Why do you gamble?
The correct answer is that you should gamble for fun.
If you gave the answer, “to get rich” or some variant of that you should stop gambling and look into investments of some sort.
That doesn’t mean you won’t get rich gambling by the way, but it is extremely unlikely to happen, and if you’re playing in order to get rich you’re probably going to end up unhappy, and maybe even with a bad gambling problem.
If you gamble for fun, then you’ll have fun.
But, sadly, there are people who gamble in order to make money: sometimes because they’re desperate for it. These people are vulnerable. And sadly, where you find vulnerable people you will almost always find people preying on them.
Licensing keeps you safe at least
Most of the worst scams in the gambling industry has been dealt with now. You can play slots, casino games, and live casino games at a whole host of licensed casino sites – with up-to-date licensing from the UK Gambling Commission – and that keeps you safe.
To an extent.
You also need to keep yourself safe from yourself.
Which means having a good understanding of gambling addiction and your behaviour around gambling.
And, pushed out of the mainstream of the industry, scamming has been banished to the fringes of the industry. And that includes most betting strategies.
Should you pay for betting strategies?
This is a nice short section:
No, you should not pay for betting strategies.
What is an honest betting strategy?
The easiest way to spot a scamming betting strategy is charging.
Charging for a betting strategy in order to release a secret to the customer is a classic scam. Don’t fall for it.
And there’s a reason why these things are a scam: there is no secret.
No secret strategy can defeat the sheer randomness of all gambling games. And it’s a managed randomness that actually delivers a profit to the casino, which means that most customers lose.
As a quick measure of the relative success of the casino industry and the betting strategy, we might try this comparison: in 2018 Denise Coates was paid £323 million. She is the chair of Bet 365, a betting company. No betting strategy company chief executive strategy has ever been published.
Any betting strategy that promises that it will make you win is a lie.
However, there are betting strategies that you can usefully use, and these will help you reduce your losses.
They are all very well-known and you should never be charged for any of them – you can find them on Wikipedia easily enough.
The betting strategies that work
No betting strategy can trump randomness.
Betting games online are based on algorithms and random number generators. In the same way that roulette has developed into a fairly fool-proof way to deliver a profit to casinos, the mathematics of slot games and other online gambling games are designed to deliver cash.
That doesn’t necessarily make them “unfair” and they are certainly not “rigged” (as long as you’re playing on a licensed site), but it does make that fact predictable.
This can be seen in the theoretical return to player. This is what a game will deliver back to players over its entire lifecycle if players behave in a certain way. This figure is worked out by running simulations of the game – the figure of 1 billion spins is often mentioned – and it should be treated with caution as a comparator.
What it shows is that games are predictably profitable for casino companies.
So how should you strategize your betting?
Your best betting strategies are those that minimise losses.
How to lose less
The easiest way not to lose a bet is not to make it. And the easiest way to reduce the risk of losing money is to bet very small amounts of money.
This seems boring, and perhaps counterintuitive. But remember, you’re playing for fun, not to make money. (Incidentally, one of the biggest wins in slot history, the then world-record-breaking multi-millions win on Mega Moolah, was won with a 25p bet.)
The most popular betting strategies work on the basis of minimising losses.
The most popular is theoretically perfect.
Martingale schemes call for the player to double their bet whenever they lose.
This is the logic of that scheme.
Let’s say you have 10p to bet on a series of coin tosses with a friend. You’re going to start off betting 1p.
On the first toss, you win, so you take your friend’s 1p and have 11p. You bet again, and lose, taking you back down to 10p. Your next bet in this scheme will be 2p because winning will recover the penny you’ve just lost.
If your mathematics is any good you’ll quickly figure out that any strategy that calls for you to double something is going to pretty quickly get expensive.
You’re right. If you lose just a few bets you’ll be in a sequence of 1p, 2p, and 4p bets that you would then have to end because you won’t have the funds to make the 8p bet needed next.
The betting strategy that works best is:
Know how much money you can afford to spend on gambling in this session and with full knowledge of how this will affect the rest of your finances.
Don’t allow yourself access to any more money.
Decide if you’d like to make that amount of money your total spend, i.e., you’ll bet that amount and keep any winnings you have, or if you’d like to use that as your seed money and use your wins to play with.
Decide if you’d like to set a limit by a number of wagers or by time.
Play!
If you want to play for a decent amount of time then set an upper limit on your single bets too. It’s useful to do this as a running proportion of your total fund.
That’s a simple betting strategy that works and anyone can use.
Enjoy! And keep it safe.
