How I Learned to Win at the Casino

My girlfriend and I are math and computer students.

Not long ago, we decided to take a vacation in Austria and so that the vacation was not too expensive, we traveled in the winter while the prices of flights and AirBnB are very cheap.

We managed to collect 2,000 euros together, bought tickets, paid for the apartment, and stayed with half our budget for wastage and expenses.

However, living in Austria is not cheap, even though it was not a tourist season. It turns out that the Austrians continue to live even when there are no tourists, and living costs do not fall because of the cold winter outside.

Some restaurants, some shopping at the mall, and we’re almost out of money. I didn’t plan that we would spend almost all the money we had allocated for the trip so quickly. We still had 3 days to spend and had almost no money.

In an impulsive moment, as we strolled on Main Street in the evening, I saw a small casino and suggested we go in if only to keep warm from the Austrian frost.

We were not dressed in a suit and dress like the other visitors of the casino, but they let us in any way because they immediately saw that we were tourists and, well, tourists were not traveling in suits.

We walked around the fancy casino a little bit, saw people spending a lot of money on the roulette, excited about the blackjack tables, men and women with boxes full of change at the slot games, and I was very tempted to play a little.

But my girlfriend stopped me. “We have no money to lose here,” she said.

Look, I explained to her, I have a method of making money at the casino. Although not a lot, nonetheless earn. Let me try. Only € 100.

She finally agreed and we exchanged € 100 for chips.

The method is very simple and usually familiar to dealers. It is called the Martingale system, but the dealers didn’t notice us. We bet small sums while other players covered the roulette table with much higher value chips.

Obviously, the rest of the players are very rich and often visit this casino. They knew the dealers by name, and every once in awhile the dealers changed, they made A loud murmur, as if they were satisfied or disappointed.

After about an hour, our € 100 became € 200 and after another hour, we already had almost € 500 in hand.

My friend was very pleased and we sat down for a break at the bar with a soft drink. She has already started planning for us to come back to the casino tomorrow evening and again we will win a similar amount and we will spend everything at the mall.

While we were sitting at the bar, an older man approached us and introduced himself in English with a heavy accent. For a moment, I was worried that he was one of the casino staff who was turning to us to shame us away. While the Martingale System is not prohibited by the rules of casinos around the world, no casino likes to lose, and certainly not by a method.

My name is Professor Philip Donaldson of the University of Queensland, he introduced himself. I relaxed. University professors do not work as casino staff. We introduced ourselves and waited to hear why he contacted us.

I followed the method you played here. It was very nice to see you win the casino. I wanted to offer you to participate in an experiment.

I am conducting psychological research on gambling behavior, to be precise, this is a wide-ranging study of how casual gamblers become addicted to gambling. I see that you are not a professional or addicted regular gambler so you are suitable for my research. You don’t have to become gambling-addicted to participate in my research, he added with a smile.

I want to suggest that I transfer you 1000 euros each and you play them at the casino, but not at this casino but at an online casino. Do you have a computer in the apartment you rented?

I have a computer, I answered intrigued. However, I do not think it is appropriate that we play in the apartment on the computer. We have 3 days left here and it is not appropriate for us to spend them in our rented apartment instead of enjoying our stay in Austria.

Well, I understand, you’re right. I’ll leave you together to enjoy. Take my card anyway, in case you change your mind. Anyone who participates in my research gets 100 euros and everything he can win in the online casino games he plays. Think about it, and if you change your mind, call me.

After he left, my girlfriend began to urge me to change my decision to refuse the professor. We really need money, and this casino can get us out of here any minute. Although you have a method for winning roulette, what do you care about using your method while playing with the professor’s € 1000?

How long it will take. In the end, we will have another 100 euros.

The next day I called the professor to let him know that we had decided to participate in his experiment. He invited us to his hotel, downtown and we sat down in the lobby to hear the rest of his proposal details.

We’ll install software on your laptop that monitors the way your game works and photographs your responses. I will transfer you 1000 euros to your account you will need to deposit to an online casino of your choice.

