Becoming a professional gambler in the casino, is it possible?
Can you make money in the casino as a professional gambler? And if so, what is the best strategy to go home with a profit every day.
Mr. Casino received an interesting question in his mailbox about professional gambling: is it possible to make money as a professional gambler?
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Dear Mr. Casino,
More and more I am trying to learn more about professional gambling in casinos.
I recently read on the Internet that you can actually go to сasino every day and settle for $50 profit a day with low stakes. This is of course nice to be true. But is this really possible?
I personally think it is possible, but it is never a guarantee that you will win your first bet when you come in. I was thinking of doing this at a roulette table. And playing more the outside of the columns by covering for example 2 columns or dozens. Big chance you win the amount. But if you lose then you lose it 2x back. So to do this in a spin you would have to bet $100 for that $50 win but if you lose you lose that $100.
I am considering doing it. But what do you think? For more tips or tricks regarding professional gambling I would of course love to hear it.
Furthermore, I have a full-time job but my goal is to use extra pennies a day with professional gambling.
John
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Dear John,
Yes, those are nice thought experiments! But don’t quit your job just yet.
Almost everyone who goes to the casino sometimes dreams about it: how can you become a professional gambler or make your money with gambling? Is there a way to beat the casino?
On various websites and forums you will read stories of people who claim to rake in a regular income as a professional gambler. Often these are strategies where you make a relatively small profit (say $50) every time you visit the casino, usually roulette strategies.
Only: Mr. Casino has yet to come across the first professional gambler in the Netherlands who can tangibly prove, that he or she invariably earns money from gambling.
And even if they were successful, why do they put their strategies on the Internet for free where anyone can read them? (Even the casinos!) Why aren’t they in the casino making money? Or better yet, somewhere on a tropical island with a cocktail on the beach enjoying their winnings?
Win $50 every day at a casino
The strategy you describe — going to a casino every day and stopping when you win $50 — can certainly work in the short term. If you go to the casino with an ample budget (say, $3,000) and spend it in a disciplined way on roulette, on most visits you will manage to win $50. You then stop immediately and start again the next day.
This can go on for several weeks at a time. After three weeks you have $1050 in your pocket and think you have fully mastered professional gambling.
But inevitably a bad day comes. You always bet on red, but spin after spin the ball falls on a black number. With each spin you have to bet more to recoup your losses, just like that $50 profit, but every time it goes wrong. After six or seven spins, you lose your entire budget. Ouch.
To get your $3000 back, you need to win another $50 for sixty consecutive days. If something goes wrong again during these sixty days, you will be even deeper in the red.
In short, in the short term it may seem like you have become a successful professional gambler. But in the long run, the casino always wins.
If gambling were really a way to make money in the long run, this knowledge would have long been shared and millions of people would be supplementing their income as professional gamblers.
Are there real professional gamblers?
So what about stories about professional gamblers? Do they really not exist? They do, but becoming a professional gambler is not that easy. If you really want to, you have the following options:
- Learn to play poker very well. If you are a good poker player, then it is certainly possible to make money from it. You don’t even have to enter big tournaments — with small cash games you can win quite a bit of money from lesser poker players. But poker is actually more of a sport than a gambling game.
- Learn to count cards at blackjack. It is not easy and takes a lot of practice, but it is possible to beat the casino, like the MIT Blackjack Team. At Holland Casino, by the way, this is not possible. At the state casino, the cards are shuffled with continuous shuffling machines, making card counting virtually meaningless.
- Play video poker on certain machines (but with perfect strategy!). In Las Vegas and some other cities in the US, there are video poker machines that pay out more than 100% in the long run, provided you play perfectly and never make a mistake. So these machines have no house advantage, but a player advantage.
Professional gambling with bonuses
Then there is another special way that professional gamblers try to make money in online casinos. They make clever use of casino bonuses.
Sometimes the bonus terms are so favorable that you have a theoretical advantage over the casino. As a player, you can then expect to be left with money — on average — after clearing the bonus.
Such a bonus has a positive “expected value” or “expected value”. In short, EV+ , a term also known from poker strategy.
EV+ does not mean that you are guaranteed to make money every time you use such a bonus. But if you use such an EV+ bonus often enough, you will probably make money in the long run.
You can read more about this method in the book Beat the Online Casino. Also check the casino reviews to see what the exact bonus terms are.
A professional gambling career?
In short, by making smart use of online casino offers, you can earn a nice profit. However, a real career as a professional gambler is not possible with this method.
The casino is fun and with some luck you can win a nice amount of money now and then. But don’t think of it as a place where you can pick up an extra penny every week. Unfortunately!
