Time is money, as much when visiting the casino as in the work world. And when we’re deciding how to spend our time in the casinos, how much time it takes to play a hand or spin the reels is a factor to be weighed right along with the house edge.
That doesn’t necessarily mean time is destiny, at least in the casino world. There are things we can do to counter the effects of time and the house edge and get a better run for our money. We can learn basic strategy at blackjack or the video poker games we choose. Even on the slots, we can slow down and learn to savor the bonus rounds and free spins that keep us in action without extra wagers.
Another way time is money, but not destiny: The costs per hour we’re about to calculate won’t match your results every time you play. Sometimes the cost will be a little higher. Sometimes lower. Every once in a while, you’ll hit the jackpot. Winning streaks and big wins happen in every game, no matter what speed of play and the house edge say our average results should be. It’s those big wins that keep us coming back.
Nonetheless, if we give time control of our bankrolls, time may be money on the tables, but it’s more like time and a half on the slots, where we play much faster.
How much faster? A blackjack player at a full table plays about 50 hands an hour. On reel slots and video poker, 500 hands an hour is an easy, steady pace at reel slots and video poker, and video slots with bonus rounds can go at least 300 spins an hour. Many play faster, and you certainly can slow the games down, but let’s use those figures as averages.
So let’s take a unit of time — one hour — combine it with the house edges on the most popular casino games and take into account the speed of play. Then we’ll rank the games by average cost per hour. On table games, let’s assume a $5 wager — if you’re a $100-a-hand high roller, multiply the average cost per hour by 20. On slots, we’ll calculate the cost per hour on penny, nickel, quarter and dollar machines, and on video poker, we’ll look at quarter and dollar games.
One word about video poker. There are so many variations that performing this little exercise could fill a book, let alone a couple of pages in Midwest Gaming & Travel. So we’ll just take the basic game of Jacks or Better, and look at what changing paytables and denominations does to that game. Paytable and coin denomination changes will have a similar effect on any video poker game you choose.
Basic strategy blackjack, full table: $1.25. There’ll be some variation depending on number of decks and house rules, but let’s assume a no-frills, six-deck game with a house edge of about 0.5 percent. At about 50 hands per hour, you risk $250. Can you lower the cost even more? Sure. Even if you’re not up to counting cards, finding tables with the best rules combination can lower the house edge below 0.5 percent and cut the cost to under a buck an hour.
Quarter 9-6 Jacks or Better video poker, one coin: $2. With expert play, 9-6 Jacks returns 99.5 percent to the player, assuming a maximum coins, five-coin bet. With fewer than five coins wagered, that return drops to 98.4 percent. At 500 hands an hour, the $125 is wagered, with the average loss being 1.6 percent of that.
Craps, pass or don’t pass: $2.10. We’ll assume 100 rolls per hour here — craps moves pretty fast. The house edges of 1.41 percent on pass and 1.4 percent on don’t pass are fairly low, and it requires an average of 3.4 rolls to decide the wagers. Using a system such as Frank Scoblete’s Five Count, in which you’re not betting on every comeout roll, can reduce the cost per hour dramatically. What about backing your line bets with free odds? The odds have no house edge, so they lower the house edge on your pass-odds combination. If by taking odds you are able to reduce your line bet, you reduce your cost per hour. But if the odds are an extra bet — and with our $5 minimum, they are — the cost per hour remains the same as if you were taking no odds at all.
Quarter 9-6 Jacks or Better video poker, five coins: $3.125. OK, that’s a little too precise, but we can be precise in video poker. At 500 hands an hour we risk $625. Note that even though we risk five times as much money as when we bet only one coin, the cost is only a little more than 1.5 times as high. That’s because the overall house edge with expert play drops to 0.5 percent. On the fifth coin, we actually have an edge. The cost per hour goes up if you bet only four coins instead of five.
Quarter 8-5 Jacks or Better video poker, one coin: $4.88. In the “8-5” version, full houses pay only 8-for-1, flushes pay 5-for-1, and we lose about 2 percent of our payback compared with the 9-6 game. Risk is $125, and we lose about 3.9 percent of that. To reduce your cost per hour, watch those pay tables. The house edge increases by a little over a percent for each unit the payback on full houses or flushes are reduced. That’s enough of a difference that the cost per hour is higher on 8-5 Jacks with one coin wagered than on the 9-6 game with a five-coin bet.
