Estimated Value (EV) is the profit or loss that we would expect to achieve from a casino offer should we repeat it an infinite amount of times and is the most important metric when assessing a casino offer.

The first, and most obvious, factor is if the EV is positive or negative. If an offer has a positive estimated value (+EV) then we have an edge over the casino and an offer is usually worth completing. If an offer has a negative estimated value (-EV) then the edge is still on the casinos side as with regular gambling and therefore not worth our time.

The second thing you will notice is if an offer is 'good' EV or not. Now from a mathematical point of view any EV is good as it directly related to your actual profit but you will quickly learn to spot offers that have a higher EV than you would normally see for that type of offer. Prioritise these while you can, you never know when a casino will remove or alter an offer.

In it for the long haul

As previously mentioned, EV is the value of an offer if repeated an infinite amount of times and as such you should never expect you will achieve EV on a single attempt of an offer. You can and will have occasions where a low variance, high RTP slot will forget how to pay out and will cost you 95% of your £10 wagering for a few measly free spins... this is variance and a perfectly normal aspect of casino. At the same time you may be lucky enough to experience a large win from what was a seemingly low value offer. I have personally experienced 3 wins over £1000 from entirely free offers with EVs under £1 in my time doing casino offers! While it is important to prioritise offers, any offer where you as a player have the edge is worth doing as that illusive big win really come from anywhere.

EV vs Actual Profit

The amount of profit you make from casinos is linked to the total amount of EV you 'take' from offers but you definitely shouldn't expect to maintain a profit figure around your EV... there are people that sit below EV throughout their entire casino 'career', there are people that sit above it forever and the most common, is people that dip above and below their EV levels continuously.

A good rule of thumb is that low/medium risk offers will take 100-200 offers to bring your actual profit in line with your EV and 500-1000 offers for high risk offers. The higher the volatility/variance of the offers being completed, the longer this will take.

Here is a real graph showing the EV and Profit over 723 low/medium risk casino offers:

The reason for this relation between EV and actual profit isn't as clear cut as some would have you believe and as such is the topic for an entirely separate post.

Tracking EV

Some people choose not to track EV and there is nothing wrong with that. Those people will fall into 3 camps:

• People that trust in the correlation between actual profit and EV. They have no need to track EV because they know that completing +EV offers where they have the edge will ultimately get them in profit.
• People that don't understand the importance of EV. Hopefully this post will change the minds if you fall into this group.
• People that don't track EV because of the extra time it takes. This is a completely valid reason as the extra time taken will effectively reduce the cash per hour a small amount. At the same time these people will usually still track profit from casino offers so EVCalc aims to help these people by making tracking EV as fast as possible.

Conversely there will also be people that don't track actual profit and track solely EV! This is a mentality that is seen more commonly in people that focus on high risk offers and with a very good reason; because of the volatility of these offers, you can experience large periods of time where you bust out of offers and don't make a profit. By switching their mindset to tracking EV and how much EV they have taken (and trusting in the relationship between EV and profit) they are never presented with hard numbers showing their current losing run and can instead focus on amassing as much EV as possible.

So how do I calculate EV?

Luckily we have a very active community of users and partner websites that use EVCalc to figure that out for you and the good news is that if you are an EVCalc user, you can track an offer with a couple of clicks from the offer details page. Just click the 'Track' button, fill in your profit for the offer and you are done!

Odds are you already have a subscription with a matched betting service that provides a simple EV Calculator as part of its suite of tools which is fine for calculating the EV of very simple offers but read why this could be very wrong. EVCalc provide a fully featured, fast and accurate way to calculate the EV of any casino offer you can throw at it, signup now and start using our EV Calculator.