7 Las Vegas Gambling Mistakes You're Almost Certain to Make

I'm just a regular guy who enjoys gambling in Las Vegas. I've spent years visiting Las Vegas and playing casino games. I've won and lost a lot of money.

After all of that experience, I've realized that much of what's written on the Internet about Las Vegas gambling leads to mistakes—big mistakes that cost you more money than you realize.

I've listed and explained the 7 Las Vegas gambling mistakes you're most likely making below.

1. You are staying at the incorrect casinos and hotels

This error is likely to be made by everyone, but for different reasons. If you're a luxury traveler who only stays at one resort in town, you're probably wasting money by not taking advantage of some of the specials available at the other resorts. On the other hand, you could be a cheapskate who only stays in fleabags, not realizing that you can get a better property for the same price.

You could be someone who only visits Vegas on weekends. That's a big mistake, because room rates skyrocket on Friday and Saturday nights.

However, staying midweek does not guarantee you the best rate. If you are traveling during a convention, the mid-week rates may be even higher than the typical weekend rates.

You're making a mistake by not paying enough attention to detail and putting in enough effort in your planning.

The more flexible you can be about where and when you stay, the more value you'll get for your money.

This requires a little more planning ahead of time, but it pays off, especially if you're staying for 4 or 5 nights.

Do your homework.

Shop around for not only hotels, but also dates.

Other interesting ways to save money on your hotel stay can also be found. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, you can save up to 74% on your hotel stay by purchasing other people's unused hotel reservations. These offers can be found on RoomerTravel.com.

2. You are overpaying for air travel

Most people do not think as much about their airline tickets as they do about their casino/hotel stay.

However, by following a few simple guidelines, you can significantly reduce your airfare costs:

According to Hopper.com, the best time to get the best deal on airline tickets is 14 days before your arrival. They claim that booking at least two weeks in advance will save you $200.

However, it turns out that booking further in advance does not save much more money.

Why are airline prices structured this way?

It all comes down to supply and demand. The longer you wait to book your tickets, the fewer options there will be. The airline can charge a higher price for those tickets.

Consider the following:

Assume you own the world's smallest airline and only have one plane with 100 seats.

For the sake of simplicity, let's also pretend that you only have one flight per day.

This means that you can sell anywhere from 0 to 100 tickets on any given day.

If it's Friday and you have a flight scheduled for Monday with 50 unsold tickets, you're probably going to lower the prices.

You want those seats to be full.

The airline pays the same price for the flight whether or not the seats are full.

The process for pricing these tickets is the same as the process for pricing hotel rooms. A lower supply means a higher price.

This is known as revenue management.

Flying to Vegas on a Sunday and returning on a Tuesday can also save you money. Supply and demand have the same reasons. Most people take time off over the weekend, but even if they don't, they don't usually take time off at the start of the week.

Because fewer people are traveling on those dates, the rates are lower to encourage more activity.

The cheapest months to visit Las Vegas are August and October.

If you want to get the best deal on airfare, book two weeks in advance, depart on a Sunday, return on a Tuesday, and travel in August or October.

3. You're overspending on tourist attractions

Some people travel to Las Vegas solely to gamble. Others enjoy gambling and drinking. There are also degenerates who come to Sin City to gamble, drink, and visit strip joints. (I don't pass judgment.)

However, the majority of visitors to Las Vegas are also there to see some of the attractions.

These attractions, like airfare and hotel rooms, can be expensive or inexpensive.

One of the simplest ways to save money on Las Vegas attractions is to stick with those that don't cost much to begin with.

Vegas.com provides a list of 20 things to see and do in Vegas for less than $20. The Mobster Museum, the Neon Graveyard, and Brooklyn Bowl are among the attractions on that list.

However, there are also lists of free things to do in Las Vegas. Over 30 free attractions in the city are listed by Travel and Leisure.

I recommend you save that link.

That way, even if you lose all of your money at the craps table, you'll have something to do for the rest of your vacation. Being broke in Vegas differs from being broke in other cities. There is still plenty to do.

4. You are overspending on transportation

You don't just arrive in Las Vegas and look for a place to stay. You'll also need to get to and from the airport.

Most places in Vegas, including those on the Strip, are too far away to walk.

Cab fare can be very expensive.

However, this is not a requirement for getting around.

According to TripAdvisor, you can get a 24-hour bus pass in Las Vegas for only $8.

And, contrary to what most people think, Las Vegas' bus system is much more convenient and easy to use than you might think.

The Strip has two bus routes:

1. The Deuce - This route runs 24 hours a day and stops at almost every hotel on the Strip every 12 to 30 minutes.

2. The Strip & Downtown Express - This route runs from 9 a.m. to half past midnight. It usually runs every 12 to 15 minutes, though it runs less frequently in the morning. This bus can take you to and from Downtown and the Strip.

Maybe the bus isn't for you, but the price is hard to beat.

Another option for getting around is to stay somewhere that is within walking distance of many of the things you want to do.

I enjoy staying in the downtown area. Glitter Gulch has everything within walking distance.

