Pretty Fair Bets

If you are looking to stretch your gambling dollars as far as possible, there are several things to consider. The one we are going to discuss tonight is the house advantage on the bets you place. You want that number to be as low as possible and there are several good options to consider. We briefly mentioned blackjack and video poker and those are generally pretty good games. That being said, many of the lower limit blackjack tables now only pay 6:5 on a blackjack instead of 3:2. The best blackjack games, with proper strategy can have a house edge of only about 0.5% but the 6:5 game can have more than a 2% edge and that number can rise to 4 or 5% if you don’t play basic strategy. It does take a little practice to learn basic strategy but it isn’t difficult and they even sell laminated strategy cards as a reference. Unless you play head to head on one of those blackjack machines, it is a social game and people do sometimes get upset if others don’t make the “right” play. Video Poker, on the other hand, is a marvelously antisocial game, just you against the machine. It isn’t hard to find a game with a 2 or 3% house edge and, in some cases, ones with less than a 1% house edge but, once again, that assumes you know proper strategy. Playing a simple game like Jacks or Better or Bonus Poker is the best way to start as the strategy is fairly simple. A quick search online will yield the basics. Games with large four of a kind bonuses, wild cards or other gimmicks are more difficult to learn but almost any video poker machine, even played badly, has a better return than most any slot machine. Still, these games do take a little skill. Tomorrow we look at two more pretty fair bets that require none at all.