One thing about the casino scene I’ve always been fascinated by is how players describe their income and outlays.
You’ll hear all about it when somebody walks away a winner, and even disastrous bad beats burrow their way into your memory. Players tend to track their bankroll fluctuations, marking start and end points at regular intervals. When you ask a gambler how their day went, you’ll usually hear a response along these lines:
“I began with $500 and ran it up to $1,500, hit a cold deck and dropped to $300, then recovered to save a nice $400 profit on the session.”
But ask that same player how much money they actually wagered throughout the session and you’ll be met with a blank stare. After all, it can be difficult to track every single bet you make during a feverish round of blackjack or an extended roll at the craps table. The action comes fast and furious, and today’s modern casino games are expressly designed to speed the experience up in every respect. Automatic shufflers, dealer-less poker tables, and electronic roulette all force gamblers to pick up the pace, making it that much harder to record strings of single bets.
But a bit of common sense and some simple math shows quite the surprise, as even the low-rollers out there manage to make hefty wagers over time.
Let’s say you’re betting a standard unit of $10 on midi baccarat, a table game which offers a nearly 50/50 chance of success versus failure. By the end of a session, you might leave up or down a few hundred bucks, which doesn’t seem like all that much relatively speaking. Take a closer look, however, and you’ll find that your total wagering volume was much higher.
Assuming you get about 70 hands in per hour, which is the recognized average pace of play for midi baccarat, you’ll wager $700 in just 60 minutes. Stretch the session out over a full eight-hour day, and you’ve ticked up to $5,600 in total wagers – not bad for a basic $10 betting unit.
This exercise demonstrates the disparity between gambling results and the betting it takes to get there. You can break even, or barely hit the red or black, and all the while your bets keep on accumulating.
I never really tracked by total wagers before, as I mistakenly believed that data offered little to no benefits, but I’ve changed my tune recently. Nowadays, along with my starting stake and win/loss figures, I try my best to keep a running tally of my total bets. This allows me to take a full accounting of the money I’m putting at risk, which is always helpful when you gamble for a living.
But even cooler than that, I can impress friends and fellow gamblers with tales of my high-stakes gambling, such as that weekend I wagered $100,000.
Of course, I didn’t come anywhere close to winning or losing a six-figure sum. Like the midi baccarat example from earlier, the total wagering represents a rather large multiple of my usual betting unit. Even so, there’s just something that’s undeniably cool about betting the cost of a luxury car in the span of two days.
With that preamble out of the way, here’s where I let you in on a little secret: you can bet $100,000 in a weekend too.
I consider myself a pro gambler, but I’m not a high-rolling whale by any stretch of the imagination. My go-to games are blackjack and video poker, but I also enjoy other skill games like traditional poker, sports betting, and Pai Gow Poker.
The key for me is that hands-per-hour rate, which allows me to place a high volume of wagers within a short period of time. Take a look at the table below to compare popular casino games by hands per hour:
| Video Poker | 500 | 0.75 percent |
| Spanish 21 | 75 | 2.20 percent |
| Baccarat | 72 | 1.20 percent |
| Mini Baccarat | 72 | 1.20 percent |
| Midi Baccarat | 72 | 1.20 percent |
| Blackjack | 70 | 0.50 percent |
| 3 Way Action | 70 | 2.20 percent |
| Casino War | 65 | 2.87 percent |
| Let It Ride | 52 | 2.40 percent |
| Caribbean Stud | 50 | 1.46 percent |
| Craps | 48 | 1.58 percent |
| Sic Bo | 45 | 8.00 percent |
| Roulette | 38 | 5.26 percent |
| Single Zero Roulette | 35 | 2.59 percent |
| Pai Gow Poker | 34 | 1.96 percent |
| Live Poker | 32 | Variable |
| Pai Gow | 30 | 1.65 percent |
| Big Six Wheel | 10 | 15.53 percent |
| Sports Betting | Variable | Variable |
By sticking to my five favorite games (bolded) — or any combination of the high-hands-per-hour and low-house-edge offerings — and betting whatever you feel comfortable putting at risk, I’m confident you can get over the $100,000 hump by the time Sunday fades into the sunset.
Below you’ll find a game plan of sorts, with the goal being to guide you through a weekend’s worth of six-figure action. I’ll touch on each game and its merits for this challenge while sketching out a timeline and calculating your total bets as the weekend progresses.
In the end, whether you win or lose will be based on your own skill level, combined with a healthy dose of short-term variance (also known as luck). But even if you don’t make a penny, or happen to send a few bucks back to the house, you’ll be able to brag about your big-spending $100,000 weekend at the casino.
The sharp gambler’s game of choice, blackjack offers a skill-based gamble in which players can do their part to control the outcome.
That much can be said for the other four games featured here as well, as skill games offer players the best chance to preserve their bankroll over the long run. This is due to the slim margins and low house edge offered by skill-based games like blackjack.
In this case, the house edge you’ll be up against stands at 0.50 on average, assuming you play according to basic strategy. That number can be finessed a few percentage points in either direction, but on average, you can expect to lose $0.50 for every $100 wagered.
