Advantage Gambling vs Basic Strategy

Many gamblers go into the casino with no plan at all. They don’t have any special strategy lined up and merely rely on luck to win.

Therefore, you’re already ahead of the curve if you know any strategy at all for casino games. Assuming you master basic strategy, then you can look forward to more winnings.

Of course, not even basic strategy will truly swing the odds in your favor. You still need a little luck to win in these cases.

As a result, some people turn to advantage gambling. They do so to give themselves a chance at guaranteed profits.

Of course, you must work harder when you get into advantage play (AP). That said, you may wonder whether it’s better to just use basic strategy.

This guide covers the pros and cons of both approaches. You can use this information to decide which route is best for you.

Basic Strategy Is Best for Casual Gamblers

If you’re just starting out with gambling, you certainly don’t want to dive into card counting right away. You should also avoid the temptations of advantage gambling if you’re just playing for fun.

You don’t want to put yourself into a situation where you get overloaded and feel like quitting. Above all, gambling is supposed to provide entertainment and thrills.

But you probably won’t feel too overwhelmed if you jump into basic strategy right away. This is especially true with games that have simple strategies.

For example, real money baccarat only features three bets. As long as you wager on the banker hand winning every time, then you’ll be using optimal strategy and lower the house to 1.06%.

If you’re playing craps, you can lower the house edge to 1.36% and 1.41% with don’t pass line and pass line wagers, respectively. You’ll reduce the house advantage further by adding odds bets to the equation.

Games like baccarat and craps are perfect for when you want to use a little strategy without getting too involved. They also give you a strong chance to win in any given session.

Once you get comfortable with the simple strategies, you might try something more complex like blackjack. This game features in-depth strategy where the house edge hinges on your every move.

If you play optimally with good rules involved, you can reduce the house advantage to just 0.5%. You don’t have to read any extensive books to execute basic blackjack strategy either.

Advantage Play Is More Involved

Advantage gambling isn’t for the light-hearted. Even card counting—one of the easier AP methods—comes with plenty of challenges.

Again, you don’t want to jump right into the fire by going down this route. Eventually, though, you may want to learn complex strategy that can result in profits.

As for card counting, this technique represents a great place to begin. You can learn a counting system like the Hi-Lo in a matter of minutes.

Once you master a system, the rest is all about practicing and knowing when to raise bets. You also need to camouflage your play so that the casino doesn’t immediately throw you out.

This brings me to another important matter in that casinos don’t exactly like APs. Part of the challenge involves disguising your strategy well enough so that you can walk out with profits.

Basic Strategy Requires Some Luck to Win

You can lower the house edge significantly just by knowing which bets and decisions to make in each game. At the end of the day, though, you’ll still need some luck to win.

Going back to a real money blackjack game with a 0.5% house edge, you’ll theoretically win back $99.50 for every $100 wagered. This win rate is much better than what the average gambler deals with.

Even still, you’re theoretically still going to be in the hole. Lady Luck must bless you to a small degree in order for you to win.

You may get extremely hot and win thousands of dollars in a given night. But you could just as easily see thousands of dollars evaporate by continually playing and exposing yourself to the house edge.

Advantage Gambling Is the Only Way to Make Guaranteed Profits

Nobody truly wants to sit down to learn and practice an AP method. However, they realize that it’s a necessary evil to guarantee themselves profits.

Advantage gambling is the only way to ensure that the odds are in your favor. You’ll still deal with luck in the short term, but you can at least look forward to gold at the end of the rainbow.

Here’s an example to show how much you could theoretically win with an advantage:

• You’re an expert card counter who holds a 1.5% edge over the casino.
• You wager $100,000 throughout the night.
• 100,000 x 0.015 = 1,500
• You theoretically stand to win $1500.

Although excellent by card counting standards, a 1.5% advantage isn’t that large. But you can see where it really pays off over the course of time.

Basic Strategy Can Be Very Simple

As mentioned before, basic strategy can also be extremely simple to use. Some games merely require you to learn which bets offer the lowest house edges.

I suggest jumping into games like baccarat, craps, and European roulette in the beginning. They all feature low house edges and give you strong odds of winning.

Blackjack strategy is relatively easy to learn, even if it looks intimidating at first glance. You can check out a blackjack strategy chart and quickly learn everything you need to know.

Charts cut down the amount of time required to learn strategy considerably. Depending upon the game, you can quickly lower the house edge around 1% with the right knowledge.

Some Forms of Advantage Gambling Are Very Difficult to Master

Card counting is at the easier end of the spectrum with regard to AP techniques. Hole carding and shuffle tracking, meanwhile, are much more difficult to pull off.

Shuffle tracking is actually an additional step that you add to card counting. You start by counting the deck like normal until the dealer begins shuffling.

The purpose of counting in the beginning is to determine which part of the shoe is positive and negative. By locating the positive part of the shoe, you know which section gives you a stronger chance of winning money.

Counting is the easy part, though. The hard part involves visually tracking the positive section as it’s broken into various card clumps.

Assuming you properly track the cards, then you can gain up to a 5% advantage. But you’ll find this process extremely difficult to execute in person.

Hole carding can be useful any game that features hole cards, such as blackjack, Caribbean stud, Mississippi stud, and three-card poker.

It sounds easy to use in theory, but it’s just as difficult as shuffle tracking. This technique revolves around trying to spot hole card values as they’re removed from the shoe, but before they’re flipped over.

You stand to gain a considerable advantage if you can properly pull off this method. Mississippi stud even gives you an opportunity to gain a 100% advantage under the right circumstances.

The problem, though, is that you’ll spend endless hours looking for a dealer who’s inept enough to flash their hole card values. You also must be able to spot the values without being overly obvious.

What Should You Choose: Basic Strategy or Advantage Play?

Whether you go with basic strategy or advantage gambling all depends upon you as an individual. If you’re just looking to have a little fun with gambling, though, I highly suggest that you stick with the basics.

You’ll find advantage play to be time consuming and, oftentimes, frustrating. If you’re a card counter dealing with a small edge, you may spend hours in the casino before turning a profit.

You also need a large bankroll when starting out with advantage gambling. As a solo card counter, for example, you should have at least $10,000 to be safe.

This large amount of money is needed to survive the volatility. You may hold an edge, but your short-term luck could be bad.

Assuming you gamble long enough and eventually want to win money from the endeavor, you should definitely consider picking up an AP technique. Otherwise, though, you should just focus on having fun.

Conclusion

Advantage gambling is the stuff of movies. You’ve probably seen a film or two that shows APs winning fortunes in a short time span.

What these movies don’t show, though, is the painstaking hours involved with developing an advantage. They also fail to show how large of a bankroll you’ll need to survive volatility.

You may still be interested in advantage gambling if you truly want to profit from the casino. But if you’re just looking to relax and be entertained, then basic strategy isn’t a bad route either.

Basic strategy allows you to cut down the house edge and boost your chances of winning. With a little luck, you can even leave the casino a winner.