The Strip, on the other hand, is much longer than you might think, particularly in the summer.

However, many hotels and casinos remain centrally located near many attractions. In fact, I like Planet Hollywood because of its location.

5. You spend far too much money on food

In Las Vegas, you don't have to spend a lot of money on food. In fact, most casinos offer free meals to those who gamble even a little. It may only be breakfast in the coffee shop, but that's a meal I never skip.

According to Vegas Solo, the best way to save money when dining in Vegas is to avoid the restaurants on the Strip. They even provide a list of some of the best meals in town for those on a tight budget. Some examples are:

1. Ellis Island is a classic Vegas budget meal. Any time of day, you can get a steak dinner for $6.99.

2. Market Street Café in California is another example of a classic penny-on-the-dollar meal in Las Vegas. There is a $7.95 prime rib special available there.

3. The Earl of Sandwich on Planet Hollywood offers breakfast sandwiches for $4.

Another way to save money on food is to eat during happy hour. Yes, most people associate happy hour with cheap drinks, but why worry about drink prices when you can drink for free simply by sitting in front of a slot machine?

No, happy hour is a fantastic way to get cheap food. Many of the restaurants that serve food during happy hour have meals for $6 or $7. Culinary Dropout is recommended by Vegas.com from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday. For $6, you can get grilled cheese sliders and meat loaf sandwiches.

Tacos are $4 at Diablo's Cantina, and happy hour is from 3pm to 7pm seven days a week. As a true Texan, I enjoy tacos and don't mind paying $4 for them.

6. You're wasting your money by gambling

There is plenty of information on the Internet about how to get the best odds when gambling, but what most of these sites fail to mention is that...

If you play ANY casino game for a long enough period of time, the house will eventually win all of your money. That is mathematically certain.

Clever gambling writers advise thinking of casino games as an entertainment expense, and there's a lot to be said for that. However, most do not go into enough detail about how to estimate the cost of a specific casino game.

Here's how you do it:

To begin, understand that the house edge is a good estimate of how much of each bet you'll lose when playing your favorite casino games in the long run.

Here's an illustration:

The house edge in roulette is 5.26%. If you bet $100 per spin, you should expect to lose $5.26 on average.

That, however, is an average over a long period of time—hundreds, if not thousands, of spins.

No one would play a gambling game where they could bet $100 and win $94.74 every time.

But if you play long enough, that will be your outcome.

But here's what happens in the short run:

You either lose your entire bet or win a multiple of it in the extreme short run (a single bet).

A Roulette Exemplification:

An even-money bet is the simplest example (red or black, odd or even, high or low). If you win, you receive the amount of your wager.

If you win one spin on a $100 bet, you win $100. However, if you lose, you will lose your $100 bet. Neither of those scenarios comes close to the expectation of losing $5.26 on that bet.

But suppose you make 38 consecutive bets and land on every slot on the wheel. In that situation, how much will you win and how much will you lose?

The wheel has 38 slots available to you. Two of them are green, eighteen are red, and eighteen are black. Assume you always place your bets on black (as Wesley Snipes suggests). You will win your bet 18 times and lose it 20 times.

The 18 winning bets will net you $1800. The 20 losing bets will cost you $2000. You have a net loss of $200 ($2000 - $1800).

If you divide $200 by the total number of bets (38), you'll find that you lost $5.26 per bet on average.

Of course, even if you place 38 consecutive bets, you will not get mathematically perfect results. The same number will appear twice or three times. Some numbers will not appear at all.

The Law of Large Numbers:

The law of large numbers comes into play here. The more you play, the more your results will resemble the mathematical expectation.

However, knowing how much you expect to lose per bet does not tell you how much the entertainment costs. You must also assess a few other factors.

One way to think about entertainment costs is to consider how much time you've spent being entertained.

For example, if you pay $7.99 for a novel with 600 pages that takes 10 hours to read, you've spent about 80 cents per hour to be entertained.

Most people would agree that this is inexpensive entertainment.

If you go to a two-hour movie for $9, your entertainment cost is $4.50 per hour.

A gambling game can be used to approximate the same calculation.

Average Bets per Hour in Casino Games:

You simply need to know how many bets per hour you will place on average.

This varies depending on the game:

• Baccarat at a full table = 15 bets per hour

• Blackjack at a full table = 50 bets per hour

• Blackjack one-on-one with the dealer = 250 bets per hour

• Craps = 100 bets per hour

• Mini Baccarat one-on-one = 200 bets per hour

• Roulette = 40 bets per hour

• Slot machines or video poker = 600 bets per hour

Once you know how many bets you make per hour, you can multiply that by how much you bet per bet to determine how much money you put into action each hour. Multiply that number by the house edge to get your hourly expected loss.

Here’s an example:

You're playing one-on-one blackjack with a dealer for $100 per hand, and the house edge is 0.5%. 250 hands per hour times $100 equals $25,000 in action per hour.

Your hourly loss is expected to be 0.5% of that, or $125 per hour.

