The house edge, game by game

A slot whose rules state a return of 96 per cent gives back, on average, $96 of every $100 that passes through it and keeps $4. Those four dollars in a hundred are its "house edge" (the share of every bet that a game keeps over the long run). The "RTP" (the return to player) states the same number from the other side, and every game has one, fixed by its rules before the first bet.

We consider this page the base on which the betting systems section rests (the progressions, the coverages, flat betting and the Kelly criterion), because no system can be judged without the number it is up against, and we have kept it to the figures and to the single formula that turns them into money.

The definition has one subtlety worth knowing. In games where the player may add money during the hand (a double at blackjack, the "call" at Caribbean Stud), the edge is usually expressed per initial bet. The "element of risk" divides the same average loss by everything actually wagered, which gives a lower figure; at Caribbean Stud, in the tables of the Wizard of Odds, the two are 5.22 and 2.56 per cent.

The table, game by game

The table gathers the usual games, from the cheapest to the dearest, with the edge of each when played correctly ("basic strategy" at blackjack, optimal strategy at video poker). We have computed each figure from the rules of the game or checked it against the tables published by the Wizard of Odds (wizardofodds.com), which give the rules behind every number, and the third column says what each of ours assumes.

The house edge of the usual casino games, with correct play and common rules

Game and bet	House edge	What the figure assumes
Craps, odds bet	0%	only added to a pass, don't pass, come or don't come bet
Video poker, Jacks or Better 9/6	0.46%	optimal strategy, return 99.54%
Blackjack, basic strategy	about 0.5%	0.43% on eight decks under Atlantic City rules; a 6:5 payout adds about 1.4 points
Baccarat, banker	1.06%	after the 5% commission
Baccarat, player	1.24%
Roulette, French rules, even-money bets	1.35%	la partage (en prison 1.35% to 1.39%)
Craps, don't pass	1.36%
Craps, pass line	1.41%
Craps, place 6 or 8	1.52%
Casino Hold'em, ante	2.16%	most common pay table, optimal play
Roulette, European single zero	2.70%	every bet
Video poker, Jacks or Better 8/5	2.70%	optimal strategy, return 97.30%
Slots	100% minus the RTP	3% at an RTP of 97%, 4% at 96%, 6% at 94%
Three Card Poker, ante and play	3.37%	usual ante bonus; pair plus 2.32% (pays 1-4-6-30-40) to 7.28% (1-3-6-30-40)
Caribbean Stud, ante	5.22%	per initial bet; element of risk 2.56%
Roulette, American double zero	5.26%	five-number bet 7.89%
Craps, field	5.56%	2 and 12 paid double
Money wheel (Big Six)	11.11% to 24.07%	by segment
Baccarat, tie at 8 to 1	14.36%
Craps, any seven	16.67%
Keno	25% to 29%	typical pay tables

Three observations follow from the table. The first is the spread, from under half a per cent to more than a quarter of every bet, a factor of more than fifty between a hand of video poker played well and a ticket of keno, for games that can sit side by side in the same "lobby" (the menu where a casino lists its games).

The second is that the choice of bet inside a game often matters more than the choice of game. The banker bet at baccarat keeps 1.06 per cent and the "tie" on the same table 14.36, while at craps the "odds" bet keeps nothing and "any seven" (a one-roll bet on a total of seven) keeps one sixth.

The third is that slots have no single figure at all, and their edge is 100 minus the RTP that each game states in its own information panel, which our page on RTP and volatility reads in detail.

Where each game builds its edge

In our reading of the rules, each game builds its edge in its own way, and the mechanism is always written in plain sight. Roulette pays as if the zeros did not exist, and baccarat takes a 5 per cent "commission" on winning banker bets, the hand that wins slightly more often than the player's. Blackjack makes the player act first, so that a hand that "busts" (goes over 21) loses at once, even if the dealer would have busted too.

Craps pays less than the "true odds" (the payout that would make a bet fair), and a place bet on 6, which wins five times for every six losses, pays 7 to 6 instead of 6 to 5, so the house keeps one sixty-sixth of every bet, 1.52 per cent. Video poker writes its edge into the "pay table"; one unit less on the full house and on the flush, from 9/6 to 8/5, costs a little over 2.2 points of return.

Slots set their edge through the pay table and the frequency of each symbol on the "virtual reels" (the reels as the software stores them), both chosen by the designer, and for this reason the figure can only be read in the game, never deduced from what the screen shows.

The formula that sets the bill

The edge says nothing about money until it is multiplied by something, and that something is the whole amount a player sends across the table, the "turnover" (the "handle" in American usage). Hence the one formula of this page: expected loss = house edge × total amount wagered.

The rule follows from a property of averages, since the average result of a series of bets is the sum of the average results of each bet, whatever their order and whatever their size. Two consequences follow from it, and they are the ones that matter when a player sits down at a table. You lose less on average only by wagering less in total (not by betting more cleverly, nor in smaller pieces spread over more spins), and a habit that makes a session last longer at the same stake raises the expected loss instead of lowering it.

The same stake at two speeds

Take a player who bets $5 a spin on a single-zero wheel for one hour. On an RNG table (a game whose results are drawn by software), where the next spin starts as soon as the button is pressed, 300 spins an hour send $1,500 across the table and cost on average $40.54. At a live table, where we assume for the example that a dealer completes 50 spins in the same hour (the studios announce paces nearer 70), the same stake sends $250 and costs $6.76.

Same game, same edge, same stake. Yet one hour costs six times the other! The difference is the turnover alone, and the same arithmetic shows that the size of the stake does not matter in itself, since a player who bets $25 a spin for 60 spins (twelve minutes at the RNG pace) also wagers $1,500 and carries the same expected loss, $40.54, as the player who made 300 bets of $5.

The same $1,500 on other tables

Turnover multiplied by the edge also lets an hour of play be compared across games, which is where the table above becomes a price list. The $1,500 of that hour costs on average $6.90 at Jacks or Better 9/6 played without mistakes, about $7.50 at blackjack with basic strategy, $15.90 on the banker at baccarat, $40.54 on a single-zero wheel, $60 on a slot that returns 96 per cent, $78.95 on a double-zero wheel and $375 at keno with an edge of 25 per cent!

These are averages over many hours, and a single evening can stray far from them in either direction (the more so when the game is volatile); but they are the figures that a long series of evenings converges on, and in our view the only ones a player can plan with.

What the edge does not say

The edge does not predict tonight's result, and how far a session can stray from the average is a question for "volatility" (how widely results spread around that average), not for the edge. It does not change with the order of the bets either, which is the ground on which our betting systems pages are built: a "progression", a "coverage" of many numbers or a "flat" stake changes how the results are spread and, through the size of the stakes, the turnover, never the share kept.

Among those pages, the Kelly criterion gives the most direct reading of this one, because applied to a bet with a negative edge it returns a negative stake; flat betting is the honest point of comparison (the stake that promises nothing). The rules that move the edge inside each game are explained on our pages on roulette, blackjack, baccarat, craps and video poker.

If we had to leave a single figure on this page, it would be the product and not the edge. If you know that an evening at a single-zero wheel will send about $1,500 across the table, you know its price before sitting down, about $40, and you can decide whether the evening is worth it.

Questions

By the Rand Casinos editorial team · Last updated October 2026 · Online since 2007