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Gambling online can be a lot of fun, and its popularity worldwide continues to grow. But for the United States gambler, gambling online can also be fraught with risk. You not only have to worry about losing your money by placing bad bets, but you also have to worry about the company on the other end of your modem.
But educated gamblers can have a lot of fun playing online. They can risk as little or as much money as they want. The trick is being smart about their gambling activities.
The 10 tips in this post are intended to give you options to think about when you decide to gamble online. Not all these options are appropriate for every gambler.
In my first point, I suggest trying play-money games. You can’t lose money on such games, but you’ll never win money this way either.
That’s not an appropriate option for real action junkies like me. I don’t see much point in playing a game where the money is just “Monopoly money.” On the other hand, this option might be perfect for some other players.
The amount of effort in each bullet point varies, too. You might not be willing to put in the work to master basic strategy in blackjack.
But if you are willing to make that effort, you can reduce the real-money cost of your gambling dramatically overnight. It’s hard to beat a house edge of only 0.5%.
Here are 10 ways you can gamble online without losing all your money.
1 – Gamble Online for Play Money, Not Real Money
All online casinos and online poker websites offer both play money and real-money versions of their games. When you play the real-money games, you must deposit money into an account with the site before placing any wagers. If you lose money this way—and you often will—it disappears from your account at the site.
But the operators of these sites are smart. They know that if you try the games without risking any real money, you’ll be more likely to play for real money eventually. So they all offer free money versions of their games so that you can “try before you buy.”
Some sites, too, offer nothing but play-money games. Most of these sites support themselves by serving advertising to their users.
Any kind of casino game and almost any kind of multiplayer poker game can be found in a play-money version online somewhere.
2 – Gamble for Real Money, But Choose a Reputable Site
I can see why many gamblers would have no interest in playing nothing but play-money games. Without risking money, it’s impossible to win money. And winning or losing money is the entire point of gambling.
Since it’s illegal to run an online casino in the United States—at least in most of them—most US citizens are forced to play at offshore sites.
Don’t get me wrong. Just being offshore doesn’t make a company disreputable. But it is easier for a company in another country to obscure the details of their ownership. It’s also a lot harder to get some kind of legal relief if a company in another country takes your money.
You probably don’t need to worry about these sites’ games being rigged. Instead, you should be concerned about the likelihood of being unable to cash out your winnings once you’ve played there a while. Some casinos delay your cash-out requests in the hope that you’ll get tired of waiting and gamble your money away.
To learn more about a gambling site’s reputation, spend some time on some player forums. See what other players have said about their experiences there. Many sites offer blacklists of casinos. You should avoid sites on these blacklists.
You should also stick with gambling websites that are recommended and reviewed by reputable gambling information portals like this one.
3 – Stick with the Games with a Low House Edge
Most people reading this are interested in playing casino games like blackjack, craps, roulette, slot machines, or video poker. All these games have a mathematical edge in favor of the house. You don’t have to worry about these games being rigged in favor of the casino because the casino has no incentive to offer anything but a “fair” game.
The problem is that the payouts on these games aren’t commensurate with the odds of winning. This means that you can win money in the short run. But in the long run, the casino will always win.
The rate at which the casino wins your money in the long run is a function of the house edge, the size of your bets, and the speed with which you play.
Casinos and gamblers measure the house’s long-term advantage with the house edge. That’s a percentage of each bet that the casino expects to win on average over a long period of time.
If a casino game has a house edge of 5.26% (like roulette), the casino expects—in the long run—to win $5.26 every time you bet $100.
It’s obvious that this doesn’t apply to the short term. If you place a single bet at the roulette table, it’s impossible to lose just 5.26% of it. You’ll either lose all of it or win at least even money.
The lower the house edge is, the less likely it is that you’ll lose your money during a gambling session. And in the long run, you’ll lose less money over time with lower house edge games.
Blackjack and video poker offer the lowest house edge, but craps isn’t bad, either. Roulette and slot machines are the games with the highest house edge, and they’re probably best avoided.
4 – Play Poker Games Where You Can Get an Edge over the Other Players
Poker games where you play against other players are an entirely different animal. In a poker game like Texas hold’em or Omaha, you’re not competing with the casino. You’re competing against other players. And since poker is a game of skill, if you’re more skilled than your opponents, you can get an edge over them in the long run.
