7 Casino Gambling Tips You Should Ignore

I was hanging out at my local casino one day, and I met an old man with a big personality.

“You want some advice?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “I always want advice. I hope you have casino gambling tips that will help me win more money.”

We sat there at the slot machines for a while, talking. He said he’d been gambling at casinos all his life, and that he’d paid his bills and his rent multiple times using money he’d won at casinos. You see, he’d figured out how to beat the casinos at their own game.

I offer you the same advice he gave me, but please understand this—these are tips from so-called “experts” that you should ignore.

1 – Spend as Much Time Playing Slots as Possible

“The first thing you need to know about casino gambling,” the old man said, “Is that slot machines are where the real money is made.”

He went on to explain that the jackpots were high enough on real money slots that you could make enough money to pay your monthly utilities and rent by just hitting one jackpot.

The best way to find a slot machine that’s “hot” is to tip the slot machine attendants or the cocktail waitresses and ask them where to play.

Another way to find hot slot machines is to stick with the machines near the entrance of the casino, especially if those games are at the end of a bank. The casinos put the loosest slot machines in highly visible locations to encourage more action.

Also, look for three-reel slot machines where winning symbols are on display above or below the payline, especially if they show at least two winning symbols on those other paylines. This is a signal that the game is getting ready to pay off.

Finally, all slot machines operate on cycles. Each game hits periodically, so once you figure out the timing of the cycle, you can arrange to sit there and make your spins when the game is “due.”

Alright, after having read all of that bologna, now you know what not to do.

2 – Trust Your Gut at the Blackjack Table

You’ll see some folks sit down at the blackjack table with a tiny laminated “basic blackjack strategy” card. They’ll slavishly follow the strategies on that card no matter what.

These gamblers lose a lot of money by ignoring their hunches and slavishly following the strategy on these cards.

They’ll try to explain to you that the strategy on these cards has been demonstrated to work like a charm in the long run to help you lose less money. But your goal isn’t to lose money more slowly. Your goal is to win money and do it fast.

To pull that off, you must beat the odds. And you can beat the odds if you just trust your gut feelings about what the next card will be.

Concentrate on what the next card out of the deck might be and notice how often you’re correct. You’ll notice that once you’ve been doing this a while, your results will improve. Practice makes perfect.

As you get more comfortable trusting your hunches and intuition, you’ll have another game in the casino that you can beat on a regular basis. It’s just like magic.

3 – If You’re Down, Make Bigger Bets So You Can Catch Up

One technique that works great is to bet more money when you’ve fallen behind.

If you’ve fallen behind, it’s because you’ve suffered a string of losses. You’ve experienced bad luck. The nature of random events suggests that you’ll have to see some winning bets soon because you’re due. And if you’ve raised the size of those bets, you can make up for the amount of money you’ve already lost.

Some people even systemize this into something called the Martingale System, which works like a charm.

When you’re gambling with the Martingale System, you find a game with an even-money payout, and you double the size of your bet after every loss until you book a win. When you do finally book a win, you’ll win back all your losses along with a profit equivalent to the size of your first bet.

Here’s an Example:

• You bet $5 on black at the roulette table and lose. So, you bet $10 on black on the next spin, and you lose again. Your total losses now are $15.
• But on your third bet, you wager on blackjack again, and this time, you put $20 down. You win, which means you’ve won back the $15 you’d lost, and you have a $5 profit to show for it.
• Then, you start all over again with a $5 bet. You can use this system to book winning session after winning session. It’s almost like a license to print money.

4 – Trust Money Management Techniques

Another way to succeed as a casino gambler is to use disciplined, consistent money management techniques.

Start by setting aside a gambling bankroll. Then, divide that into multiple smaller bankrolls based on how many gambling sessions you want to have.

Your win goal is a percentage of your bankroll that you want to win during the session. Once you’ve won that amount, you quit gambling for that session and pocket your winnings.

The lower your win goal is, the likelier you are to achieve it. I like to set low win goals and grind out lots of small winning sessions.

With a $500 session bankroll, a win goal of 10% would mean that you’d quit once you’re up to $550 for that session. A loss limit is like a win goal, but instead of making sure you quit while you’re ahead, a loss limit gets you out of action before a losing streak destroys most of your session’s bankroll.

I like to use a loss limit of 20%, which means that with a $500 bankroll, I’d quit when my roll got down to $400 (until I’d lost $100).

So long as I have between $400 and $550, I keep gambling. Think of the win goals and loss limits as the lines on the highway. As long as you stay between the lines, you won’t get into much trouble.

5 – Go for the Longshots at Craps, That’s Where the Big Money Is

You’ll find plenty of inexperienced craps players who stick with basic bets like pass, don’t pass, come, don’t come, and odds bets. These bets don’t offer much in the way of payouts, though, and it’s hard to win big when gambling this way. In fact, this might be the most boring way to play craps.

Smart gamblers trust their hunches at the craps table, just like they do at the blackjack table. And the stickman at the craps table will offer you all kinds of cool bets with big payouts. Some of these bets pay off at 15 to 1.

This means that a $100 bet can win you $1,500. That’s a lot better than the even money payout you’ll get when you win a basic bet like the pass line bet.

Even if you lose that bet occasionally, the big wins will compensate for that, especially as your intuition improves.

6 – If You Need Extra Money, the Casino Is a Good Place to Get It

When you take a disciplined approach to casino gambling like the approach I suggest here, you’ll start making money almost every time you visit the casino. If you’re a little short paying your bills, you can just go to the casino and grind out some small wins over several playing sessions.

The old man in the introduction to this post explained to me that his mom was an expert at timing the slot machines, and, when he was a young man, she’d take him to the casino and tell him which machines to play.

Almost two-thirds of the time, he sat down for a winning session. They often bought groceries and paid rent with their winnings from the casinos.

7 – Ignore the Distractions and Focus on Getting More Money Into Action

If you’re spending a lot of time at the buffet, or seeing a lot of shows, you’re wasting time you could be spending gambling. Since you have a lot of winning techniques, you should spend as much time actually gambling as you can.

That’s how you maximize the amount of money you win.

Conclusion

Of course, all this advice is terrible. I read advice like this every day on forums and in other blog posts, though.

What’s worst is that I’ve even seen a lot of it in printed books.

But, the truth is simple—do the opposite of everything I sarcastically suggested in this post, and you’ll lose less money for it.