Let's say you're playing craps and only betting on the pass line. That bet has a 1.41% house edge. A bet of $100 multiplied by 100 bets per hour equals $10,000 in action per hour.

$141 per hour is 1.41% of that.

In this case, craps is only slightly more expensive than blackjack, but consider this:

Not everyone who believes they are good at basic blackjack strategy is. This 0.5% is based on perfect basic strategy.

Assume you're not good at basic strategy and make enough mistakes to give the house a 1% edge. That is, in fact, not uncommon.

Your hourly expected loss at one-on-one blackjack is now $250, which is significantly higher than at the craps table.

The beauty of that craps bet is that it requires no strategic thinking at all.

How do these table games' hourly expected losses compare to slot machines?

Most people will not put $100 on a single slot machine, but let's say you're willing to play for $5 per spin. That's $3000 in hourly action at 600 spins per hour.

The house edge on slots, on the other hand, varies. It's most likely at least 5%, but more likely in the 7% range.

However, there is no way to determine the house edge for a slot machine.

At 5%, $3000 equals $150 per hour; at 7%, it equals $210 per hour.

Even if your bet on the slot machine is only 5% of what you bet on the table games, your expected hourly loss is still in the $150 - $250 range.

Of course, you can change any of these variables to lower your hourly expected loss.

For example, if you played that slot machine half as fast, you'd only lose $75 or $105 per hour.

If you take a 15-minute break at the blackjack table every hour, you'll save about $30 per hour playing blackjack.

You could also play blackjack at a full table, which would result in fewer hands per hour.

You can also bet less, but doing so reduces the excitement factor.

Consider the following:

Assume you're playing roulette for a penny per spin and only betting on single numbers. These wagers pay out at 35 to 1.

How excited are you about winning 35 cents?

Consider the thrill of winning $3500 on a $100 bet.

How do you figure out how much to bet?

I like a concept I read about in John Vorhaus's book Poker Night. He was writing about how to set the stakes in a poker game, but the concept is applicable to casino games as well.

He suggests establishing a "gulp limit."

The idea is that you buy in for an amount that would make you gag if you lost that much money in your wallet.

This amount varies according to your temperament and financial situation.

Some people may swallow hard if they lose a wallet containing $5.

Others may not notice if they lose a wallet containing $500.

The point is that gambling is meaningless unless there is a significant amount of money at stake.

I'd be bored out of my mind after an hour of playing penny slots.

But if I increase my bet per spin to $5, I'm much more interested.

Common sense is also required.

If you're struggling to make your $1000 rent payment each month, you have no business sitting at the blackjack table and betting $100.

A bad streak at the blackjack table could wipe you out in less than 5 minutes.

That is not amusement.

That's complete nonsense.

7. You've Been Accepted into the Players Club

Almost every other gambling writer in the world will tell you that you should always join the casino's players club.

And, yes, there are benefits to joining the players' club.

You receive a small percentage of your total purchases back in the form of rebates and freebies.

Here's what you get in exchange for those meager rebates:

Privacy.

That may not seem like a big deal, but consider it. You have entities with vast sums of money tracking every penny you spend while gambling.

When tracking that spend, their goal is to figure out which marketing buttons to push to get you to spend more money.

The casino can use this information to send you hyper-targeted direct mail ads to get you to come more often than you would otherwise.

This means you'll be spending more money on gambling than you would otherwise.

And if this type of marketing weren't profitable (extremely profitable), the casino wouldn't offer any rebates.

Consider the following scenario:

In Las Vegas, you visit a casino four times a year. You spend an average of two days there per trip, and you gamble for four hours each day.

The casino expects you to lose $500 per trip, or $2,000, four times a year.

They can tell by your actions, however, that you enjoy playing Wheel of Fortune slots.

They can tell because this is by far the most popular game among slot machine players. As a result, they decide to hold a slot machine tournament with that game on dates that you would not normally visit.

They send you invitations to the tournament via mail.

You decide to make an extra trip to Vegas for the tournament, resulting in a $500 loss that year.

This is not a large sum of money for many people.

However, it is a significant sum of money for the average American. In the United States, the average annual salary is around $50,000.

Gambling losses of $2500 per year amount to 2.5% of that person's annual income.

That doesn't include the cost of traveling to and from Vegas, as well as the cost of staying there.

Let's say you pay an extra $200 for airfare and $300 for a place to stay so you can go to the tournament. Those expenses are also considered.

You'd have to love gambling a lot to justify that kind of investment.

You might argue that you're immune to these types of advertising tactics because you're so well-versed in them.

And you could be correct.

However, Cultwatch warns against thinking you're immune to mind control.

Knowing how mind control and persuasion tactics work isn't enough to protect against them.

I simply ignore the players' club.

It's not a fair exchange.

Conclusion

In Las Vegas, you can make a lot of mistakes.

However, you can easily avoid the majority of them.

And, to be honest, not all of the mistakes I've listed are mistakes. Some of these are simply personal preferences.

A little mindfulness goes a long way in gambling (and in life, for that matter).