Final Words on Bankroll

ABBY: Blackjack is an interesting game. If you are a $10 player your average bet will not be $10. You will have hands where you double your bet, split pairs, double down on splits and so on. Your average bet will be more than $10. If you play two hands, which I don’t recommend, you are betting more than $20 per hand.

At a full table, and I recommend you play at a full table to reduce the number of decisions you face and that you use the blackjack “basic strategy,” you will get about 60-70 decisions. Let us now multiply 70 decisions by $11. That’s $770. That’s what you need for one hour of play with the idea that you can lose every decision. Say you want to play four hours in a day then give yourself $3,080.

CINDY: You will notice that we have given you a very large amount of money to play just two games – sometimes the amount you could lose on every hand, which won’t (I hope) ever happen. At the end of this article, we will come back down to earth and give you our guesses for what you need to play one to four hours in a casino.

ABBY: I like to play roulette, one bet of $10 on an even-money bet such as reed/black, high/low, odd/even. I’ll probably make this bet about 40 times in an hour, so that comes to $400. Four hours would come to $1,600.

CINDY: You can use that figure for the other propositions such as the columns and the dozens. Abby and I both avoid the inside bets but there you could and will run into longer losing streaks. You need to be able to get through those streaks. A hit or two at any time will bring in 35-to-one on any given bet. A quick hit is a great thing as it sets you up for the entire session.

ABBY: Games such as Pai Gow Poker would require about $600 a session since the table minimums are about $15 to $25. You’d play about 40 decisions per hour at this game. Traditional Pai Gow Poker has plenty of pushes on hands and that is a great aspect of the game.

CINDY: Slots can be a problem. You have no idea of what the payback is on a machine or what percentage of hands are hits or wins.

ABBY: Bring a lot of money is all I can tell you. The streaks at slots can be awesome for good and for bad. A few decent hits can make your session but a few really lousy streaks can hurt you really bad. There are times where it is back and forth with the casino or the player slowly winning more money than the other.

CINDY: Let’s jump now. If you are a $10 player then you need, hold your breath, $10,000 to $12,000 in the bankroll to even consider going to the casino. I would divide my sessions into one-hour groupings and not play more than four hours in a day.

ABBY: That $10,000 to $12,000 seems like a lot of money but you are building it up frequently with steady deposits into your bankroll account. Once you have it and you go to the casino and then you have any winning trips, those wins go into the account. Money in the account that is going up is a good thing.

CINDY: Losing trips? You just keep putting in your regular deposits. You are always depositing.

ABBY: And if your bankroll gets really, really big? Maybe increase your bet – a little, or take money out to put into a regular account.

Cindy: All the best!

ABBY: The best!

This article is provided by the Frank Scoblete Network. Melissa A. Kaplan is the network's managing editor. If you would like to use this article on your website, please contact Casino City Press, the exclusive web syndication outlet for the Frank Scoblete Network. To contact Frank, please e-mail him at fscobe@optonline.net.