At the blackjack table, you can also expect to lose nearly half of the hands you see. That doesn’t sound too great at first glance, but when you consider the negative-expectation design of all casino games, a loss rate of 49.09 percent isn’t bad at all. In reality, that means you won’t lose on 50.91 percent of deals — which is why so many professional gamblers grind blackjack exclusively.
With just over half of hands ending with you up or breaking even, blackjack is the perfect game to begin your $100,000 wagering challenge. And the game also offers a brisk pace of play — one of the highest on the casino floor, in fact — at 70 hands per hour.
That aligns perfectly with the midi baccarat example from the introduction, so we already have a good idea of how blackjack affects our total betting bottom line. If you’re betting $10 units, you’ll post $7,000 in wagers over the course of a 10-hour day. That’s not enough to put a dent in the six-figure goal, but increasing the betting unit can get you closer, as the table below demonstrates:
| $20 | $1,400 | $14,000 |
| $30 | $2,100 | $21,000 |
| $40 | $2,800 | $28,000 |
| $50 | $3,500 | $35,000 |
| $75 | $5,250 | $52,500 |
| $100 | $7,000 | $70,000 |
As you can see, upping the ante to $75 per hand — which is admittedly too rich for my blood –gives you a shot to clear the $100,000 hurdle with just two days of 10-hour-per-day sessions.
But the beauty of blackjack is that you don’t have to increase the betting unit to boost your action. Instead, try playing several “spots” on the table simultaneously. A player who is comfortable with the $10 increment can double their total wager to $20 by playing a pair of spots or taking two hands per deal.
Obviously, this adds to the money you’ll have on the line for each hand, but it also spreads the level of risk out to mitigate the impact of variance. You may have two $10 wagers at risk, but if the odds hold up, you’ll tend to win one and lose the other more often than not.
Another fan favorite for skill-game sharps, video poker can be played perfectly by anybody with knowledge of basic strategy.
The term “video poker” actually encompasses dozens of different variants, from Deuces Wild to Double Double Bonus and everything in between, but I’ll stick with the classic Jacks or Better to make things easier.
In this case, Jacks or Better played on a 9/6 “full pay” machine produces a house edge of only 0.46 percent. If you’re more familiar with the payback percentage metric, that equates to a 99.54 percent payback rate. However you slice it, though, full-pay Jacks or Better video poker is one of the most player-friendly wagers on the floor.
And just like blackjack, you’ll wind up winning money right around half the time. Put in precise terms, your win rate on full-pay Jacks or Better stands at 45.46 percent, with the other 54.54 percent of hands resulting in a loss. Those winners can come in all shapes and sizes, however, from merely getting your bet back on one pair hands, doubling up on two pair, or hitting the jackpot for a royal flush.
Due to the variable payout table, this 54/46 win/loss ratio provides video poker players with plenty of cushion. You may lose every other hand, but the hands you turn a winner on can bring back two, three, five, or 10 coins to subsidize those previous losses.
Consulting the hands-per-hour chart from above, you’ll note that video poker boasts an absurdly high pace of play. Playing 500 hands in a single hour may not seem realistic at first, but when you break the math down, it becomes much easier to see.
One hand of video poker can be dealt and played to completion within five seconds or less. Assuming a 0:05 rate, you’ll play 12 hands every minute. That comes to 720 hands per hour, assuming you’re playing like a robot and skipping bathroom breaks and the smoker’s patio.
As it turns out, I rounded down with my 500 hands-per-hour figure, as many proficient video poker specialists have recorded 1,000 hands in the span of just 60 minutes.
That’s for experts who can back up their flying fingers with perfectly applied basic strategy, so I chose to cut the rate in half for readers.
Now that you know just how many hands you’ll be playing per hour on a Jacks or Better machine, let’s crunch the rest of the numbers for the $100,000 challenge:
| $1 | $500 | $5,000 |
| $5 | $2,500 | $25,000 |
| $10 | $5,000 | $50,000 |
| $20 | $10,000 | $100,000 |
Lo and behold, video poker holds the key to unlocking that $100,000-in-a-weekend milestone.
Playing for just $10 per hand, which isn’t all that much for serious video poker aficionados, you’d need just two days of 10-hour sessions to meet the mark. Even folks firing $5 per hand have a shot, albeit one which requires all-nighter sessions of 20 hours per day.
If you’re serious about placing $100,000 in bets over any given weekend, video poker is definitely the best place to start.
This table game isn’t as popular among recreational players, as it’s an offshoot of the ancient Chinese tile game known as pai gow.
The structure and gameplay can be a bit intimidating at first, but if you have any experience with traditional poker or video poker, you’ll get the hang of things in no time. Just imagine a fusion of blackjack and poker, with the player and dealer taking seven-card starting hands, before trying to arrange them into strong five-card and two-card combinations.
When the time comes to showdown, Pai Gow Poker’s use of two hands to settle the score comes in handy for players that enjoy a low level of volatility.
