6 Tips And Tricks To Gain An Edge Over Online Casinos

The house always wins.

There’s a reason that saying’s a cliche: it’s largely true. Casinos are businesses, with the sole aim of making a profit, and they’re very good at it.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to profit from online casinos as a customer - you just have to be smart about it.

The way to achieve this is through harnessing the many offers available from online casinos, which can result in making surprisingly high profits over time.

In this article, we’ll talk you through exactly how this works, why it works, and how much money you can expect to make. We’ll also touch on other ways to make consistent profits through betting online, which can be combined with casino offers to give you a significant boost to your income each month.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

How Do Online Casinos Make Money?

To begin with, it’s important to understand how online casinos make their money.

Because online casino software is almost always automated, the casino can be confident of maintaining a consistent profit margin. Usually, a casino’s margin on games will be somewhere between 2% and 10%.

This doesn’t sound like a huge amount. But when you consider that online casinos have fairly limited overheads (unlike live casinos, they don’t need a physical building, and comparatively few staff), and that enormous amounts of money will be wagered, it ends up being an exceptionally reliable way of making money. All an online casino really has to offer to its customers is the opportunity to risk their money.

One exception to the normal profit model is poker, where a casino’s customers are playing against each other rather than against the house. This makes it slightly more complicated to make a profit (and it makes poker a somewhat less profitable game for online casinos than other games).

For poker, casinos make money through ‘the rake’ (a percentage cut of the pot), through entry fees for tournaments and by encouraging players to wager extra money on side games (which use the more normal online casino profit model).

Online casinos will also invest the money their customers hold with them (as is the case with pretty much any institution, in any industry, that holds customer funds).

There are certain restrictions as to what they can do with this money, but it’s easy enough for them to make steady returns from those investments, especially as they aren’t paying their customers interest on the money they hold.

RTP And Casino Games

The majority of an online casino’s games are in the form of slots (including variations on slots) and live casino. These are all powered by random number generators, which ensure unbiased, fair results and a specified return to player.

The return to player, or RTP, is the average percentage of money staked that players will win back. So for example, if a game has a listed RTP of 95%, players will on average win £95 for every £100 staked. The remaining £5 is the casino’s margin, and where they make the bulk of their money.

Online casinos don’t always display RTP prominently, and sometimes it’s very difficult to track down - but it can usually be found somewhere in the information about the game, or on the initial loading page, as shown below.

It’s important to bear in mind that this is the average return to player, meaning that your individual results for any one game aren’t going to be an accurate reflection of the RTP. It may well take millions of spins for a game’s returns to actually hit its advertised RTP.

From the casino’s point of view, that’s absolutely fine - collectively, its customers will make millions of spins, so they can be pretty confident that their profits will work out as they expect.

From the customer’s point of view, the situation is a bit more complicated. They will be well aware (one hopes!) that on average they should walk away with less money than they started off with.

But on a smaller scale any individual game’s volatility can be very high - meaning you’ve got a chance of wagering, say, £100, and coming away with nothing, but also a chance of ending up with an enormous win, potentially thousands of times the value of your original stake.

If you’re hoping to gain an edge over the casino, it’s important to not to focus too hard on the possibility of a huge win. Sure, it could happen, but you’re more likely to come out with less money than you started.

To make any sort of reliable profit from casino play, you need to find a way of gaining a statistical advantage over the game - and that’s where casino offers come into play.

How To Get The Most Out Of Casino Offers

Online casinos are always trying to attract new customers, and one of the most effective ways for them to achieve this is to offer out freebies.

Even if you’ve never gambled in your life, you’ll probably have encountered advertising or marketing emails from casinos offering you free spins or bonus funds if you sign up.

Those offers give savvy bettors the chance to gain an advantage over the casino, improving their chances of coming out in profit. With the benefit of the free extras, many offers can result in an RTP of over 100% - i.e. on average, you can expect to win more than you lose. This is usually referred to as positive expected value, or +EV.

We can work out the expected value of any offer we see advertised with some relatively simple maths, and this allows us to assess if it’s worth doing.

As an example, we’ll take a look at Betfred’s casino sign up offer: deposit and wager £10 and get 200 free spins.

You can choose between a few different slots games to wager your initial £10 on. It’s best to choose a game with a high RTP, such as Silver Bullet, which has an advertised RTP of 96.84%. On average, you would have £9.68 after you’ve completed your initial wagering.

You then receive 200 free spins, with a value of 5p each. These have to be used on Age of the Gods; God of Storms 2, which has an RTP of 96.14%. This means that, on average, players will make £9.61 from their free spins.

This brings you to a total of £19.29, making a £9.29 profit on your initial £10 of wagering. This offer therefore has positive expected value, and is extremely worthwhile.

