Casino Payouts
The concept of payout ratios is one that’s sadly overlooked by many gamers, but those in the know who play in a semi-professional or full-time gaming capacity will be well aware of it.
In statistics, it’s known as expected return, and it’s actually quite a simple, but very powerful concept: If you were to play any casino game (barring multiplayer poker) for an infinite amount of time, you would eventually get the same amount of money back as anyone else doing the same thing.
This is because over time, every single outcome that can happen, will happen. This can actually be explained very easily with a simple example: Suppose you spend every waking moment flicking a coin for the rest of your life.
The outcome is probably going to be out of balance the first few times: It could easily be 3 heads and 7 tails or similar for the first 10 outcomes, but over time it will even out, and with a one in two chance of landing a head, if you bet evens on heads your expected return is that you’ll get all your money back – no more, and no less.
This is because you can expect half of your bets to pay double, and the other half to pay nothing. Your expected return, or payout ratio is the percentage of your money you’d expect to get back, in this case 100%.
However, casinos are not in the habit of running games that work like the example above. Whilst it’s possible to make huge wins, casinos need to know that they’ll come out slightly ahead over time, so they impose what’s known as a house edge.
The house edge is the percentage of your bets that you can expect to lose over an infinite number of time, and that’s what keeps the casino in business, letting them pay their bills and carry on operating so it’s a very necessary thing to have: The trick is to make sure that you play games with a low house edge, to improve your chances.
The house edge is a small percentage – usually from 7% up to 2 or 3% on slots, though you won’t generally find this given explicitly. It’s actually very easy to work out though, from the payout ratio:
Payout ratios are given as a percentage of your total stake: If your total stake is assumed to be 100%, then you’ll see payout ratios given as a figure slightly smaller than this, usually 90-something percent.
If you played for an indefinite amount of time this is what you’d expect to get back, so suppose you had a slot with a 97% payout ratio: If you wagered £10 on it every time for the rest of your life, you could expect a typical (mean average) payback of £9.70 and the hosue edge would be 100%-97%, or 3%.
Obviously the idea of playing a game indefinitely is a purely fictional scenario: Nobody plays a game an infinite number of times, and because of this many people assume the payout ratios have no relevance.
After all, just because you can expect to typically get £9.70 back each time doesn’t mean you’re going to: You’re far more likely to get a smaller or larger amount that that. However, payout ratios will tell you which games are more likely to pay you more – and in the uncertain world of gaming, that’s as good a measure as you’re going to get.
The way to improve your bankroll in gaming is to spot opportunities for getting the highest payout ratio, and then – the longer you play – you’re giving yourself the best chance to inch ahead one step at a time, and consolidate some decent, regular victories that will enable to you beat the casinos.
Some sites do publish payout ratios for specific games, and this is a great place to start. Other websites publish them as well, and if you can find games that have good (97%-plus for slots) ratios, you can play them to make sure you expose yourself to the best odds around.
There’s more that you can do, though: Some sites offer occasional cashback schemes, and these are something you can exploit to push up your payout ratio.
They usually work by refunding you a certain amount if you make a net loss over a set period – usually 24 hours but sometimes longer, and by rewarding you for losing they’re effectively giving you cash if you don’t make over 100% of what you wagered – which means you can typically expect more for every £1 you wager.
These schemes are what canny, career layers keep an eye open for, and should be investigated at every opportunity.
You may think that no casino would ever offer a game with a negative house edge, i.e, with a payout ratio of more than 100% – but you’d be wrong: If you play a videopoker with the word ‘bonus’ in the title, it invariably means you can expect to win more than 100% of what you wager over time.
However don’t get too excited: You’d have to play to an optimal strategy for many hours every day, and there are much easier ways of making the kind of returns you could expect – but it does go to show that if you’re canny enough you can find ways to improve your chances with an online casino that will get you ahead of the vast majority of other players.
As always, remember how much you can afford to lose, don’t take undue risks and bear in mind that for a successful online casino career you need to make regular, small profits. If you want to come out ahead over time in the online casino business, it pays to play regularly, and with your head screwed firmly on.