Which table for a first visit

Priya is standing between two tables that both take the same bet a round. One of the two is a baccarat table where the Banker bet costs about $7.63 an hour on average; the other is a roulette wheel with one green pocket, at about $9.46 an hour. At which of the two tables is the money she brought more likely to still be there when her hours are up?

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

People walk in and pick a table the way you pick a seat on a bus: by which one is empty and which one looks friendly. That is how you end up betting three times what you meant to, twenty minutes in, and being surprised.

Three questions, in this order

The sign on a table names the game and gives the minimum (the smallest bet the table takes, for each bet on your spot). Neither the name of the game nor the smallest bet it takes tells you what an hour in that seat costs, or how many rounds the money in your pocket is good for. Three questions tell you both, and every one of the three can be answered while you are still standing.

1. What does an hour here cost on average? Three numbers make that figure: the bet you put down each round, the rounds an hour (how many rounds a table gets through in an hour, which is what turns a bet into an hourly cost), and the house edge (the share of every dollar bet the casino keeps on average, over many rounds). Multiply the three numbers together and you have the price of an hour (bet, times rounds an hour, times the house edge: what an hour of a game costs on average). Where that multiplication comes from is a lesson of its own later in the course; tonight you only need to find the three numbers and multiply them.
2. How many bets does my money buy here? Divide the money you brought by the table’s smallest bet, and the answer is your limit in bets (your limit counted in bets rather than dollars: $100 at $10 a bet is ten bets). The sign never does that division for you, and two signs that look much alike can leave the same money with five times as many bets at one table as at the other.
3. Does this game ask me to decide anything? At some tables nothing you do once the bet is down changes how the round comes out; at others what you do after the bet is most of what the seat costs. That is a decision (a choice you make after the bet is down that changes what the round costs on average; roulette and baccarat have none). A game that asks you to decide and a game that asks nothing of you are both fine on a first visit. What costs money is sitting down at a game that asks you to decide while believing it asks nothing.

The first question at the baccarat table Priya is looking at. Only the bet is hers to choose, and neither of the other two numbers is on the sign.

Not one of those three questions asks which table is due, which table is lucky or which table is friendly. A run of bad rounds and a run of good ones look exactly alike from a seat, and neither the people sitting at the table nor you can tell from either run what the next round is going to do.

What an hour costs, game by game

Nine ways to spend an hour: $10 a round at every live table, $1 a spin at the machine. Only the speed and the house edge change from one live table to the next.

Blackjack is priced twice, once for each way of playing the hand: once for blackjack with every hand played by the chart, once for blackjack played the way the dealer plays — draw to 17, never double, never split, which is how most first-timers play. The same $10 a hand in both, and the two prices are a long way apart, because what a hand of blackjack costs depends on what the player does with it. An ordinary beginner’s ordinary mistakes add about a percentage point to the house edge the chart itself leaves behind.

Two ways of playing blackjack, both at $10 a hand, and two prices for an hour. Two things change from one card to the other: what the player does with each hand, and whose blackjack table the price is taken from. Learning the chart makes a blackjack seat cheaper; it does not make the seat cost nothing.

What the machine allows is a ceiling, not a pace. 600 spins an hour is as fast as the machine allows — one spin every six seconds, kept up without a break for a full hour, which nobody does. Halve the machine’s speed to something a person really sits at, and its hour still costs more than any of the five cheapest live tables above. The $1 bet is the whole reason the machine looks like the cheap seat.

Leoformer dealer · rules and maths

Let’s count it on one line. Ten dollars, seventy hands, half a percent — that is three dollars and change an hour. Ten dollars, thirty-eight spins, five and a quarter percent — that is twenty. Same ten dollars in your hand, six times the price, and nothing about the room tells you which is which.

How long the money lasts is a different question

The table with the cheaper hour is usually not the table where the money lasts longest, because how long the money lasts depends on how many rounds it has to survive, not only on what each round costs.

Priya is choosing between baccarat’s Banker bet and the single-zero roulette wheel, and at those two tables the two questions pull against each other. The Banker bet is the cheaper hour — about $7.63 an hour against about $9.46 an hour at the single-zero wheel, both at $10 a round — and the baccarat table is also where the money runs out first. The reason is speed: the baccarat dealer gets through 72 hands in the time that the single-zero wheel spins 35 times.

The size of the bet is the other lever, and it is the one that needs no arithmetic to see: halve the bet and the same money becomes twice as many bets, and twice as many bets survive the planned hours far more often. A smaller bet costs less an hour as well, because less money crosses the table in that hour. What a smaller bet does not buy is more hours. The hours were settled at home, and no bet size adds one to them.

Blackjack is missing from this table on purpose: how a hand turns out has never been published for a B.C. table. On this page blackjack has a price and never a chance of lasting.

Which games ask you to decide

The question about decisions does not separate complicated games from simple ones. It separates games where your own moves change what the seat costs from games where nothing you do after the bet changes anything.

A game with nothing to decide is not the same as a game with one price. Nothing a baccarat player does after the deal changes a single card — and yet the Tie bet keeps 14.36% of every dollar put on it where the Banker bet keeps 1.06%. The choice between the Banker bet and the Tie bet is made before a card is dealt, and that one choice is the difference between the cheapest hour at the baccarat table and the dearest.

