Playing at an online casino is a lot of fun. Many people are drawn by the speed and ease of playing games now, instead of waiting for hours for their favourite machine back home to be available. However, just like anything else that involves money, gambling comes with its risks. And while some may seem to be winning more often than they lose, it doesn’t take long to start losing the money they came with.
For this reason, it’s important to calculate your win rate before you gamble at any reputable online gambling singapore site, so you can set a limit on how much you want to lose and know when to call it quits.
What’s a Win Rate?
It’s a pretty simple concept. If you’re playing a game or at an online casino, and you have a 50% chance of winning any single hand or round, then your win rate for that specific activity is 50%. While this may not seem like the most exciting way to look at things, it’s actually extremely useful. It not only lets you know what game or activity to spend your time on, but also how much money to bring with you and when to quit.
For example, you were playing blackjack online. If we can sit down at any point in a blackjack game, have about a 50% chance of winning or losing any single hand, and the house only has a 1% edge over us no matter what we do, our win rate would be slightly above 2%.
This might sound like you’re losing more often than not, but once you put money behind it and actually start playing with real cash, you’ll see that in the long run, you’re actually making money.
How to Calculate Your Win Rate
In order to calculate your actual win rate at an online casino, you need to know the following things:
- The average time played per session.
- The number of sessions played.
- The total amount won or lost during those sessions.
Once these figures have been acquired, you can use them to calculate your win/loss percentage for the period in which they were collected. Most online gambling singapore sites have a win rate calculator, but you can also use a simple spreadsheet to calculate your win rate at home.
Once the total number of sessions has been calculated, convert it into days and divide by the average play time per session in hours.
But it isn’t always a simple matter of knowing your total number of wins or losses. In order to know how well you’re actually doing at an online casino, you need to calculate your win rate per hour and compare this figure against the amount wagered during that time.
Casino games with a low house edge such as blackjack, baccarat and craps tend to be the easiest to beat at online casinos, while roulette, slots and other games with a high house edge are usually best avoided.
You should also know that your win rate isn’t stable, so making a calculation for just an hour or two is a pointless task, and in reality, the more time you play online casino, the better your win rate becomes.
Several factors affect your overall win rate, including:
- Variance. This term refers to how much of a statistical variation can be expected over long periods of time. A low variance means that there will be less deviation between your actual win rate and the long term expected value. This means that your actual win rate will be closer to your expected value as the variance is reduced.
- Skill. Well-developed skills in any casino game, blackjack especially, can lead directly to a higher than normal win rate for an individual player; although they have played a very long time yet.
Gather information on the games and casino.
To calculate your win rate, it’s crucial that you know what kind of games are being offered by the casino.
We’ll look at an example of an online casino offering roulette, blackjack and slots. Knowing what kind of games are offered by the casinos that you’re considering will not only give you a better idea of whether it’s right for you, but it will also make future calculations more accurate.
Calculate your total bet size.
Your total bet size is crucial to calculating your win rate. If you know the size of your average bet in a game, you’ll be able to roughly calculate how much time it will take for you to break even and hopefully win!
For this example, let’s say that we bet $1 on each spin on roulette. Again, knowing what kind of games are offered by the casino in question is very important.
Calculate your total bet size in a given period of time.
In this step, we’ll use our roulette example and calculate the total amount that you’ve bet in one day (24 hours). Let’s say that you’ve played for five days in a row, so that means 120 spins.
Multiply the amount of spins by the size of your bet, and you get 1100. That’s how much money you’ve wagered in 5 days!
Calculate your win rate.
Now that we know how much we bet over a certain period of time let’s calculate our win rate. We’ll do this using roulette again.
If we multiply the amount of money we won by 300 and then divide that number by 1100 (our total bet size over a 5-day period), we’ll end up with an overall win rate of 0.27%.
Takeaway
In conclusion, by calculating your win rate and putting a limit on how much you want to lose before quitting, you’ll be able to come out ahead more often than not. If you’re able to change the game that you’re playing or find loose slots games too, then it could make up for the money you lose from time to time.
Also, remember that it’s important not to play with money that you can’t afford to lose, so if you find yourself slipping below your win rate threshold, then it might be a good idea just to leave and come back another day.