Of course, as we’ve established, these average figures apply over millions of spins, rather than a couple of hundred. It’s perfectly possible (if fairly unlikely) for a player to lose their initial £10 and win nothing from their free spins.

However, when you complete an offer like this, the odds shift from being against you to in your favour. And the more offers with positive EV you complete, the more your profits are likely to correlate to the overall theoretical EV from everything you’ve done.

Outplayed members completing casino offers usually make anything from a few hundred to a thousand pounds on average each month - a huge boost to your income!

6 Tips And Tricks For Casino Success

Getting started with casino offers isn’t particularly difficult, especially if you’re an Outplayed Diamond member following our handy guides, but there are still things you can do to maximise your profits and your success.

We’ve summarised some of the most important below:

1. Trust the process

It’s natural to be wary of casino offers. There is risk involved, and it’s important to be aware of that, and only to wager money you could, in a worst case scenario, afford to lose.

However, you shouldn’t be discouraged if your initial results don’t match up to the EV of the offers you’ve completed. Variance is inevitable with this kind of strategy, but the more offers you do the more your overall profits should start to come into line with their EV.

2. Track your profits

It’s more important than you might think to keep track of your profits. Although it won’t actually affect how much you make, it allows you to observe trends and compare your real profits to the EV of the offers you’ve completed.

People are often terrible at mentally tracking their progress, liable to exaggerating their wins or losses, depending on their outlook. You’re far better off having an objective record of your progress, which will help you make informed decisions as to what to do next.

3. Expect upswings and downswings

Part of trusting the process is accepting that your progress won’t be linear. The nature of casino means that you’ll have periods where you seem to be winning a lot, and periods of the opposite.

In neither case should you conclude that your current run of luck will continue. There’s a lot of volatility in casino profits, but in the long run it does even out. Most people end up with graphs that look something like the one pictured below; lots of peaks and troughs, but a steady trend upwards overall.

4. Check the EV

Before you embark on an offer, make sure it’s actually worth completing. Sometimes the offers bookies make are of so little value that it’s simply not worth doing them - either because you stand to make just pennies from large amounts of wagering, or because the EV turns out to be negative in spite of the offer.

You can work out the EV for any offer yourself based on the amount of wagering, number of free spins, and RTP of the games involved. Outplayed diamond members, though, can check the EV for worthwhile offers in our trusty guides, or use our EV calculator if you happen to come across an offer that we haven’t featured.

5. Don’t be tempted to gamble for real

The problem with casino games is that they’re designed to encourage our irrational, unhelpful impulses, and to be fun while they’re at it. Even the most hardened statistician would struggle not to get excited by a sudden big win in a slots game - and your brain then craves the same excitement again, making you more likely to keep playing.

Casino games can also make you more prone to emotional decision-making. It’s easier than you’d think to fall into the trap of gambler’s fallacy (believing you’re more likely to win if you’ve had a run of losses) or believing you’re on a ‘lucky streak’, no matter how rational you imagine yourself to be.

You therefore have to be strict with yourself and avoid any temptation to keep playing beyond your required wagering or free spins - at that point, you’re simply handing your advantage straight back to the casino.

6. Combine with Matched Betting

Matched Betting is, in some ways, quite similar to taking advantage of online casino offers. Here, too, you’re profiting from the promotions run by bookies, but here they’re for sports betting.

Matched Betting is the strategy of betting both for and against the same outcome. So for example, you might bet both that Manchester United win a match, and also that they don’t win a match.

You make your profit by combining this technique with the many promotions bookies offer to lure in customers. For example, you might see an offer where you have to place a £10 bet (known as a qualifying bet) to receive a £10 free bet.

If you match both bets, you can roughly break even on the first bet, and then use your free bet to make a profit. Between sign up offers and reload offers, you can make £300 - £1000+ a month. A few people even make a living this way!

The key advantage of Matched Betting is that, if you do it right, you’ll end up with a guaranteed profit. This can work incredibly well when combined with casino offers, as your Matched Betting profits will make it easier to weather any downswings from the casino side of things. Any unexpected large wins, meanwhile, can contribute to your bankroll for Matched Betting.

Between casino offers and traditional Matched Betting, you’ve got the opportunity to make hundreds, or even thousands, in extra cash each month - not bad for something you can do from the comfort of your own sofa!

Summary

So, it turns out that the house doesn’t always win - not quite always, anyway. When you capitalise on the offers online casinos make, you tilt the odds into your own favour, which enables you to make consistent profits from casinos.

And when you combine this with Matched Betting, it can be an even more profitable strategy!

To find out more about Matched Betting, check out our dedicated guide to beginners. Or, if you’re more interested in getting started with casino, have a look at our membership levels breakdown so you can decide what’s right for you. And if you need any help, our support team is available 7 days a week to lend you a hand.