The only condition is that you play at the casino, for the whole amount of 1000 euros I have transferred to you. You must complete the experiment for the time you have left in Austria.

You can choose which game you want, you can switch games, from Roulette to Slots, or to Blackjack. Decide what you want. You may use any method you like and play for any amount you wish. The main thing is that you will play for whatever amount I have transferred to you.

You can bet on any amount of € 1000 in one round, or divide it into cents. You decide.

After playing all the € 1000 I transfer to you, you will be allowed to save yourself any amount you win at the games, plus you will be given € 100 for your hassle.

Since my girlfriend did not bring her computer for our trip to Austria, she did not participate in the experiment. I signed a document with the conditions that the professor demanded and he wired me a 1000 euro to my account.

Although I am a young student, I am not stupid. I was constantly searching for how this professor might tidy me up, and I had trouble finding out what he might do to me.

He transferred the money in advance to my bank account. With his encouragement, I went to the bank’s website and saw that they had entered € 1000 from abroad from the University of Queensland.

Although at the end of the process he might not pay me the 100 euros, however, I also could get away with the 1000 euros he deposited into my account. Why wouldn’t I believe him with 100 euros when he believed in me with 1000 euros.

I thought maybe he might have planted some malware on my computer, but my computer was so old I really didn’t care.

As I turned the matter around in my head, I couldn’t find what could happen bad, and meanwhile, I was streaming with this strange process.

After the signatures, the professor installed his software on my computer that took pictures of the on-screen movements and checked if my computer camera was working so that he could take pictures of my face and my reactions as well as my game, and sent us on our way.

I had two days left in Austria to play for € 1000.

Have you thought about how to play? My girlfriend asked.

Not yet. I have some ideas, but I need a few hours to think about it. Let’s go have lunch. In the afternoon, I will start playing games.

We sat down and ordered some well-known in Austria, Viennese schnitzel, but even before I finished the huge dish that was placed in front of me on the table, I asked my friend to pull out my laptop and asked the surprised waiter for the restaurant’s Wi-Fi password.

The restaurant was already almost empty. Here and there, some diner-guests were left with many bottles of beer on the table. I didn’t feel like I was bothering to grab a table.

My friend, who is usually strict about manners, especially abroad, was curious to know why I suddenly opened the computer and did not object to my actions.

What are you looking for? She asked gently.

I’m looking for where to play and which game I have the most chances to win.

What do you care about where you play? Anyway, the goal is to lose all the money, she urged me.

On the contrary! I replied with a smile that I tried to look crafty.

What he demanded is that we deposit all the money on gambling sites, and play with the whole amount. He did not say that we should also gamble on the amounts we will win on these sites.

True, she said, but what’s the difference anyway, everyone who plays at the casino loses money in the end. That’s how casino games are built, isn’t it?

It is true that anyone who plays in the casino, over time, will lose the money, I thought. The more time he plays, the more he will lose. That’s how the games are built.

Take the roulette for example.

The roulette wheel has 36 numbers, all painted in black and red. Half the numbers are black and half are red. However, another number, zero, is painted green.

I opened a picture of a roulette table on the computer where she can clearly see the wheel to demonstrate it.

If you put a single Jetton on a single number in the roulette, and you win, the dealer will pay you 36 times the amount you wagered, but the chance of winning that number is not 1/36, but 1/37, because of the extra zero.

In other words, if we put one jetton on all the numbers on the roulette table, including on the zero, we would have to put 37 jettons. In that case, in fact, we will cover all the options available in the game. And, in any case, we will lose one Jetton. Why? Because we bet on 37 chips and when we win (and of course we would win because we covered all the numbers), the dealer will pay us back 36 chips. In each such round, we will lose one jetton.

In fact, the casino benefits from the players because it pays less than all of the roulette wheel betting options.

As is well known, casinos and online casinos make a lot of money. Let’s check how much the casino earns from each roulette betting round.

How can you know in advance how much the gamblers will place on the table?

