Math Help - how do casinoes stay in business?

Originally Posted by corsica

You just answered your own question from the topic title.

I'll tell you a secret...

I almost never ask questions i don't know the answer to.

Why play a crooked game? It would be just like gambling

however, i love debating...

Someone once said that casino gambling was for the mathematically challenged...I believe that is true in general.

Originally Posted by ILikeSerena

The rules of the game favor the casino with some fixed percentage, so yes the casino will win more than average.

..against optimal play in the absence of card counting. Most players do not play optimally so against then the house wins more often.

Changing the deck and/or the dealer is the method of the casino to protect itself against gamblers that remember the cards and who try to bribe the dealer.
The casino is in its rights to do that afaik.

Multiple decks in the shoe reduces the card counters margin, and card counters when detected are banned. If card counting countermeasures were ineffective Black Jack would not be a casino game.

CB

Originally Posted by agentmulder

according to this wiki article

Blackjack - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

the house edge in a fair game is between 0.5% - 1%

That means on $1000 worth of bets the house makes 5 - 10 dollars

I think they make a lot more than that because they cheat.

I doubt that they cheat in general (certainly they are more honest, and have lower margins than financial institutions) their margins are regulated by local law and in the bigger centres the supervision is such that cheating is unlikely (and unprofitable, since the scandal when the news breaks would destroy the centre and the cash cow).

The house makes more than the theoretical margin because the margin is calculated against optimal play, and most players do not play optimally.

CB

Originally Posted by CaptainBlack

Multiple decks in the shoe reduces the card counters margin, and card counters when detected are banned. If card counting countermeasures were ineffective Black Jack would not be a casino game.

CB

Counting can help your odds in blackjack from what I've heard, but it takes time to come across a "hot" deck generally. The book "21" (which was developed into a film a few years back) demonstrated one efficient technique of counting where a few people bet minimum and then signaled a high-rolling friend when the count was high. This worked for a bit, but the casinos caught on quick. My brother told me anytime that someone joins a table now, the dealer switches to another deck. So the counting technique doesn't really seem very viable.