Think about it this way. If you’re playing in a poker tournament with 9 other players, you have a 10% chance of winning the tournament—but only if you assume that all the other players are equally skilled.
But if you’re twice as good as the other players in the tournament, the probability of winning goes up to 20%.
The sites offering these poker games make their money by taking a percentage of each pot. This percentage is called the rake. Usually, they take about 5% of the pot, with a certain maximum amount.
The implication behind the rake is important, too. If you’re equally skilled as the other players, you’ll lose money slowly over time. Not only do you have to be more skilled than the other poker players at the table, but you must also be skilled enough to compensate for the rake.
5 – Bet on Sports in an Educated Way
Over a decade ago, I read a book called How to Make $100,000 a Year Gambling for a Living by David Sklansky. It was a life-changing and eye-opening experience. One of the most important things I learned from the book is that the biggest opportunity to make money as a professional gambler comes from betting on sports.
It’s not easy to make a profit betting on sports, either, though. Just as casino games have a house edge and poker has a rake, sports betting has a mechanism to transfer your money from your wallet to the sportsbook. This mechanism is called the vig.
At most sportsbooks, you must wager $110 to win $100. And they handicap the games in such a way that when you do so, your probability of winning is almost always 50%.
If you’re wagering $110 to win $100, and if you only win 50% of the time, it’s easy to see how you’ll lose money in the long run. Assume you place 100 bets and win 50% of them. You’ve won $5000, but you’ve also lost $5500. Your net loss is $500.
For one thing, they’ll shop from one sportsbook to another to find opportunities to bet with a lower vig.
For another, they’ll look for profitable situations. The handicappers at the sportsbook aren’t always 100% accurate when they create the point spreads. They’ll also often move the lines in response to the public so that they can get an even amount of money on either side of an event.
Educated gamblers can use these opportunities to make lots of money betting on sports.
6 – Beware of Sign-Up Bonus Terms and Conditions
All online casinos and other gambling sites offer sign-up bonuses to new players. These offers seem like an easy way to get free money, but they’re not as good a deal as most gamblers initially think. Remember, these gambling websites aren’t in the business of giving away money.
Here’s how a sign-up bonus at an online casino usually works:
You deposit a certain amount of money, and the casino offers you bonus money in your account equal to a percentage of that money. They also usually cap the size of that bonus.
A common bonus offer these days is 100% up to $1000 on your first deposit. If you take advantage of this bonus, you would deposit $1000, and the casino would credit your account with an extra $1000, giving you $2000 in your bankroll.
This seems like a no-brainer way to get an edge over the casino.
The first requirement might be that you wager your deposit plus your bonus 25 times before cashing out. This means you’d need to place $50,000 in wagers before cashing out.
The other requirement is that you can only wager this money on slot machines. Since those games have the highest house edge, it doesn’t take long to lose all the money you deposited and all the bonus money, too.
If the house edge for the slot machines at a given casino is 5%, you’re expected to lose $2500 on $50,000 in action. You might get lucky and come out ahead after $50,000 in wagers, but the odds are against it.
7 – Set Strict Bankroll Management Rules for Yourself and Follow Them
If you were paying attention to the other points on this list, you probably noticed that the gambling websites always have a mechanism in place to keep your probability of winning money at less than 50%. The exceptions for expert poker players and sports bettors notwithstanding, the websites have the odds in their favor.
This doesn’t mean you can’t win. In fact, the websites are counting on a percentage of their customers winning in the short run. If they never won, they’d never gamble, and the sites would go out of business.
What this means to you is that if you get ahead, you have to quit and cash out while you’re still ahead if you want to ever walk away a winner.
Most gamblers don’t have the self-discipline to do that. If you keep playing, you’ll inevitably lose all your money if the probability is against you.
Bankroll management experts suggest setting a loss limit and a win goal. Once you’ve lost a certain amount of money (or won a certain amount of money), you quit and cash out. The problem with their suggestion is that some people think it increases their probability of winning.
It doesn’t. It only increases the probability that you’ll walk away a winner occasionally. If you play games where you have a mathematical disadvantage, you’re certain to lose all your money in the long run.
