Does the house always win when it comes to online gambling? Yes—but it’s not quite that simple. What’s important to understand here is something called the ‘house edge’. The house edge outlines how much a casino will win on average. It may seem like a negligible detail at first, but for any online gambler serious about making money, or just having fun, it’s an important concept to understand.
The House Edge Explained
Imagine you’re out picking strawberries in a field.
You work hard, and every few minutes, you treat yourself to a nice juicy strawberry as a little reward for your hard work.
This, in essence, is what the house edge looks like in a casino. Casinos around the world have large facilities and fancy machinery or hosted websites with plenty of features and software. Regardless, these investments require a profit to be made, otherwise, casinos would not be a viable business model. That profit is taken in the form of a house edge.
Every time you play a casino game, it is constructed in such a way that the casino will make a slight profit.
Does the House Edge Mean That Casino Games are Rigged?
If casino games are designed so that the casino takes a certain amount of profit, does that mean that any casino game you play is rigged?
Yes and no.
Yes, it’s rigged so that the casino can take a percentage of the profit. But no, that doesn’t mean that you can’t ever win. It means that overall, across the course of a day or week or month, casinos will be able to extract enough profit from their games to sustain their operations and take home a cut as well.
However, the big thing to note is that the house edge can vary wildly across different casinos and casino games. To select an online casino that has a fair house edge, check out these casino guides from CasinoHawks to make the right decision for you. With the guide you can find the games that have the lowest house edge, and thereby improve your chances of winning.
How the House Edge Leverages the Law of Large Numbers
A concept that goes hand in hand with the house edge, is the law of large numbers. This is critical to understand for anyone that is looking to save money at online casinos.
In essence, this outlines the idea that over a high volume of numbers, results will gravitate towards the average and settle there. Take the example of a casino that takes a house edge of 2%. This means that the casino will on average make a 2% profit off the bets placed on its games. Over the short term, this may look incredibly volatile—every time you bet $100, you won’t simply get $98 back. You might make $150, then lose $70, then make $300, then another $50, then lose $170, and so on.
However, if you regularly went to the same casino every week for a year, and bet a total of $100,000, the chances are you would walk away with close to $98,000 by the end of the year.
Over time, the law of large numbers will bring a casino’s winnings in line with the house edge. This means that for regular gamblers, choosing an online casino with a good house edge really makes a difference.