Be A Sport. Losing In Las Vegas So Casino Owners Will Win.

Losing in Las Vegas Lex Loeb Contributor Network . Losing in Las Vegas is the real name of the game. Las Vegas has developed one of the world's most amazing illusions and that illusion is not just the tourist trap with all the elements of high class theme parks. The whole casino industry is built on the illusion that the casino is a place that you can have a fair chance of winning money as a gambler. The illusion is that of winning. Casinos make money precisely because people tend to lose more than they win. Las Vegas style gambling has developed into the high art form of making losers feel like winners. This is what accounts for the high style and elegance of most casinos. Monte Carlo was the original developer of the casino as palace for rich patrons to come to gamble by allowing them to feel as if they had arrived in the establishment of the well just by the fact that their customers had the cash to ante up in the casino. The rich flocked to Monte Carlo knowing they would likely loose money on game played but that it was all part of the sport of the well to do. Monte Carlo and most major casinos subsequent to it foster gentrification and the appeal of ostentatious behavior as much as possible. Most of the blue chip casinos in Vegas and elsewhere cater to those who want to appear to be rich and ostentatious because it is a winning formula. You can see the influence of Monte Carlo in the architectural designs of most of the big successful casinos. Card room type casinos are a slightly different animal as they feed off the instincts of compulsive gamblers without all the elegant frills. Casinos don't particularly like customers who have any advantage in winning over the house. Card Counters in black jack get black listed by a consortium of casinos the minute they are identified.. Casinos are in business to make money and if possible a lot of money. The costs of keeping a casino open and running are very expensive in labor, utilities and debts required to pay for the gaming equipment. The only way to keep the operations going is to keep people coming though the door with money to bet and get them to stay as long as possible. Comfortable climate control can be very expensive in Las Vegas with the desert heating and air conditioning loads on equipment. The same climate problems exist in hot and humid Macaw . The costs per gambler or non gambler visiting are substantial before a single dollar is even wagered. Keeping customers in your casino can be tricky in a place like Las Vegas with so many choices of places to play the same game. Casinos go out of their way offering creature comforts, freebies, comps and incentives to keep their customers and they also sometimes offer out right cash bribes to get customers to come into their establishments before going to a competitor's. Making losers feel like they are winning such as being included and welcome in a high class establishment goes a long way toward keeping the business. The American Gambling Association representing casinos puts out a brochure called, "The House Advantage-a Guide to Understanding the Odds." There they spill the beans to customers that losing and not winning is the actual name of the game. The brochure says that regardless of what casino game one plays the chances are based on random outcomes and "always favor the casino." Games of chance are just for entertainment at a cost to the consumer it says, adding, the player should not come to a casino considering it a place to make money. The brochure uses the euphemism "responsible gambling" to characterize the way players should behave by not wagering money they cannot afford to lose because as the brochure quickly points, in very few pages, winning in a casinos is more myth than reality. There is no casino that does not promote the anti-statistical probability myth of "good luck" as there is no such thing. Betting within your limits is the only way to protect yourself from unsustainable loses except for not ever entering a casino to gamble in the first place. The house advantage is the art and science of the casino taking a percentage of every wager played by gamblers in their gaming facility. House advantage can be anywhere between a half of a percent to over 20%. One of the worst offenders in terms of house advantage in casinos are games run by state lotteries. State video lottery terminals can pay or paid almost 30 percent to store owners who host the machines as it had been in Oregon with the state getting big cut of the profits above that amount. Keno games and other state lottery games can retain over 70% of wagers which is one of the biggest casino rip offs imaginable but a scam approved by the public as a means of taxation. The state lotteries keep the good luck myth going in the most predatory way to keep their citizens hooked on their game and are able to because they lock out competition. Vegas and Indian casinos have more competition and their house advantage per game varies between a half percent per wager and over 20% for keno games. Some players have some advantages but not enough to beat the house advantage unless they are cheating. The biggest and best of the Vegas Casinos have an approximate aggregate house advantage of 14-15 percent mostly because of the lucrative nature of slot machines that quickly compound losses for players repetitive wager after wager. If a player loses 5 or 10 dollars to the house on every pull of a slot machine arm his stash of cash for playing quickly is exhausted unless a major jackpot is achieved before the money runs out. The player is likely to win 95% of his money back if the house advantage on a particular slot machine takes 5% for the house advantage. Some players will get ahead while others get behind but most will deplete their cash on hand the longer they play. The brochure from the American Gaming Association actually says that the longer and faster a gambler plays their games the sooner they will go broke. You can experiment yourself in a casino playing slot machines until all the money you have to wager is gone, gone , gone even if you re-wager any small or large jackpots you receive. The over all outcome of random chances of the games offered at casinos are designed to net the house an overall outcome that favors the casino the longer all of the players continue to use the facility. There is no better money machine except for the federal government with it's tax based house advantage on all transaction in our economy. The best gamble having anything to do with a casino is in owning one. The more the average player plays the more he necessarily has to lose. The digital computer driven casino facilities are really a very high tech fine art of making it enjoyable for people to loose a lot of money. The games offer a grand illusion of being able to win when most customers with lose the longer or faster they play . If a player is likely to lose money playing fast with big bets as making small bets