But it’s not much fun thinking about that all the time.
8 – Change How You Define “Winning”
Most people define winning at gambling as walking away with a profit. You can do that some of the time with win goals and a bankroll management strategy. But in the long run, your losses will overtake your wins, and you’ll still wind up broke.
But if you change your definition of winning to include how much fun you have for your money while you play, you can walk away a winner whether you’ve won or lost.
I suggest thinking of gambling as an entertainment expense, like buying a movie ticket or a novel. In fact, the hourly cost of such entertainment can be commensurate or even better than paying for that movie ticket.
An average movie ticket costs $10. That’s $5/hour for your entertainment, assuming a 2-hour movie.
Let’s say you like to play blackjack online for $1/hand. The house edge if you master basic strategy is only 0.5% or so. In an online game, you can probably get in 200 hands per hour.
This means you’re putting $200 per hour into action. Your expected loss on that action is only $1/hour.
Of course, this means keeping the size of your wagers reasonable. Many land-based casinos don’t offer blackjack at such low stakes. And if you play other games with a higher house edge, the cost of your entertainment goes up.
But you also might enjoy casino gambling more than watching a movie, in which case it’s okay to lose $10 or more per hour on average over time.
9 – Explore Non-Traditional Gambling Activities, Like Day Trading
To this point, I’ve focused on traditional gambling activities like casino games, poker, and sports betting. But many people enjoy other ways of getting their money into action. And some of those activities, like day trading, are completely legal.
I have a friend who’s an admitted gambling addict. I’m not judging him, but he spends a lot of his day trading stocks these days. He thinks he’s really good at it because he’s making a lot of profit every day.
But here’s the thing:
We’re in a bull market right now, and everyone’s making money. And the stock market prices are also more volatile than usual because of the uncertainty about the economy under our current political regime.
When things settle down, my gambling addict friend might start losing money in the stock market. I hope that he doesn’t, because I like him.
But there’s no getting around the fact that he’s gambling on the stock market. It’s not exactly the same as gambling on a slot machine or a game of blackjack, but it’s closer than he’d like.
I also have friends who enjoy trading in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. That’s becoming a popular deposit method for online casinos, but it’s such a volatile financial instrument that you can probably have a lot of fun betting one way or the other on the price of Bitcoin.
Forex is another popular but non-traditional gambling activity where you bet on the comparative values of foreign currencies.
10 – Network with Some of Your Gambler Friends via Email or Other Software, But Be Really Careful
Nothing prevents you from gambling on sports with your buddies. People do it all the time by setting up office pools of various kinds. You can expand the number of people participating in these activities with you through clever use of email and message boards.
But be careful. The Wire Act is a federal law that makes it illegal to place bets over the phone. For the purposes of enforcing this legislation, communications over the internet count.
If you’re not setting things up to make a profit, and if you’re sticking with just personal acquaintances, your risk level is low.
But once you start setting up pools and games where you stand to make a guaranteed profit when compared to the other competitors, your risk level skyrockets.
If you set up a football pool with squares, but you keep a 5% commission, you’re running an illegal gambling operation—especially if you’re conducting this business over the internet.
Some people might be concerned about gambling with offshore businesses, but your risk with those companies (legally, anyway) are minimal compared to what might happen if you start running your own online gambling business.
I don’t give legal advice in my blog, but I recommend caution if you go this route.
Conclusion
Those are my 10 suggestions for how to gamble online without losing all your money. Some of these suggestions are more appropriate for some gamblers than others. Some of them just involve becoming educated about your gambling activities before getting started on them.
My favorite online gambling activities involve playing blackjack with perfect basic strategy and playing poker with players who aren’t as skilled as I am. I have friends who have an ongoing love affair with betting on sports, too. To each their own.
The main thing to remember is that you need to control yourself and make the best decisions you can when you’re gambling online. Don’t gamble with money you can’t afford to lose, because, with rare exceptions, the odds are always against you—no matter what kind of online gambling you prefer.
The safest way to avoid losing money when gambling online is to stick with the play-money games. I don’t think they’re much fun because you can’t win any real money at most of those games. I have friends who can’t get enough of the free games, though, so they might be a great option for you.
All these gambling decisions are highly individual. Only you know what your goals are and how you can best achieve them.
