The Best Online Casino Games

While you are fighting the house vig of 3 percent, the house’s hold may run as high as 20 percent. Many gamblers confuse the casinos’ edge and the amount the casino is likely to win.

That is why so many gamblers are skeptical of house edges as low as two or three percent. They know that they have they lost much more than two or three percent of the money they risked in gambling; therefore, they assume that the house edge must either be understated or that the casinos are cheating them.

However, a casino with a house edge of 3 percent can easily have a hold rate of 20 percent or more. Most land-based casinos average hold rates of 20 percent or better at blackjack, even though some persons are skillful enough to beat the game.

The typical hold rate is always higher than the house edge because the gambler played the same money over and over until his loss rate becomes the hold rate percentage.

Assume you buy into a blackjack game for $200. If you only made exactly $200 in wagers and lost exactly 3 percent of them, losing a total of $6, the casino hold rate and house rate would be the same.

But do you play like this? Not likely. You convert your cash to chips and continue to play the same monies over and over. After an hour of play, you may have wagered a total of $1,000. If the casino won its average expectation of 3 percent, your loss would be $30.00, or 15% of your bankroll.

This multiplying effect is why the casino’s house edge is so critical. This is why we will only play the games with the lowest house edge in the online casinos.

Referring to the previous table, if we decide to only consider games with a vig of 3 percent or lower, we must limit our games to baccarat, blackjack, craps, European roulette or video poker.

While you are playing in a land-based casino, there are a number of reasons why you may prefer to play at a leisurely pace. You may enjoy the casino ambiance, the presence of other attractive patrons, the pleasure of slowly sipping a drink and absorbing all aspects of what can be a unique experience.

If you are playing on your home computer, I doubt if you will experience much ambiance. The online casinos like to make a great deal of their graphics and virtual experiences, but for me, the best experience of all is beating the casino as quickly as possible and then return to doing something else.

When you first play online, you may be somewhat enthralled with the online gaming experience, but after a few sessions, you will feel exactly like I do. You will want to put in your playing time, lock up a win and then go on to your next endeavor. That is why the speed with which online games can be played is so important.

Many online casinos offer you the chance to play with other persons in such games as blackjack and roulette. While you will never actually see the other players, you will see their wagers and their presence will slow the game down considerably. I never play with other players when I am playing for blood.

I don’t want any distractions from my prime purpose – relieving the Internet casino of some of its loot as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

Any of the games we have selected can be played quickly. However, if you choose blackjack as your game, you may be slowed down because the only way to play blackjack to win is to play basic strategy with no mistakes.

While you can easily refer to a strategy card while playing in your pajamas on your home PC, this will slow you down and may require more concentration until you have the basic playing strategy down cold.

For Internet play, I believe the best games to play are those offering wagers with approximately 50-50 odds of occurring. Games offering even-odds wagers are baccarat, craps, and roulette.

It is very important to only play against games with known expectations. The odds in Bingo can range from 0 to -25%; I used 10 percent in the table as an average. The house edge in Caribbean Stud ranges from 2.6% to 5.2%. Slot machines on the Internet are a great unknown.

The house edge can vary from -2% to as high as 25%. Sport wagering is dependent upon the skill of the player and the average bettor will face a house edge as great as 10%. The odds in video poker vary dependent on the version of the game played and the player’s skill level.

The only games with low enough house vig, where you can make evenmoney wagers with mathematically fixed expectations, are blackjack, baccarat, craps, and roulette. 

Ease of learning a game is also an important criteria. With a game like online baccarat, you will only have two choices to make for each wager. You will either wager a predetermined amount on the Banker hand or the Player hand.

If you chose to play roulette, you chose to wager on either Red or Black. With online craps, your choices will be between betting Pass Line or Don’t Pass. Don’t worry if you don’t understand these bets right now. I will cover them thoroughly.

My point here is that in each of these cases you will be able to learn how to make the correct bets very easily as you will only have one set of choices facing you each time you make a wager.

It is critical that the games you chose to play on the Internet can be beaten without playing too long. Any time you are playing against a negative-expectation game you will reduce your risk when you reduce the number of wagers you will make.

Of course, by playing against online casinos offering bonuses, we will be playing in positive expectation games so long as we don’t overstay our welcome. I have developed excellent betting and money management systems for the even-money wagers in baccarat, craps and roulette.

In addition, we have developed some excellent online blackjack strategies. See Tushpetan for a list of proven online gambling strategies for these games.

By using these systems, you will be able to maximize your returns from Internet gaming while keeping the number of wagers required to do so to a minimum.

Another important factor to consider is variance. I won’t get into the statistical concept of variance, I just want to focus on the simple concept of how much your bankroll may vary up and down while playing a game.

In general, bets made exclusively on even-money wagers will cause less variance in your bankroll than bets made on wagers offering higher payoffs.

There is yet another potential problem with games offering many wagers with higher than even-money payoffs. 

Consider video poker for instance. For so-called “full pay” Jacks or Better video poker, the house edge is only one-half of one percent with correct play. This looks like a great game until you analysis just where the payoffs are coming from to give the player an expectation of winning about 99.5% of the time. 

The following table shows the payoff schedule for full pay Jacks or Better. Video poker experts usually refer to this version of Jacks or Better as 9-6 Jacks or Better, referring to the payoffs of 9 to 1 for a Full House and 6 to 1 for a Flush.

Look at the information given for a Royal Flush hand in the table. The payoff is 800 to 1 for each coin inserted. With Internet play, instead of coins, you would use virtual currency. If you made a $5 wager and hit a Royal Flush, your payback would be 800 x $5 = $4,000.

While this may sound tempting, look at the expected frequency of hitting a Royal Flush, shown in the third column. A Royal Flush hand will show, on the average, once every 40,390 hands.

The frequency of this hand is 0.00248%, yet this hand accounts for almost 2 percent of the total expectation (a value of 1.98 is shown in the table).