Three Card Poker, Pair Plus, $5.75: This is paytable dependent. On the game’s original paytable, Pair Plus has a house edge of 2.3 percent. But paytables are available with house edges up to 7.3 percent. Beware. To keep your cost per hour at a minimum, look for games that pay 40-1 on straight flushes, 30-1 on three of a kind, 6-1 on straights, 4-1 on flushes and even money on pairs.
Basic strategy blackjack, one-on-one: $6.25. Head-to-head with the dealer, you’ll play about 250 hands per hour, giving the house edge more chance to work against you. Time is really money here. The cost is five times as high with one player at the table as with seven. Seek out full tables. Don’t worry about other players’ “mistakes.” They’ll help you as often as they hurt you. In the long run, they won’t cost you money. Playing alone will.
Average blackjack player, full table: $6.25. If you don’t know your basic strategy or don’t stick to it, if you play by feel or hunch, if you take insurance or split 10s sometimes or any of the odd things average players do, the house edge climbs to about 2.5 percent. Reducing your cost per hour is easy. Learn basic strategy, and stick to it.
Dollar 9-6 Jacks or Better video poker, one coin: $8. Unlike slots, video poker payoffs do not vary with coin denomination. Instead, they vary according to the paytable. The cost on a dollar video poker game is four times that of the same paytable played with quarters.
Three Card Poker, play against the dealer: $8.50. House edge is 3.4 percent of the ante, or 2 percent of total action, including the additional bets we make if our cards are good enough. That’s one of the best among newer table games. To keep your cost per hour at a minimum, stick to the basic strategy: Bet with queen-6-4 or better, and fold lesser hands.
Let It Ride: $8.75. Here, we’ll figure that our starting point is three $5 wagers, of which we may pull back two during the course of play. That leaves the same basic $5 risk as in other examples. With a house edge of 3.5 percent of one wager and 250 hands per hour, that leaves an $8.75 average loss. Our cards are good enough to leave the other bets on the table often enough to reduce the overall house edge to 2.8 percent.
Penny video slot machine, 20 lines, one coin per line: $9. Each spin of the reels costs only 20 cents, and at 300 spins an hour, you’re putting $60 an hour on the line. In most casinos, the lowest coin denominations also bring the lowest percentage payoffs. Here, we’ll use an 85 percent return for pennies. Some casinos will offer higher payback percentages, some lower, but pennies do tend to pay less than 90 percent. To lower your cost per hour, you have two choices: Play fewer paylines, or slow down the game. I like to cover all the lines myself.
Roulette: $10.52. Other than the bad bets at craps, roulette has one of the highest house edges on the tables, at 5.26 percent. It also moves more slowly than other table games, so the cost here is based on 40 spins of the wheel per hour. The house edge is the same on every bet on a double-zero wheel except the five-number bet on 0, 00, 1, 2 and 3. There, the house edge climbs to 7.89 percent. If you were to insist on betting $5 a spin on that combination — and I don’t know why anybody would — the cost per hour would climb to $15.78.
Mini baccarat: $10.60 (banker) or $12.40 (player). Baccarat has one of the lowest house edges of games in which skill doesn’t matter. When ties, on which we get our money back, are taken into account, the house edge is 1.06 percent on banker and 1.24 percent on player. Even though the house edge is low, the cost is high because mini baccarat motors along at 200 hands per hour. Big baccarat can be much slower, as low as 15 hands per hour in rooms that cater to high rollers. At that speed, average losses would drop to 80 cents on banker or 93 cents — except we won’t find any slow-moving big baccarat games that take wagers as low as $5.
Quarter reel-spinning slot, one coin: $11.25. At 500 spins an hour, average risk becomes $125. The house keeps somewhere from 6 to 9 percent on quarter slots. If you bet only one coin, you’ll get a somewhat lower percentage because the payoff on the top jackpot awards a higher percentage to max-coins bettors. There’s room for much variation depending on the math of the individual machine, but let’s assume a 93 percent payback, with max coins played, that drops to a 91 percent return with fewer coins wagered.
