How do Vegas Casinos Make Money?
Play slot machines for free without registration. Casino credit line. Online casino with real money no deposit bonus. Online casinos reviews. Best casino strategy, tips and tricks. Make money online casino. Baba wild slots casino free coins. Make money online casinos. Live online casino uk. New casino games online. How to make money in casino. Mar 25, 2020 The Maths – How Casinos Make Money. Let's say that we are playing a game of flip the coin, and because we're fun people we're also betting on it. If we bet £1 a throw. I win £1 and you lose £1 if the coin comes up heads. You win £1 and I lose £1 if the coin comes up tails. That is what we call a fair game.
The answer seems obvious right? Gambling. Hell, I just lost $200 at the craps table last week. Vegas casinos are ornate palaces. And those palaces are funded by people that get a kick out of feeding machines and chasing royal flushes.
What about all the 'fringe' activities though? The dining, night clubs,hotel, shows, retail ,etc. Are they simply a draw to get us in the door as a loss leader or do they contribute to the casino's bottom line as well. To answer the question, I dug into MGM Resorts 2016 financial report.
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See Also:77 free things to do in Vegas. A complete list!
For those unfamiliar, MGM owns a number of properties in Las Vegas to include MGM Grand, Luxor, Bellagio, Excalibur, Circus Circus, Monte Carlo, New York New York, Mirage and Mandalay Bay. The accounting that I am looking at does include some non-Vegas properties as well, however, still provides a solid revenue and profitability snapshot.
Below is a high-level overview of MGM's revenue per category or, simply put, what customers spent per activity before MGM deducted out expenses.
Casino revenue is defined as what the casino 'won' over the year after paying out players. 'Other Income' would be defined as income made outside of MGM's core business (Example: Rented out excess warehouse space not being used to another, unrelated, organization).
Revenue per Category:
As you look at Revenue generated by MGM, it's no secret that the Casino is king accounting for 48% of money coming in. Hotel rooms and Food/Beverage come in as the second two largest generators accounting for 20% and 16% of the company's revenue in 2016 respectively.
When you take the revenue per category and subtract out the expenses incurred, you can get a nice, simplistic, high level picture of what the casino profits off of each category.
Although other categories carry some weight for MGM, the Casino still nets almost as much money as the rest of the categories combined at $2.2 billion dollars in net profit vs. $2.5 billion dollars net by room sales, entertainment, food/beverage and 'other' combined.
There are additional expenses that eat away at MGM's bottom line that aren't directly attributable to one of the revenue categories above such as corporate expenses ($313 million dollars in 2016), administrative expenses ($1.4 billion in 2016), etc, however, the info above should give you a good idea of where Las Vegas casino revenue and profits are coming from. What's clear is that although money generated from gaming is important, it's not the only show in town.
As MGM Resort's hotels provide the second-largest profitability and revenue punch I thought it would be cool to take a look at which of their Vegas properties command the highest rates and sport the highest occupancy.
There are 3 main terms you will want to know:
- Occupancy Rate – What percentage of rooms were occupied.
- ADR – Average Daily Rate – What did people pay on average per night.
- REVPAR – Revenue per Available Room – What the average nightly revenue was per room available (whether occupied or not). Basically, your nightly hotel revenue divided by total # of rooms.
Not surprisingly, Bellagio topped MGM's charts for Average Daily Rate in 2016 at $278. Bellagio was also 91% occupied and had a Revenue per available room of $246 per night.
Circus Circus came in with the lowest Average Daily Rate at $83 and was 81.6% occupied. CC Las Vegas had a Revenue per available room of $68.
New York-New York notched the highest occupancy of MGM's casino/hotel portfolio at 95.1% occupancy with an ADR of $141.
According to the UNLV Center for Gaming Research, it's important to keep Gamblers captive overnight as in 2016 guests drove the following average revenue per room daily (all Vegas casinos – not just MGM):
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Pit Revenue: $96.48
Slot Revenue: $105.83
Food Sales: $98.11
Beverage Sales: $43.73
In summation, it's clear that Casino revenues in Las Vegas are king but there are other key drivers of resort profitability to include entertainment options, dining along with the property's hotel. These fringe services are becoming a more important piece of the profitability picture as Millenials shy away from gambling and seek 'experiences'. More properties are getting creative with revenue drivers and rightfully so. For instance, you can now hunt zombies in Virtual Reality at the MGM Grand or play Twilight Zone Mini Golf at Bally's. You also can't walk 15 feet in Vegas without tripping over a damn zipline attraction.
Gambling will remain the core but there is certainly a shift in Vegas toward new and innovative dining and entertainment options.
On a final and unrelated note, as of the end of 2016, MGM logged an 'Outstanding Chip Liability' of over $227 million. Which one of you guys is hoarding all the chips? Cash those bastards in!
Check out our other piece – Could Circus Circus be the next Las Vegas implosion?
Feature Image: ©F11 via canva.com
Almost every online casino has some sort of welcome bonus to help try and persuade you to sign up and use their website rather than their competitors. With a little bit of thought and cleverness, we can take these new-player casino bonuses and convert them into withdrawable cash.
