18 of those results were black, while the other 18 were red, and so on. It had 38 possible results, 2 of which were green (the 0 and the 00). It was a standard American roulette wheel on the giant TV screen above the table.

I have no reason to think that the probability of the underlying game had changed. The dealer scans the playing card into a machine, then the animated roulette wheel spins and lands on the space that corresponds to the card that was dealt. The roulette games at the Winstar Casino don’t work that way. When you hit the “spin” or “bet” button at an online casino, the RNG stops on whatever number it’s “thinking of” at that millisecond. That’s a computer program that generates thousands of numbers per second. That wasn’t THAT weird for me I’ve played at plenty of online casinos that did the same thing.īut the online casinos use a random number generator program to produce their roulette results. There’s an animated roulette wheel that drives the results. The first weird thing about playing roulette at the Winstar Casino is that they don’t have an actual roulette wheel. How the Roulette Ante Affects the House Edge They could easily be the difference between a winning session and a losing session. This has the obvious effect of costing you the amount of the fee multiplied by the number of bets you make. The casinos love to use euphemisms to make a bad deal seem slightly better, and using the word “ante” instead of “fee” is just an example of this.

It would be more accurate to describe this so-called “ante” as a fee for playing a hand of blackjack or for betting on a spin of the roulette wheel. In the Native American casinos in Oklahoma, it’s an amount you put up in addition to your bet that the house keeps whether you win, lose, or push. What’s an Ante?Īn ante is a forced bet, usually in poker, that drives action to the game. Calculate the house edge for the table games I played at the Winstar Casino, accounting for the antes. I had a math teacher in high school who insisted that I “show my work.” But this was the first time I’d spent much time at the tables paying that ante on every hand of blackjack and every spin of the roulette wheel.īeing a gambling writer who’s especially interested in the math behind the games, I started thinking about how to quantify what this ante does to the house edge. I knew in a vague way that the Winstar ( like other Oklahoma casinos) charges an ante when you place a bet. We started with roulette and went on to play blackjack. We didn’t have much fun at the slots, which seemed tight, so we decided to try the table games. I’ve never really done much gambling there besides playing poker. On Sunday night, I took a date to the Winstar Casino in Oklahoma to do some gambling.

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