The reason: it is not a gamble.
“If you want to find the answer, look for the rules the casino is broken”
When you go to play a casino, you expect to lose. Or you should. But if you really look for the reasons why the casino wins, they are few and far between.
If you want to find the answer, look for the rules the casino is broken. They always win by making the tables harder for non-gamblers. They always take in less money than they earn on the tables.
In one casino, at the height of its success as a casino operator, the casino was paid at 20% of the rake, and it gave up more than half of that rake every month to the owner of the casino—to be spent on the employees, the slot machines, the rooms. This is because it needed to maintain some semblance of an operating margin, and to pay the owners a minimum of $60k for each slot machine the operators played, and $90k for each floor table that they owned. The difference was huge.
How did they manage to make it happen in the first place?
First, the casinos need to manage in a way that no one ever gets rich. If casinos want to get as much money out as possible, they must get at least a certain percentage of their revenue from “sloppy” people, like you and me, so the other people won’t complain to their friends, and the next person who decides you should give them a cut of their profits will be as well-off as everyone else.
The first step in that is to make sure that the rules are enforced to ensure that this does not happen: to make sure that people who have bad days don’t go to the casino, or that the games were played with the worst odds. The rules also have to be enforced to ensure that nobody is paid more than another, and that no one is paid less than the other, so that everyone can stay in and out, without getting a huge cut from the casino.
Then there are the rules of the game. These require that everyone in the casino can win if they play well, because in order for someone to lose they have to lose, and the casino is there just to make money.
These are the basic rules of the game—and they were adopted at a time when casinos themselves were struggling with a tough business model:
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