But before we delve into casino bonuses, let's talk about sportsbook bonuses. Making money from them is known as matched betting and is pretty easy and may be where you started off?
But right now because of the COVID-19 coronavirus most sports aren't running so there aren't that many matched betting offers available. But to try and keep customers casinos are offering better bonuses than normal. Now is a great time to try some casino bonus bagging – especially as we all need to make some more money!
Contents
Unlike Matched Betting, Casino Bonus Bagging Isn't Risk Free
Unlike matched betting, making money from casino bonuses is not risk-free. But that doesn't mean that they can't be profitable and worth doing.
We call this notion EV (expected value). By using maths we can work out how much money we will make on average from the bonus. So why is that not risk-free? Because of variance. Each time we make a slightly different amount, but over the long term it averages to the EV.
If you understand what I mean then feel free to skip straight to the how casino bonuses work section.
Note: this can get quite complicated. If you want someone to explain it to you one-to-one then Oddsmonkey have an onboarding coach who will hold your hand when you sign up to their £17.99 a month service.
The Maths – How Casinos Make Money
Let's say that we are playing a game of flip the coin, and because we're fun people we're also betting on it.
If we bet £1 a throw.
- I win £1 and you lose £1 if the coin comes up heads.
- You win £1 and I lose £1 if the coin comes up tails.
That is what we call a fair game.
There is risk – we could play 100 flips and I might lose money, or I might win money. But either way, it is just down to luck. Statistically, I am not more likely to win than to lose.
There is a 50% chance of me winning each throw, and a 50% chance of me losing each throw.
That is not what it is like in a casino. The casino has an edge.
Let's change the rules slightly:
- I win £1 and you lose £1 if the coin comes up heads.
- You win £1.10 and I lose £1.10 if the coin comes up tails.
That is not a fair a game.
There is still risk – we could play 100 flips and I might make money. But I am more likely to lose.
On each coin toss I expect to lose 5p. We use this word 'expect' a lot when it comes to making money from casino bonuses. It means the average in the long-term.
Here is a very simple tree showing you how we worked out that expected loss of 5p.
(0.5 x £1) + (0.5 x -£1.10) = -£0.05
That number becomes what is called the house edge. For every £1 we bet we expect to lose 5p.
If we play 1,000 flips, I will have bet £1,000 and expect to lose £50 (1,000 x 5p).
The More We Play The Closer To Expected We Get
Now we get a bit more complicated. The longer I play, the more likely I am to lose money.
I am not going to explain the maths here (email me if you want to know), but over 1 coin flip my chance of walking away with a profit is 50%. The coin can either come up heads or tails.
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Over 100 coin flips my chance of making a profit has dropped to 31.7%, that's almost a 1/3rd chance which still is quite high. I might decide that I'm feeling especially lucky and take that 1/3rd chance. But over 6,000 coin flips my chance of leaving with a profit drops only 1%.
That is how a casino makes money. If there are 60 people playing at your casino and each plays the coin flip game 100 times, then each person has a 31.7% chance of leaving with a profit. But as the casino is playing 6,000 total flips it only has a 1% chance of not making a profit overall. A pretty clever business model.
What Are The House Edges Of Different Casino Games?
Now you can't actually play our coin flip game in a casino so let's apply this concept to two real casino games.
Roulette. Is a very basic game which almost everyone understands.
There are 36 numbers not including the zero. Of those 36 – 18 are red and 18 are black. The number zero is not red or black. Each time the wheel spins there is an equal chance that the ball will land on any of the numbers 0 – 36.
If you bet on red and it comes up, you win your stake back. So a £1 bet would win £1.
There is an 18 out of 37 chance of a red colour coming up. That means that you have a 48.6% chance of winning, and a 51.4% chance of losing.
Let's draw that same tree we did earlier but this time for roulette:
(0.486 x £1) + (0.514 x -£1) = -£0.028
For ever £1 bet we expect to lose 2.8p. That's the house edge.
That's pretty low. But roulette is not the casino game with the lowest house edge. That award goes to….
Blackjack. Forget card counting or anything you've seen in the films, your basic blackjack is the casino game with the smallest house edge.
There are many different rule sets for blackjack, and the house edge depends both on those rules and also on how close to perfect strategy the player is playing. But most games of blackjack have a house edge of about 0.5p per £1 bet (0.5%).
Let's just think about that, 0.5%. That's so low! It's the equivalent of playing the coin flip game with the rules:
- I win £1 and you lose £1 if the coin comes up heads.
- You win £1.01 and I lose £1.01 if the coin comes up tails.
If we played 1,000 hands of blackjack at £1 a bet, we would have staked £1,000 and expect to lose just £5.
How Casino Bonuses Work
Thank you for sitting through all of that. Now that the basics are out the way let's talk about the juicy stuff. How we can actually make some money from casino bonuses.
Just like with matched betting, most casinos offer new players an incentive to sign up and play at their casino.
Unfortunately, unlike with matched betting, there is no way we can hedge out our bets. But we can use this knowledge of the house edge to turn things in our favour. Provided the bonus is good, we can expect to make money.