Dollar 9-6 Jacks or Better, five coins: $12.50. Four times the wager, four times the cost as the quarter version.
Caribbean Stud: $13. We’re assuming an ante of $5 at Caribbean Stud, with 50 hands per hour. If you learn an easy basic strategy, the house edge is 5.2 percent of the ante, or 2.6 percent of total action — we’ll have cards good enough to make the additional bet of twice our ante often enough to push our total wagers to about $500 an hour. I’ll not list the side bet on the progressive jackpot here. The house edge depends on the size of the jackpot, but with the paytable starting at a flush or better, you’ll get a winner of any kind only about once per two hours.
Nickel video slot machine, 9 lines, one coin per line: $13.50. Same 300 spins per hour as on penny video slots, fewer paylines, but a higher bet coin denomination puts the average wagers per hour at $135. Figure on about 10 percent as the cost of play — a little more at some casinos, a little less at others. Want to reduce your cost? One way is to take your time on the bonus rounds. Think over your choices. Celebrate the wins before making your next choice. The full time you’re playing the bonus round is a time you have a chance to win without making any further investment.
Quarter 8-5 Jacks or Better video poker, five coins: $16.88: With expert play, we lose 2.7 percent of our wagers, more than five times as much as on 9-6 Jacks or Better. Take a look around the casino before you play to see if there are better games available. If not, slow down your play.
Dollar 8-5 Jacks or Better video poker, one coin: $19.50. Four times the cost of quarter 8-5 Jacks or Better, with an average investment of $2,500 per hour. To those who think the “9-6” and “8-5” designations don’t make any difference in whether you win or lose, well, they do.
Quarter reel-spinning slot, three coins: $26.75. Note that this is a better payback percentage than quarter games with one coin played, but it’s still a higher cost per hour with total wagers of $375. That’s something to keep in mind when budgeting your day at the casino. When players used to feed coins in by hand for every pull, casinos figured spins per hour at about 240. If you seriously want to slow down your play and lower your cost, that’s one way to do it — if you still can find a machine with a coin head.
Average blackjack player, one-on-one: $31.25. Compare this to the basic strategy player at a full table. Learning basic strategy is an important skill. So is knowing enough to play at the slower table unless you’re a card counter who has an edge on the game. Speed favors whoever has the edge. Most of the time, that’s the house.
Dollar reel-spinning slot, one coin: $35. Risk is $500 at a dollar for each of 500 spins. We’ll assume an overall payback of 95 percent with max coins played, but only 93 percent with one coin wagered. Slow down. Drop coins into the slot. Chat up the waitress. And stretch your dollar.
Dollar 8-5 Jacks or Better video poker, five coins: $67.50. The risk is $2,500 an hour. At 97.3 percent, we get a better payback percentage than on dollar slots, but a five-coin maximum bet instead of three coins on the reel-spinners leaves the cost per hour nearly as high.
Dollar reel-spinning slot, three coins: $75. Casinos regard dollar slot players as some of their most valuable customers. With $1,500 an hour in play at games that return about 95 percent, dollar slot players usually are well-comped — and deservedly so.
Craps, any 7: $83.35: Let’s take a really bad craps bet to contrast with the pass and don’t pass wagers. On those, we lose only $2.10 per hour. But here, the house edge is much higher, at 16.67 percent, and bets are decided on every roll instead of once every 3.4 rolls. That’s why smart bettors stay away from one-roll propositions.
There’s one more factor that we haven’t discussed yet. The cost per hour on any game is lower when you take into account cash back and comps. And the kings and queens of cash back are slot players. On any close call in cost between a table game and a slot game, some of the difference will be made up in the cash back awarded to slot players. Through player rewards cards, time is money in slot players’ favor, too.
- John Grochowski is the author of The Casino Answer Book, The Slot Machine Answer Book, The Video Poker Answer Book and the Craps Answer Book, available through Bonus Books, Inc. at (800) 225-3775.
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