Simple answer... no! Casino is hands down more profitable than matched betting but this is an objection that is heard all too often:
Whilst these kind of phrases are heard all of the time they are actually true but only if you don't understand casino offers and how they give us an edge, let me explain:
To understand why the positive estimated value offers we complete are not gambling we need to understand the house edge which is built into every casino game. For example:
Roulette is all about that 0. Any outside bets (column, dozen, colour, odd/even, high/low) will not pay out if 0 comes up which provides a small but noticable difference. Your '50/50' bet on red actually has a 48.6% chance of coming in. Also notice there are 37 numbers on the table (0-36) but the casino will only payout at 35/1 (decimal odds 36)... this means the casino pays out slightly less than the true odds of the event happening.
Blackjack gives the house a very distinctive advantage in that the player can bust before the dealer. Even if you bust out of your hand as does the dealer, you still lose your stake. Another factor is human emotion; we know that according to the perfect BJ strategy we should stand on 17 right? Fact is most people do not know this strategy and even if you do and the dealer has a 10, he's guaranteed to have another 10 isn't he? You might as well hit...
Slots are programmed to adhere to a set of rules that determine both its volatility/variance (how often it pays out and how much) and house edge. The slot takes a random number and, using that slots unique logic, will generate what you see on screen and the final payout. This doesn't mean they aren't random though! They numbers that this generator comes up with are random but the payouts have been measured over a large enough amount of spins to guarantee that in the very long term, the house edge is true.
There is a myriad of ways that casinos use to gain small advantages over their customers on all of their games and the above is by no means an exhaustive list, it merely serves to provide a good example of where house edge comes from.
Casinos have existed forever and always will in some form. There have always been people that understand this unbeatable advantage that a house edge provides and use it to profit.
Also take note that house edge is the inverse of RTP. If a slot has a 96% RTP meaning on average it pays back 96% of what is staked, then that leaves a 4% house edge or profit for the casino.
Quite simply any time house edge is in the casinos favour, the EV will be negative and if the edge is in the players favour then the EV will be positive. This is why straight up gambling without an offer is never profitable long term.
Lets check this theory by running some numbers in EVCalc. We will simulate playing £100 of roulette betting on an 'even' odds outcome. This approach has a house edge of 1.35% or an RTP of 98.65% so for every £100 staked we would expect to lose £1.35:
Hopefully that leaves you with a good idea of how clearly House Edge, RTP and EV are all linked together.
Quite simply because you can win money. Just because the casino is guaranteed to win in the long run, this house edge doesn't make sure each person follows to that figure. Person A could put his life savings into betting on Red 32 on a roulette table and lose £200,000 £20 at a time whilst person B could do a single bet of £5,000 on lucky black no. 8 and walk away with £170,000 profit. You then have 1 bankrupt person, 1 rich person and a casino thats happy to have acted as the middle man.
This lure of a potential win is the very basis that casinos are founded on. Every single part of the casino experience be it online or in person is designed to trigger this instinctual desire to win. Which leads to the next point...
Casinos use every trick in the book to lure us in. The sights, sounds and feedback every game gives is extensively tested and tweaked over time to 'engage' the player and in turn, generate more profit for the casino and they do it very well. Some people are particularly susceptible to this temptation and if this is the case then apologies but maybe casino isn't for you. There are things we can do to give ourselves the best chance though.
The sounds used in slot machines in particular are extremely engaging. They can range from tense music when you are potentially about to land a winning line, catchphrases from a famous person/character or songs from your favourite band. Luckily this is the easiest thing to nullify... mute the sound in game or turn your devices volume down.
Most slots and some casino games (such as Roulette) will have an autospin feature that will allow you to set the number of spins to carry out and a loss limit. They will then carry out that number of spins without any intervention from you. If the game you are using has such a feature... use it.
Autospin also has the advantage of making it easier to track wagering. If you are doing £1 spins for example and know you have to do £500 of wagering then you know that 5 x 100 spins (the maximum most slots will let you autospin) and you are done. Some slots will cancel the autospin when a feature is triggered which is a minor bugbear but you will just have to recheck your wagering progress with the casino before continuing.
If the slot you are using doesn't have an auto spin function and you are using a computer as opposed to a mobile device then you can use an auto clicker program. You won't get the same advantage of helping you keep track of wagering but it will still save your fingers and remove a lot of the temptation that manually spinning brings.
The 'one more spin' mentality is all too common even amongst those experienced in casino and is grouped here with chasing losses because it can quite easily lead to just that. The easiest way to explain why this is a bad idea is to go back to the thing that we keep mentioning, EV.
If we are doing an offer which is stake £20 for 20 free 20p spins on a 95% RTP slot. We can work out the EV as ((20 x 0.2) x 0.95) - (20 x (100 ÷ 0.95)) = £2.80. For demonstration sake say we do '1 more spin' at £1, for every spin we would be looking at an ev of -5p. Now this doesn't sound like a huge amount but when you consider that means for each spin over what is required you are decreasing the EV of that offer by almost 2%
Furthermore we have to remember that everything in casino is about the long term. Now if we were to do 1 more 'one more spin' (which quite often turns into 9/10 one more spins so this is best case scenario) and we do on average 100 offers per week, thats 5200 offers per year and all of a sudden those 1 more spins have cost us £260 of EV in a year.
Just don't do it, finish the offer, close down the tab and move on to the next offer.
The same reason any business has offers or promotions, to get your custom.
Compare it to a supermarket offering your favourite snack at a massively discounted price, that offer might be enough to make you shop there instead of somewhere else and although the supermarket may make a loss on that specific purchase, it will make it up when you, hopefully, purchase other things in that trip and maybe even come back to their store again.
Casinos are no different, they are a business, you are their customer and their promotions are their loss leaders. For as long as the law permits a) gambling and b) promotions there will always be rival casinos and therefore the need for them to attract customers to their casino instead of the competition.
At the beginning of this post we mentioned those common objections to casino and mentioned they are true, using all of the information on this page you should be able to see why they were correct: