Beating the house – what are the odds of beating the casino?

Beating the house is the perennial prey of many casino-goers. After all, why visit a casino other than to win big? Yet, the dynamics of gambling are such that relying on defeating the house is not only improbable – the whole thing is not even designed to work this way. The house always wins because the house edge is slightly tilted in favor of casinos to begin with.

Despite all of this, people continue to ask: "Can you beat the casino?" and, if so, how exactly to go about it? Casino Guru has taken a look at what makes casino strategies successful and what games have been known to consistently produce winners.

Can you beat the casino?

Yes and no. Giving a straight answer to this question would not be entirely accurate either way. To beat the casino, you first need to ask yourself – what game do you intend to play? What is its theoretical payout, and is there at least one person who has been known to defeat the game consistently?

If this is the case, then yes, in theory, you may beat the casino, but the available evidence is not in your favor. A slot game has around a 96% theoretical return. In other words, for every $1 you bet, you can expect $0.96 back.

Over $100, you can theoretically expect to win back $96 and have lost $4 to the casino. Casino Guru has explained how variance and payout ratio work in detail here. Most people will lose over the long term if they play constantly.

This is why casinos do not mind big winners and even publicize their exploits. However, if certain conditions are met, casinos can start losing money – and hurting.

Can you beat the casino at blackjack?

Blackjack is actually one of those games that you can play and defeat at a land-based casino, and less so at an online casino. You may have heard of the MIT Blackjack Team, which traveled around casinos in the 80s and 90s and won supposedly millions of dollars counting cards.

The team, consisting of math whizzes, taught themselves how to count cards and used a spotter system whereby one person would count cards until the deck got "hot" with a co-conspirator, then swoop in to win consistently, with any wins outweighing potential losses in the long term.

Essentially, if you can count cards well enough and perhaps have a partner to assist you, you will soon find yourself winning more than you lose playing blackjack.

The drawback? While it is perfectly legal to count cards, any casino that catches you using its advanced security systems will politely but firmly escort you out of the property and most likely prohibit you from re-entry.

While the blackjack house edge can drop to as little as 0.26% for single-deck blackjack, and there is literature by successful blackjack gamblers, the theory still suggests that blackjack is not a game that you can beat.

Dana White has been an interesting headline. The man has been banned from some casinos over his teasing playstyle. He would bet big, but quit as soon as he won, not giving casinos a chance to win back what they just lost. He is also known for his baccarat plays.

Can you beat the casino at roulette?

Theoretically, you should not be able to, but there is at least one prominent example of a gambler who has done it – Niko Tosa. The enigmatic Croatian gambler visited the Ritz Casino in London, the United Kingdom, in 2004, where he won more than £1,000,000 before being arrested.

His arrest, though, did not reveal anything untoward, other than the fact that Tosa had multiple passports under different names. Yet, the casino and investigators never proved that Tosa had cheated.

So, in theory, Tosa did beat the casino at roulette, and it was not a matter of luck. He was betting thousands of pounds per single roulette spin and not even looking at the roulette wheel’s outcome, using call bets to bet in the last possible moment.

Eventually, Tosa was banned from the casino, but he is said to have been traveling around the world, beating casinos at roulette like this for many years now. No plausible explanation has been given as to how Tosa did it to this very day.

A journalist was able to catch up with the secretive gambler several years ago, and when asked what his secret was, Tosa simply said that he had trained himself to predict where the ball would land.

A highly unlikely scenario.

What about baccarat?

Baccarat is another popular game where we have at least one successful example of a person "defeating the game." This is Mikki Mase, the controversial gambler who claims to have been banned from every casino in the world, and definitely Las Vegas.

Mase claims to have won $32,000,000 from his casino gambling, including baccarat. While his claims are mostly subjective, he has appeared on podcasts and video interviews, showing his overall gambling history from accounts, claiming that he has won at various gambling activities.

His baccarat days are over, and Mase now supposedly runs a sports betting advising service, where he tells other people what and who to back. Mase remains a highly controversial figure in gambling, with poker professional Sean Perry calling him out as a "fraud," so it may be worth taking his claims of beating the house with a grain of salt.

Beating the casino – make sure you understand the risks first

Overall, beating the casino is highly improbable. While the founder of FedEx went to Sin City and managed to save his company from bankruptcy on a $5,000 blackjack bet, his story is anecdotal and an exception to the rule.

Replicating the fabled success of people like Mikki Mase or Niko Tosa is not very likely, especially when we are not sure what these gamblers did to actually win in the end. Casinos are still fun, and even though the chances are usually stacked against you, you can still enjoy your favorite games responsibly and safely!

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