I can’t know this figure beforehand, but I can calculate how much of the casino’s turnover turns into a profit. If the casino earns 1/37 of the roulette gambling cycle and the whole cycle is 100%, then the casino earns 1/37 of that cycle, which is 100/37 equal to about 2.7. I calculated it on my cell phone.

The casino earns only 2.7% of the turnover of each roulette table.

That is, if the casino wants to make one million euros a month from one roulette table, it has to roll on that huge turnover, with one million euros making up 2.7% of that turnover.

At this point, I asked the waiter who passed our table a dessert menu and a pen.

The waiter handed us the menu and I ordered a Pavlova cake, which is my favorite dessert. I picked up the pen and started writing on the paper tablecloth, among the crumbs of the meal he had gathered.

I felt that my girlfriend was losing interest in my calculations and I tried to present my thoughts to her without boring her.

Let’s go back to the casino calculations, I suggested. You learn math like me, and it’s all just plain math. Let’s go on with my idea so that I can define it for you and a little bit for myself because not everything is clear to me in the direction I think.

She responded without enthusiasm, but I was too eager to consider her feelings. I had a mission to play on those 1000 Euros and I just didn’t want to spend them without thought and planning.

If the casino only earns 2.7% on its turnover and wants to make a million euros a month on one roulette table, we will check, for calculation, how much the casino turnover if the roulette would give only one percent.

We divide a million euros into 2.7. While talking I did the calculation on my phone and the result was about 370,000.

Now let’s get back to a profit ratio of 2.7, which means we will multiply 370,000 by 100 and the result, just over 37 million.

That is, in order for the casino to earn one million euros from one roulette table, it has to roll 37 million euros on the table a month. This is not a reasonable result. No roulette table rolls a turnover of 37 million, but a million euro profit per month is reasonable. I read online about it.

This means that the casino benefits from another source and not only because of the same poor home income of 2.7%.

I had to work through these simple calculations. We quickly liquidated the Pavlova cake that was served to us, paid the huge bill (for us), and returned to the rented apartment.

My girlfriend went to bed a little to be awake in the evening for the casino. She had already planned what to wear for the event, but I couldn’t put up with the result we got on the restaurant map and sat down to research online about the casino’s profits from a successful roulette table. My memory didn’t fool me. Indeed, casinos earn about one million euros a month on every roulette table. How do they do that?

With a tummy full of a heavy meal and unnecessary Pavlova, I lay down on the bed, feeling time crunching and I find no intelligent way to play for the € 1000 I got.

At 10 o’clock we woke up, both of us, suddenly, dressed as nicely as we could within the limits of what we had brought in our suitcase and recent purchases at the mall and set out for the cold facing our little casino.

The place was busy, even more than yesterday.

Do you remember that here we are playing for our money and not the professor’s € 1000, I mentioned to my friend.

Yes, tonight we will also be playing at a maximum of 100 euros, like yesterday. I hope we win today.

At that moment I grabbed my friend’s elbow. I understood how the casino earns a million Euro a month without having to roll 37 million on its roulette table.

What did you understand? She asked in the noise and bustle of the place.

What did we say yesterday and today when we entered the casino? I asked, and without waiting for her answer, I continued. We said we would spend € 100 budget. What does this say about our psychology? We planned to lose 100 euros in advance, not to win

It is true that I knew the Martingale System and that we actually won yesterday, but anyone who enters the casino anywhere in the world is trying to budget his planned losses.

Addicted players fail to budget and this is reflected in their addiction. However, sane and logic players also plan to lose at the casino in advance, and all their planning is how much they are willing to lose.

In other words, their approach to casino games is negative. This is not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, it has a lot of mental maturity. Players go to the casino to enjoy the atmosphere, the excitement of the games and are willing to spend a predetermined amount on their entertainment.

The problem is only those pathologically addicted players who fail to rein themselves in.

So what do you understand here anyway? How does the casino earn more than that 2.7 % on turnover? She asked.

Let’s say you go to a casino with 100 euros and plan to play roulette for one euro every spin.