On any given hand of Pai Gow Poker, you’ll have a 29 percent chance to win, while the dealer has 30 percent equity to win the dough. That leaves 40 percent of hands ending in a tie, with one of your poker hands beating the dealer’s equivalent, while the other hand goes their way. In that case, all of your bets are returned as a push, putting you right back where you started.
Breaking even isn’t particularly palatable to most recreational players, hence Pai Gow Poker’s relative lack of popularity. But for anyone attempting to bet $100,000 over the course of a weekend, this game has it all. The house edge is relatively low at just under 2 percent, and you’ll be seeing about 34 hands on average.
Take a gander at the table below to see how that hands-per-hour rate stacks up:
| $5 | $170 | $1,700 |
| $10 | $340 | $3,400 |
| $25 | $850 | $8,500 |
| $50 | $1,700 | $17,000 |
| $100 | $3,400 | $34,000 |
| $200 | $6,800 | $68,000 |
| $300 | $10,200 | $102,000 |
This game presents a steeper hill to climb for small-stakes bettors; there’s no doubt about that. But thanks to Pai Gow Poker’s tendency to produced chopped pots, you can feel more comfortable upping the ante with larger bet sizes, as 40 percent of hands will result in your money remaining in place.
If you can cope with betting higher than you normally would, Pai Gow Poker offers a respite from the rough-and-tumble world of table games.
This one’s tough to analyze precisely, as sports betting is an inherently fluid industry.
With dozens of sports, hundreds of games, and thousands of wagers posted by major sportsbooks each and every day, no two sports bettors are alike in their behavior. You might prefer small bets strung together on a parlay ticket, while I dabble in big underdog moneylines when the situation arises. Other bettors enjoy fading point spreads for an essentially even money return, and others still stick to long-term futures and prop bets.
With that said, it’s difficult to pin sports betting down to a neat little formula like I have with the other games thus far.
Adding to the intrigue, the world’s top sports bettors cash winning tickets just 54 percent of the time — and those are the true greats. Rank-and-file sports fans like you and I don’t have algorithms and databases at our disposal, so our win rate will likely fall right along the 50/50 threshold.
Knowing all of this, you’ll need to be prepared to fire heavy wagers at the sportsbook if you hope to hit $100,000 in bets over a weekend. You’ll also need the stars to align with a sweet winning streak to avoid busting your bankroll.
You start with $500 and fire it on a (+400) underdog, with the Phoenix Suns beating the Houston Rockets straight up. That game took about three hours, and with $2,000 in hand, you fire that on a longshot horse race with 10-to-1 odds against. You’re running hot, and your pony crosses the line first, good for a $20,000 payday.
By this point, you’ve bet just $2,500, but you now have $20,000 to work with, so it’s time to dial back the risk level. You plunk the 20 Gs down on an even-money bet, backing the Golden State Warriors to beat the point spread against one of the NBA’s flunkies. Steph Curry and the boys handle their business, and you build your bankroll to $40,000 or so.
By now, you’ve wagered $22,500, so it’ll take two more bets to hit the six-figure target. At this point, you can afford to take heavy favorites, so you go ahead and put $40,000 on the Houston Rockets to win straight up over the lowly Los Angeles Lakers. The odds on this one aren’t good at (-500), but it’s all about the total bets on this day.
Houston makes it happen for you, another winner (and another $8,000 in profit) is collected, and your total wagers climb to $62,250. Wash, rinse, and repeat on another heavy favorite for the last $37,750, and you’ll be the latest $100,000-in-a-weekend Las Vegas legend.
The same caveats about sports betting apply to poker, as you can play cash games from $1/$2 blinds on up to $500/$1,000 and beyond. Throw in the different variants (No Limit Texas Hold’em, Pot Limit Omaha, Seven Card Stud, etc.), and players have endless options to choose from in the poker room.
I’ll stick with the purist’s game of No Limit Texas Hold’em while assuming you can place $1,000 in bets during any given hour. Most live poker cash games deal out 30 hands every 60 minutes, so we can run those figures through the formula to get a general idea of poker’s ability to generate $100,000 in bets over a weekend:
| $1,000 | 1 | $10,000 |
| $2,000 | 1 | $20,000 |
| $3,000 | 1 | $30,000 |
| $4,000 | 1 | $40,000 |
| $5,000 | 1 | $50,000 |
| $10,000 | 1 | $100,000 |
That’s obviously a pretty rough outline of poker betting activity, but even at the lowest $1/$2 stakes, players start with $100 to $500 in their stack. No Limit betting means exactly that, so even if you pick and choose your targets carefully, just a few “all-in” shoves each hour should get you in line with the table above.
If I had to rank these five games based on the likelihood of reaching $100,000 in bets over the weekend, I’d go with video poker first and foremost. From there, live poker offers a decent shot, followed by blackjack, sports betting, and Pai Gow Poker. You’ll choose your own journey, but hopefully this page serves as a helpful guide for anybody looking to strike it rich with a six-figure run.
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