Let's take a look at one bonus that is currently offered by William Hill on their live casino.
To get the bonus, we need to deposit £25 and then place a series of bets that total at least £200. When we have reached that target and we contact customer service, a bonus of £25 will be added which we are then free to withdraw along with whatever is left of our initial deposit.
How We Make Money From Casino Bonuses
£200 sounds like a lot, but after what we've learnt about house edges and blackjack it shouldn't sound so bad. Remember blackjack has a house edge of 0.5%.
Over £200 staked we expect to lose only £1. That means we expect to keep £24 of the bonus!
This is what we expect to happen.
- We deposit £25 into William Hill Live casino.
- We place 200 £1 bets. At the end, we have lost £1 and have £24 left.
- A £25 bonus is added to our balance.
- We withdraw our balance of £49 (£24+£25).
- We have made a profit of £24.
But, there is risk.
There is a chance we will lose more than just £1. There is even a chance of us losing more money than the bonus is worth. If we use up all of that £25 we would need to deposit more in order to finish the staking.
We won't go into the maths on variance. But understand this. Blackjack has a house edge of 0.5% and a standard deviation of 1.15.
That means that at a £1 bet size there is a 95% chance we will make somewhere between £7.75 and £40.25. But it also means there is a 7% chance of making a small loss.
That is the essence of making money from casino bonuses. You are simply moving the odds to your favour.
Websites like Oddsmonkey and Profit Accumulator (more on them later) have calculators for working out your variance and house edge from different casino games. They also have strategy calculators to help you play the games optimally.
Whew. So after all that explaining, the actual steps were very simple.
But we had to go into all that details because it will enable you to look at more advanced offers and take advantage of them as well. Every casino bonus has different terms and you need to be able to work out what strategy to follow to get the highest ‘expected profit' or ev from the bonus.
Which brings us on to the hardest part of making money from casino bonuses.
Where To Find The Best Casino Bonuses
You can only do that William Hill Live casino offer once, so to continue making money you need to find some more offers.
And the unfortunate truth is for more casino bonuses it is not profitable to make money from them. You need to find the diamonds in the rough.
You can do this in exactly the same way as you would when sports matched betting. And in fact, if you have done matched betting before you will probably already know the following two choices:
- Look through casino terms and conditions manually.
95% of people pay for a service. Compared to the EV you can make the services are cheap, they give you a curated list of offers to work through, and they point out any dangerous loopholes in the terms and conditions.
My two favourite paid for services for casino bonuses are:
- Profit Accumulator. Free for your first few bonuses, then £19.99 a month.
- Oddsmonkey. Free for your first few bonuses, £19.99 a month.
Nowadays they are both pretty similar with largely the same offers but different communities, website feel and customer service. They each have free accounts you can try out so I suggest signing up to both and then choosing which one you like the most.
Note: this can get quite complicated. If you want someone to explain it to you one-to-one then Oddsmonkey have an onboarding coach who will hold your hand when you sign up to their £19.99 a month service.
There Are Lots Of Different Types Of Casino Bonuses
Wow what a beast of a post!
Let's just finish on saying that there are lots of different types of casino bonuses and all have slightly different best ways to exploit them.
By now you should understand the concept of expectedvalue and therefore making money from casino bonuses. You have a guide to tackle your first bonus and you have plenty of resources to help you research and find new offers. Good luck!
USEFUL LINKS
- More details on casino wagering requirements.
- My summer betting diary where I made £250 a week throughout the summer holidays.
FAQ
What happens if I lose all of the £25 before completing the wagering requirement??
This is a very real risk and is also the reason why there is a chance of losing a small amount of money while completing the wagering requirement.
What you need to do is to deposit more money and finish the betting.
I hear people talking about ‘sticky' bonuses or doubling up. What does that mean?
You should really join a forum and start asking people there. You are getting into some quite complicated areas with the potential to lose some large amounts of money if you make a mistake.
But in short: A sticky bonus is one that you can never withdraw. You can only withdraw the winnings. This means that the tactics we spoke about earlier don't work. Doubling up is a technique to make money from them. You basically bet the whole bonus on red on roulette. If the bet wins you withdraw the winnings. If you lose you've lost the bonus which you couldn't withdraw anyway.
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What are the house odds of some other casino games?
- Baccarat – 1.06%
- 3-card Poker – 2.01%
- Craps – 0.34%
- French Roulette (you get 50% of your stake back if it lands on 0) – 1.35%
- American Roulette (two 0s) – 5.26%
- Slots – 3-10%. Average is about 5%.
Can I card count online blackjack?
No, you cannot. Card counting relies on the contents of the remaining cards changing as the rounds go on. In online blackjack the cards are shuffled every hand so the contents don't change. You can do it with live blackjack – but I believe they shuffle regularly to make it more difficult. I have never tried.
I have a question that is not answered here?
Drop me an email at hello@sampriestley.com and I will do my best to get back to you.
Can you make money from casino bonuses while self-isolating or under quarantine?
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Yes you can! It is actually a very good time to do it because you can do every step of the offer from your home.