The chance of winning is 1 to 37, which means you are likely to lose a long time until your number arrives. Although statistically after every 37 rounds, your number will come, but not necessarily. Your number may suddenly appear several times in succession, or not appear at all for hundreds of turns. Only if you check millions of rounds will you find that the number goes out one to 37 rounds.

So what are you trying to say here? She asked with glazed eyes.

You may lose all your money before you win, and even if you win here and there, you will run out of money before the statistics come to fruition.

I’ll illustrate this with an explanation of slot machines.

The slots are programmed to give the player an average of 95 to 98 percent of his bets. Each slot has its manufacturer’s predefined percentages of profit. You can know at the online casino about each slot machine what is of the player’s return percentage (RTP). These are laws that the slots manufacturers are bound by the license they receive from the state.

What does this actually mean? If you play a 95% RTP machine for 100 Euro and spin every time 1 euro, the machine will return you € 95 in winnings. Machine profit is 5%, twice the profit on roulette.

How does a Slots player manage to lose all his money on this machine? He plays not only with the original capital with which he came from home but also with all the amounts he has earned.

Slots players place € 100 in coins and keep them in a cardboard bucket. We saw such around us. Each time he wins, he transfers his winnings to the bucket and he plays until he runs out of money in the bucket.

It is true that in a machine that returns 95% of the turnover, it should play exactly 100 games to lose just 5 euros, but statistics do not work accurately on 100 games but on thousands, maybe millions of games.

In a statistically ideal world, a player who comes to a casino with a budget of 100 euros, and plays slot machine on one euro every spin, will remain with 95 euro after his first 100 games, and if he continues to play will slowly erode his capital and winnings.

It will take him 2,000 games to spend all his money.

Since every player comes to the casino with negative thinking, he will naturally play until he runs out of money. Given the large sums the casino plays with, it has no budget limit. However, the player has only a limited amount to play, long before the stats work on him.

When I finished this explanation, my friend looked like a student who had just left a math class and had not been able to write down everything the lecturer had said in the lesson. I know that look in her eyes. She is just looking for who to take the lesson sheets for so that she doesn’t stay behind in the class.

So what do we do now with all your explanations? She asked.

We’ll spend two hours here and go to the apartment. I want to research a little on the internet about the advantage I have of getting my budget from someone else rather than my own pocket.

I can, of course, play 1000 Euro with 1 euro per spin to erode all the 1000 Euros that the professor gave me, and end up staying with 950 Euro which are my winnings in the machine, but it seems that there should be a more sophisticated way to do it.

She breathed a sigh of relief. On the one hand, we have two hours to spend at the casino she dressed up for with the best clothes she bought at the mall and on the other hand, I started to figure out how to spend the professor’s € 1000.

After two hours we earned more than € 300 in roulette again, which gave me confidence in my theories, and we went back to the apartment.

After failing to seduce me to go to bed with her, and “We’ll continue tomorrow”, she went to sleep and I sat down on the computer.

For about three hours, I searched for the slot machine with the biggest jackpot I could find on the internet, more than € 3 million. Towards morning, I went to bed.

We got up late and had the apartment Nespresso quietly. I was still a bit sleepy from a sleepless night.

What do you want to do today? She asked.

I have a plan on how to spend the € 1000. I suggest you go to the mall or wherever you want, and I’ll start playing with the professor’s money.

She wasn’t enthusiastic, but with a few hundred euros we won night after night in the little casino, she definitely had something to do downtown.

Even before she left, I sat down on the computer.

I turned on the professor’s software to record every action on my computer. I already knew in which online casino to open an account.

I already had a set plan for how to play the 1000 Euros. The main thing is to stick to the program and work without deviation. In the worst case, I’ll go away with € 950 in small winnings, after I spend my allotted € 1000. At best, I’ll be able to take the jackpot.

In the slot game I selected, there is the option to start an automatic game. After each spin, the game starts immediately another spin, up to 10 games in a row.

I aimed the highest bet, € 5 per spin and let the machine run 10 games in a row. After 10 games, I pressed the spin button again and the machine ran 10 games again.

