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Gaming Guru
Tracking Your Chances8 June 1999
Not long ago, the Chicago Sun-Times letters page included a note from a reader asking me to compare wagering on horse racing to betting on casino games. That's an exercise I went through a couple of years ago, but let's take another quick look. Roughly 80 cents of each dollar wagered on the races is returned to winning bettors. The other 20 cents go to purses, taxes and the operators. More is taken out of gimmick wagers such as exactas and trifectas, and less on straight win bets, but it comes down to about 20 cents on the dollar. That's equivalent to a house edge of 20 percent. If you drew horses' names out of a hat from here to eternity, you'd lose about 20 percent of everything you bet. That's an enormous house edge by casino standards - the house edge against a blackjack basic strategy player is only about 0.5 percent; against a $1 slot player it's about 5 percent. But casino players bet much faster and more often than horse players. A $5 blackjack player who plays for an entire two-hour cruise might make 100 bets, and a slot player might make 1,000 bets, but a horse player can bet every race on a nine-race card and make only nine wagers. What's all that mean? Pick horses at random, betting $2 on each race on a nine-race card, and your average expected losses for the day total $3.60. Play basic strategy blackjack at $5 per hand, and your average losses for a two-hour cruise total $2.50; play two coins at a time on a $1 slot instead, and your average expected losses shoot up to about $100. Can a horseplayer cut average losses by becoming a better handicapper? Certainly, just as a blackjack player can improve his odds by learning to count cards. The superior wagering experience? To each his own. This article is provided by the Frank Scoblete Network. Melissa A. Kaplan is the network's managing editor. If you would like to use this article on your website, please contact Casino City Press, the exclusive web syndication outlet for the Frank Scoblete Network. To contact Frank, please e-mail him at fscobe@optonline.net. Recent Articles
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