1. Roulette
   • YoursYou choose which bet to make and how much to put on it
   • The wheel spins
   • The bet is paid or taken
2. Baccarat
   • YoursYou choose Banker, Player or Tie
   • The cards are dealt out by a rule nobody at the table can change
   • The bet is paid or taken
3. Blackjack
   • YoursYou put the bet down
   • YoursYou draw, stand, double or split, while the dealer waits
   • The dealer plays the hand out
   • The bet is paid or taken

Where the decision sits inside one round of each game.

Blackjack is the opposite case, and the widest one. Played every hand by the chart, blackjack costs less an hour than baccarat’s Banker bet and less than every roulette wheel, and only the slow craps pass line comes cheaper; played by instinct, blackjack costs more an hour than any roulette wheel in the room. Until you have learned the chart, the honest figure for your own hour is the one for playing the way the dealer plays, not the one for playing by the chart. And two blackjack tables a metre apart can pay a blackjack at different rates, which moves the price of the seat again — what the difference between those two signs is worth is counted in the lesson on the table sign.

What the price does not settle

The first thing the sign leaves out is how many people are sitting at the table with you, and it changes the price of an hour a lot.

The same wheel with two green pockets, the same $10 a spin, the same house edge on every spin. The only thing that changed between the two cards is how many people are sitting there, and an hour at the wheel with nobody else at it costs about 3.2 times what an hour at the busy wheel costs.

• How many people are sitting there. A dealer with nobody to wait for deals faster, so a table with empty seats is at once easier to follow and dearer by the hour. That is a real trade and it runs both ways: the quiet table is the one to learn at, and it is also the one that takes your money quickest while you learn.
• A screen has no price. An electronic table (a terminal where you bet on a game run by a screen instead of a dealer; the smallest bets are often lower, and how fast one runs is not published) often looks like the cheap seat, but no operator we could read publishes how fast one runs, so an hour at a screen cannot be priced.
• Standing and watching, which is not welcome everywhere. Watch a few rounds before you join: good advice for a game you have never played. But one casino puts watching without playing on the list of things it does not permit, so watch while you are still choosing a table, and say so if anybody asks what you are doing. When you cannot follow what is happening at a table, ask the dealer.

And three things change nothing at all: which numbers came up on the last few rounds, which dealer is dealing, and whether the table is “running hot”. Each of those three beliefs is taken apart later in the course; none of the three changes what a round costs by a cent.

Practice: pick a first table

Three levels, and only the first two are scored. Level 1 sets two tables side by side and asks which hour costs less: 9 moments. Level 2 adds a plan and asks where the money lasts the evening more often: 10 moments. Level 3 is 6 situations a price alone does not settle, each answered by a quoted source and none of them scored.

The lesson is one run: every square on the strip below is one moment of it, and they are all there from the start. Only your first answer on each moment counts, and when a level’s squares are full the next level begins by itself.

Answer by pressing the table itself or the buttons under it. Every amount on a card is an example bet, not any casino’s minimum — what a real table asks is on its sign. Two prices count as about the same within 15% of each other, two evenings within 5 points.

Check yourself

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

Five quick ones. Pick an answer, then check it. No timer, no points: just whether it stuck.

The question we opened with. The dearer hour is the one where the money is more likely to still be there: the single-zero wheel lasts the whole 2 hours in 7 of 10 evenings, baccarat’s Banker bet in 6 of 10 evenings. The wheel spins 35 times an hour and the baccarat table deals 72 hands, so the same ten bets have half as many chances to run out at the wheel. What an hour costs and how long the money lasts are two different questions, and at these two tables they have two different answers.

Where to check this

19+ (18+ in AB, MB, QC) · Play responsibly · the helplines for every province are at the end of this page

Two other lessons of this track answer the questions on either side of this one: reading the sign at the table tells you what that table is, and finding your way on the floor tells you where the tables are and when they open.

Further reading

• The house edge of casino games · Wizard of OddsThe table of rounds an hour this course uses for every game, with the note that it is a rating table from one Las Vegas casino.
• Blackjack basics · Wizard of OddsWhat three common ways of playing blackjack without the chart cost, on that author’s own table.
• Blackjack: how to play · OLG PlaySmartOntario’s beginner page: choosing a table, and watching a few rounds before joining one.
• Roulette: strategies · OLG PlaySmartWhy a small amount of money and a large minimum bet do not go together, in one sentence.
• PAR sheets, probabilities, and slot machine play · Kevin A. Harrigan and Mike Dixon, Journal of Gambling Issues 23 (2009)Where the figure for how fast a machine allows you to play comes from: timed on reel slots at an Ontario casino.

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

One line to take with you. Write the table’s smallest bet next to the money you brought, and divide: that is how many bets tonight is. If the answer is a handful, the move is a lower minimum or a shorter evening, and if the plan itself still needs writing down, Game plan does it in a couple of minutes.

Not a bigger limit. The limit was the one decision you made with a clear head, standing up, before any of this was in front of you.

How it’s worked out