played over time it does not really pay to do either. Heads the house wins tails the house wins and the player loses a little bit over time each wager is made. In casino you will notice that when people lose playing games the machines they are playing are quiet but when they win a jackpot or a big bet at a card table the noise level rises so everyone in the casino can hear it. The casino needs to let everyone in the casino see someone is actually winning as frequently as possible and not draw any attention to the losers. The casino prefers losers to quietly leave the casino embarrassed that they lost money so no one notices how many of them there are and for the big winners they will put out a red carpet, ring bells and whistles to lead them out or even better yet keep them re-betting their winnings in hope of getting more of that money back. Winners receive bigger comps and freebies later from casinos because a gambler feeling successful having won a jackpot will bring that money back to play again with a larger chance of losing it than winning more. The sad thing about casinos is that the illusion of creating winners ensnares a lot of wishful thinkers in the trap that they set so skillfully for compulsive gamblers. Losers tend to think that they can win back their loses by coming back to play because they see the jackpot winners. In most casinos and state lotteries they house tends to take pictures of the winners and display them with the amount they won. Sometimes the amount is more than a million dollars or hundreds of millions in state lotteries. They never show pictures of all the people who lost money because they would run out of room to display those. They could just hand you a big chunk of a telephone book or show you the huge stacks of the pre-sorted junk mail they send to their customer base to attract them back into the casino. It takes many losers in a casino or a lottery to make just one big winner. If you visit a casino instead of playing you can go there to people watch. See how many jackpots there are in the slot machines. When an electric slot machine makes a big jackpot payout it makes a big noise everyone can hear on the casino floor. You can walk toward it to find out what the jackpot is. Sometimes it is not as big as you might expect it to be and you only have partial information as someone who just one $5000 might have bet more than that over time before they actually won it.. Then , at risk of being kicked out of the casino, you can start taking notes about which machines payed out a really substantially big jackpot and how much it was. Casinos do not want anyone collecting information like that! What you find out is that the big noises of the jackpots are often just penny machines paying out 200,000 pennies which is just $2000 . Machines have limitations on what they can pay out because that allows for the house advantage to work in favor of the house in even the worse case scenario for the house of multiple jackpots happening in a brief period of time from the same machine. The house has one final weapon against having to pay out money and that is a little legal jargon found on the slot machines that says that they can refuse to pay out any payout because :"malfunction voids payout". Really big wins are necessarily taxable so winners have to offer up their social securities numbers and other information to receive a check and for federal and state tax reporting purposes. Really big winners can be considered possible cheaters if they have an existing record of winning jackpots and according to some sources why would'nt casinos do background checks on winners once they have personal information like social security numbers. Players can be at a disadvantage immediately for any reason with words like "any machine malfunction voids payout." Casinos become concerned when they know that the off the shelf specks on a particular computer slot machine says that there is a one in 5 million chance of a slot machine paying out a million dollars and it happens on the third day they have the machine on the casino floor. A player can expect some big wins to be scrutinized more than they would like and other because casinos have budgets to adhere and time constraints to pay bills. When you enter a casino as a curious tourist not to play but to see how many jackpots are actually won and how big they actually are on a daily basis you are surprised by just how few big jackpots there are. The odds of winning big are not much better than in the state lottery. Smaller casinos will not get very many big jackpot winners on a daily basis necessarily. Jackpot sizes maybe more modest when they do occur. The casinos don't want the players to have the same information on the actual odds of playing for obvious reason. Small jackpots will be made to look bigger than they are with sirens and audiences applauding. Too big a jackpot and the casino may try to tone down the noise a bit while they investigate if the win was "legitimate." For more information on how much gamblers loose at casinos you can go to the public shareholder statements of some of the larger casino companies and try to make some calculations based on revenue from gaming realizing that they do have significant expenses required to keep the casino open and operating and to get customers to walk in with cash. Those expenses are subtracted so you can imagine that gamblers bet a lot more than is shown in gross and net revenues. Annual reports are a great window on the industry. The casinos do necessarily pay out a lot of money to players that does leave the casino but they net a good deal of money from most of their players. The illusion of winning works like a charm for the casino business with no good luck ever required. It is wonderful entertainment for players but they have to realize that their purpose in the casino is most often to loose some or all of their wagered money to pay out money to the house advantage and to the temporary winners . Winners are temporary because the longer they play the games at a casino making repetitive bets the more likely they will loose all their money over time. Electronic slot machine games are big sellers for casinos because the machines can build up anticipation and expectations some even having narrative story lines and plots for players to find hidden random combinations with sought after pay outs.. The appeal of gambling as entertainment is all about the possibility of winning even if the probability is very low. Las Vegas dresses it self up with elegance, luxury and with shows , fancy amenities like food and theme park attributes but all of this is built around the square footage of the actual casino floor space. Casino , like stores in shopping malls , have rating as per dollars of sales per square foot. The best of casinos have the highest sales per square foot. When you enter a casino you should feel like a lamb going to slaughter or at least as the money you bring with you as cash as an offering to the God of Chance. .