How Professional Gamblers Calculate Their Hourly Earnings

Whether you are playing baccarat, roulette or poker at home or no-limit texas hold’em poker at the recreation club or even in Las Vegas, whether you are playing for fun or for a living, once a week or every day, you have to understand that the object of professional gambling is to make money. That’s where the profits are. That’s where the fun is. That’s the way you approached the game.

Expectation and Hourly Earnings

I have discussed Mathematical Expectation in one of my earlier posts. Mathematical expectation is the difference in wagers after taken into consideration the average amount in winning or losing bets. It is an extremely important concept for the gambler because it shows him how to evaluate most gambling situations. Using mathematical expectation is also the best way to analyze most professional plays, including tie bets in baccarat, counting cards in blackjack and poker.

Mathematical expectation has nothing to do with results. It makes no difference whether you win or lose a specific bet or series of bets as long as you have a bankroll to cover your losses. If you continue to make these bets, you will win, and in the long run your win will approach specifically the sum of your expectations.

Anytime you make a bet with the best of it, where the odds are in your favour, you have earned something on that bet, whether you actually win or lose the bet. By the same token, when you make a bet with the worst of it, where the odds are not in your favour, you have lost something, whether you actually win or lose the bet. You have the best of it when you have a positive expectation, and you have a positive expectation when the odds are in your favour. You have the worst of it when you have a negative expectation, and you have a negative expectation when the odds are against you. Serious gamblers bet only when they have the best of it; when they have the worst of it, they sit out.

What does it mean to have the odds in your favour? It means winning more on a result than the true odds warrant.

Mathematical expectation is at the heart of every gambling situation.

Bob Stupak, the Vegas World casino owner, has said, “Having one-thousandth of one percent the worst of it, if he plays long enough, that one-thousandth of one percent will bust the richest man in the world.”

In most gambling situations like casino craps and roulette, the odds on any given bet are constant. In others they fluctuate, and mathematical expectation can show you how to evaluate a particular situation.

In blackjack, for instance, to determine the optimal play, mathematicians have calculated your expectation playing a hand one way and your expectation playing it another way. Whichever play gives you a higher positive expectation (maximixing wins)or a lower negative expectation (minimixing losses) is the optimal play.

Hourly Earnings

Your hourly earnings or hourly rate is closely related to expectation, and it is a concept especially important to the professional player. If you play professionally, you should try to assess what you think you can earn per hour. For the most part you will have to base your assessment on your judgement and experience, but you can use certain mathematical guidelines.

Of course, in most games you can’t be precise. Many variables would affect your hourly rate. Furthermore, if you are playing in a public card room or in some private games where the operator takes away commissions, you need to deduct either the house rake or the hourly seat charge. In Las Vegas poker rooms the rake is usually 10 percent of each pot up to a maximum of $4 in the smaller seven-card stud games and 5 percent of each pot
to a maximum of $3 in the larger seven-card stud games, in the Texas hold ’em games, and in most other games. In baccarat, the commissions is 5% on banker won bets.

In the long run a player’s overall win is the sum of his mathematical expectations in individual situations. The more plays you make with a positive expectation, the more money you will make. The more plays you make with a negative expectation, the bigger loser you stand to be. Therefore, you should almost always try to make the play that will maximize your positive expectation or minimize your negative expectation in order to maximize your hourly rate. Once you have decided what your hourly rate is, you should realize that what you are doing is earning.

You are no longer gambling. You should no longer be anxious to have a good day or upset when you have a bad day. If you play regularly, you should simply feel that it is better to be playing making $50 an hour, able to come and go as you please, than to be working an eight-hour shift making $40 an hour.

To think of professional gambling as something glamorous is very bad. You must think that you are just working as a professional player and that you are not particularly anxious about making a big score, If it comes, it comes.

Conversely, you won’t be so upset if you have a big loss. If one comes, it comes. If you are hit, you are hit. You are just playing for a certain hourly rate.

If you have estimated your hourly rate correctly, your eventual winnings will approximate your projected hourly rate multiplied by the total hours played. Your edge comes not from lady luck, system or money management, but from exploiting situations where you have the advantage. The actual advantage would depend on what game you play.

To assume you play perfectly is, of course, a big assumption. Few if any of us play perfectly all of the time, but that is what we strive for.

If you have any question, email me at

soondr@gmail.com

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