While I was aware of the fact that the computer was constantly filming me, and that the professor was expecting to see my expressions during gambling, I had trouble playing to the camera. All the time, I remained calm, as if I was doing monotonous work. I’m not a movie actor, just a math student.

According to the calculation the machine was supposed to play 200 spins of € 5 to spend the 1000 Euros.

The computer rolled spins, announced small and big winnings, and within about an hour I was playing all over the professor’s € 1000 and I had 942 Euro casino winnings left.

I ended my commitment to the professor and earned € 942.

I was pleased, but not completely. I didn’t win the long-awaited Jackpot.

I called the professor to tell him I would come to his hotel in an hour with the results to download them from my computer and began to reflect on the temptation to keep playing.

I had a huge amount for me. Almost a month’s salary for a student. If I continue to play, I may spend the entire amount, but may also win the huge jackpot.

Finally, I decided to run just 200 more spins, which, according to my calculation, might reduce about 5-6% of the amount of winnings left in the casino cashier. Even if I won’t win the Jackpot, I will have about € 900 left.

I ran the 200 spins, and this time I felt I was playing for my own money. I no longer referred to it as an exercise for the professor but as a private bet. I was so tense I couldn’t get to the bathroom.

When the 200 spins ended, I had 894 euros in my casino account. Without thinking much, I ran 200 spins again thinking I’d stop when the balance will get € 800.

But as soon as I turned on the spin, my computer suddenly stopped for a long time. For over fifteen minutes, The Slot machine filled almost € 3.5 million into my account.

Because I was flooded with emotions, I didn’t know what exactly I was feeling. I tried to calm down. I got up from the chair and went to the bathroom, but instead of peeing, I vomited.

After I relaxed, I shut down the computer, got dressed, and went off to the professor.

I sat down in front of him in the hotel lobby and he immediately felt something was happening.

I still hadn’t decided whether to tell him or hide from him, but I knew the software had absorbed everything that was going on. I finally told him that I had won a jackpot of over € 3 million.

He smiled at me in disbelief and opened the computer to watch the last fifteen minutes of recording. I saw myself on the screen go pale, then turning red and run to the bathroom, trying to make myself calm and peaceful.

Well, the professor told me, this whole amount is yours. This is the agreement between us. He removed the software he had installed on my computer and returned it to me.

I achieved what I wanted, he added. That would be really good for my research. But I have a question to ask you. Try to answer me honestly, because it is important to the results of my research. What would happen if you didn’t win the jackpot? Would you stop playing and collect the winnings or spend all the money in the casino?

The truth is, according to my plan, I only wanted to bet on your € 1,000 and to save the rest of the money I received in the winnings because that’s a lot of money for students. However, I was tempted to keep playing and couldn’t stop. I can’t honestly tell you if I would have indeed stoped at € 800 as I promised myself. The huge amount of jackpot is too tempting.

Think well if you are going to tell about this to your girlfriend and what it will do to your relationship, he said and did not add as I went away.

I met my girlfriend trying new clothes at the mall. She was determined to spend all the money we had earned at the casino the previous two nights.

Well, are you done with the professor? She asked. What’s came out of the experiment?

I played the whole amount and I had almost 950 euro winnings left, I lied. The professor left me that amount as we agreed and added €100. You can spend it too if you want.

Wow, you’re a genius. I would have played until the money ran out, without thinking much. It was a good idea to separate the original amount from the winnings. I didn’t even think about it.

I don’t want to waste anymore. This huge amount will help us survive for a few weeks during the exams period when we don’t have time to work.

She was much more responsible than I was. I risked this amount to keep playing, while she preferred to save it for tough times. I appreciated her for that.

After returning from Austria, it took about two months to get my winnings to my bank account.

I first consulted a lawyer and accountant on how to bring the money into my account and how to invest it until I decided what to do with it.

Suddenly I found that all the professionals around me were very nice to me. Even the bank branch manager invited me to a meeting in her office after she had never had time to meet with me before.

The most important thing I learned from all this adventure is that the safest way to earn a casino is to own a casino.

I will tell you about it later.