Month: May 2020

The house edge is the integral mathematical advantage that a casino, or ‘house’, holds over the player in any game of chance. The house edge is the reason why a casino will always win, eventually, and the higher the edge the more profit the establishment can reasonably expect to make in the long-term.

Astute casino gamblers may already be aware that the addition of a green triple-zero to a double-zero roulette wheel increases the house edge from 5.26% to 7.69%, but even triple-zero roulette pales into insignificance when compared with some of the worst culprits to be found on the casino floor. Slot machines, for example, are easy to play and typically offer a house edge between 2% and 15%; the problem occurs if you encounter a slot machine at the ‘tighter’ end of the scale, because the fast rate of play means that you can lose money hand over fist.

Worse still, though, is the Big Six, or Big Six Wheel, which is often positioned front and centre in a casino and manned by an attractive, young employee in an effort to part customers from their hard-earned cash. That isn’t too difficult, with the lowest house edge available, under Las Vegas Rules, standing at 11.11% and the highest at 24.07%. Keno, in which players pick a few numbers and bet on them in lottery style, is another lucrative money-spinner, for the casino, offering a house edge between 25% and 40%.

In the world of casino gambling, many blackjack professionals have attained ‘legendary’ status by employing so-called advantage gambling techniques – the best known of which is card counting – to reverse the house edge and make vast amounts of money. Perhaps the most famous, or infamous, of them all was the late Ken Uston, who was instrumental in the development of ‘big player’ card counting teams in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and elsewhere in the Sixties and Seventies.

Born Kenneth Senzo Usui, in 1935, Uston was a gifted child, who excelled in many fields, including mathematics. Educated at Yale and Harvard, he was introduced to blackjack techniques by the book, ‘Beat The Dealer’, written by Edward Thorp and later mastered card counting under the auspices of blackjack professional, Al Francesco.

Francesco started a card counting team in the early Seventies and Uston was quickly promoted to ‘big player’ status, making him responsible for placing large bets, typically between $100 and $1,000 a hand. Uston reputed made over $60,000 a day for the team and during his career, as a whole, single-handedly won untold millions of dollars. In the late Seventies, after the so-called ‘Tuesday Night Massacre’, when Atlantic City casino operators banded together to outlaw card counting, Uston filed, and won, a law suit, securing a landmark ruling that card counting was skilful play, rather than cheating, and therefore entirely legal.