Key Takeaways. Gambling is not a good alternative for earning extra cash. Each game you play at a casino has a statistical probability against you winning. Slot machine odds are some of the worst, ranging from a one-in-5,000 to one-in-about-34-million chance of winning the top prize when using the maximum coin play.
In a down economy, it’s normal to start thinking of alternative ways to generate some extra money, but if you’re tempted into thinking that gambling is one of those good alternatives, then you need to keep reading.
Once you step foot into a casino and exchange your money for chips, you’ve sold away your only advantage: staying out of the casino to begin with. Casinos can bring great shows, food, and entertainment, but statistically, they won’t bring you much more than that.
Key Takeaways Gambling is not a good alternative for earning extra cash.
Each game you play at a casino has a statistical probability against you winning.
Slot machine odds are some of the worst, ranging from a one-in-5,000 to one-in-about-34-million chance of winning the top prize when using the maximum coin play.
In 2018, commercial casino gaming revenue amounted to about $41.7 billion; one way to think about all those profits is that they are the result of the accrual of all of the losses from casino patrons each year.
Big Business and Big Profits
To say casino gambling is a lucrative business would be an understatement. In 2020, commercial casino gaming revenue amounted to about $30 billion, a nearly 30% decline from 2019 due to the COVID-19 pandemic after a seven-year period of steady year-over-year growth.
Still, gambling is big business. and it’s no surprise where those profits are coming from: Tens of millions of people visit Las Vegas in a typical year, with some hoping to win more money than they came in with. There are more than 450 commercial casinos in the United States, according to the American Gaming Association’s State of the States 2021 report. These casinos generated $6.7 billion in gaming taxes for state and local governments in 2018.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court gave U.S. states permission to legalize sports betting if they wish to do so. It is still fully illegal in nine states, including Texas. In seven other states, there is some form of pending legislation.
Games of No Chance
Math is the universal language, and it rarely ever lies. Each game you play at a casino has a statistical probability against you winning—every single time. While this house advantage varies for each game, it ultimately helps to ensure that over time, the casino won’t lose money to gamblers.
For people who are really good at blackjack, the advantage for the casino might be only 0.5%, but certain types of slot machines might have a 35% edge over a player—and other games fall somewhere in between. The slot machine odds are often some of the worst, ranging from a one-in-5,000 to one-in-about-34-million chance of winning the top prize when using the maximum coin play.
The house advantage obviously isn’t insurmountable—people do win (sometimes substantially). However, it does mean that the more you play, the more the math works against you, and the better the chances are of you walking out of the casino with less money in your wallet than when you came in.
The table below compiles some of the house edges for several popular casino games.
Why is 72 called the hammer in poker?
The hammer, nicknames sarcastically for being the worst statistical starting hand in Hold'em.
How Does Three Of A Kind Rank? Three-of-a-kind stands as the seventh-best hand on the poker hand rankings list. Three-of-a-kind beats all two pair, pair, and high card hands. If you randomly draw five cards from a regulation 52-card poker deck, you have a 2.1128% chance of making three-of-a-kind.
Making three-of-a-kind often gives you a hand that’s strong enough to win the pot in a game of poker. You’ve made three-of-a-kind when you hold three of the same ranking card, along with two other unpaired cards, in a five-card hand.
Three-of-a-kind ranks as the seventh-best possible hand in the standard poker hand rankings. This hand only loses to other very strong hands, like straights, flushes, full houses, four-of-a-kind, straight flushes, and royal flushes.
An example of three-of-a-kind looks like this:
Other examples of three-of-a-kind include hands like A♠A♣A♥9♦4♥ and 7♦7♠7♥3♦2♣. Note that a three-of-a-kind hand that includes a pair as the other two cards, like A♠A♣A♥9♦9♥, qualifies as a full house, which outranks three-of-a-kind in the hand rankings.
If two or more three-of-a-kind hands face each other at showdown, the higher-ranking three-of-a-kind wins. For example, the A♠A♣A♥9♦4♥ hand (three-of-a-kind aces) would win against 7♦7♠7♥3♦2♣ (three-of-a-kind sevens).
How Does Three Of A Kind Rank?
Three-of-a-kind stands as the seventh-best hand on the poker hand rankings list. Three-of-a-kind beats all two pair, pair, and high card hands.
If you randomly draw five cards from a regulation 52-card poker deck, you have a 2.1128% chance of making three-of-a-kind. This can also be expressed as 46.33-to-1 odds against.
The deck yields 858 distinct ways to make three-of-a-kind out of a five-card poker hand. Factoring in the combinations of suits gives us 54,912 total ways to draw three-of-a-kind from a 52-card deck.
In Texas Hold’em, you try to make the best possible five-card hand out of seven cards. This changes the probabilities behind making three-of-a-kind.
With all five community cards on the board in Texas Hold’em, you have a 4.83% chance of making three-of-a-kind (19.7-to-1 odds against).
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Wager Mage
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