Five Apps to Help You Lose Less at Online Casinos
Have you heard the phrase “the house always wins”? Of course, you have. It’s not exactly a novel concept.
The odds of certain events during games are always calculated to ensure that the casino has a slightly better chance of winning than you, the player, does. However, there are a few nifty tricks that might help you to limit your losses. As is common these days, there are mobile applications designed to help you understand and apply the concepts we’ll introduce below. We’ll also give our favourite five applications that might improve your chances with Lady Luck.
Money Manager: Expense Tracker
If you love to have a flutter on the weekend but constantly find yourself overindulging, causing you to miss monetary obligations (bills, rent, etc.), perhaps a money management application might be the perfect way to help reduce your losses at the casino. In the heat of the moment, chasing that loss, players might not realise that their continued betting is jeopardising their general financial security.
There are loads of money management applications out there and any of them can help you work out just how much extra cash you have in a given period of time to enjoy online casino games. However, since we figured that most people reading this article will have little experience with such financial planning applications, we went for Money Manager: Expense Tracker on Android, or the iOS equivalent, Money Manager: Budget Planner.
It’s a simple application that allows users to input incomings and outgoings. The user experience is what made this one our pick for newcomers to financial planning applications. It’s so intuitive and users can categorise each earning or spend making it easy to see where you could save a few quid and to see how much money you can realistically afford to lose at the online casino without it impacting other financial obligations.
Poker Equity Calculator Holdem Lab 2
If every time you rock up to the felt you find yourself walking away a sore loser, or perhaps you’re already an online card shark and feel you have a few leaks to patch, you should seriously consider an equity calculator of some description.
A poker equity calculator basically shows the probability of one hand or range of hands beating another hand or range of hands. Of course, they’re not perfect since they presume that no more action will take place in the hand. They are, however, used by professional and amateur poker players alike around the world to improve their game and ultimately lose less (or win more!)
The great thing about a poker equity calculator is it can be used to display very simple concepts to new players. For example, you can illustrate how important thinning the field pre-flop is with a monster starting hand like Aces and Kings. Versus one player, these hands are major cash cows – versus five random ranges, not so much!
Alternatively, advanced players can plug in carefully worked out hand ranges versus potential pre-flop hands to see how they fare in different scenarios.
Although equity calculators are available on websites, the beauty of an application is it lives on your mobile device. Using a second screen can mean that you can check equity mid-game whilst barely taking your eyes off the action!
Our favourite poker equity calculator at the moment is Poker Equity Calculator Holdem Lab 2, again because of its user-friendly introduction to the concept of expected value.
Blackjack Strategy Practice
Blackjack is one of the casino industry’s most-loved and most lucrative games. It’s great for them because people hear, “Blackjack is the fairest game in the casino” and think that they are betting on an almost breakeven event.
They’re right, blackjack is the fairest game in the casino…potentially!
Compared to most casino games, there are a lot of decisions to be made in blackjack. Each time you make a decision (double, stand, split, etc.) you are given an opportunity to remain at that close to break-even gamble or to deviate from it. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to deviate in any direction other than down.
Don’t worry though. You don’t have to sit there with a calculator to work out the expected value of every player hand/dealer card combination (there are a lot!). Fortunately, some kind soul did that for you and produced what is known as a blackjack perfect strategy chart.
Ideally, you want to get a good grasp of a perfect strategy chart and the best way to do that is by practicing!
The Blackjack Strategy Practice application is a great way to teach the mathematical concepts of the game without parting with any cash. In fact, the application doesn’t even use play money. This is a good thing since expected value isn’t about whether you won or lost. It’s about how likely you are to have won or lost a given hand.
The app’s main mode is a quiz. It throws out a starting hand for you and a faceup card for the dealer and asks you how you would play it in the real casino. You make your choice and it tells you whether you made the most optimum one. Such an interactive tool is a far better way to commit the information to memory than just staring at the chart for hours or trying to pull it up during game time.
Along with the quiz format, there is information about perfect strategy blackjack, as well as an accessible chart (don’t let them see you using it at a brick-and-mortar casino!). You can also customise the ruleset to ensure that the strategy chart provides the optimum decisions for the blackjack variant you are playing.
Any casino application with a welcome bonus!
Of course, one of the best ways to reduce your losses at the casino is to play with someone else’s money! No, that doesn’t mean you should go raid your spouse’s purse when they’re not looking though.
Many casinos offer a welcome bonus and these are a great way to play your favourite games for a lot longer than if you were just using your own money.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a designated application that lists all current bonus codes offered by casinos. There do exist plenty of browser-based resources to track down the juiciest promotions though. Websites such as NoDepositRewards have professional gamblers vet the casinos and their bonuses. Still, a stand-alone application would be most welcome.
Since promotional cash or free spins offer improved expected value than if you were to take the punt using your own cash, we couldn’t leave this potential money-saver off our list. We therefore got a little contrived.
Many casino operators that offer lucrative welcome bonuses also provide a standalone application. They’re therefore technically an application that can help reduce your losses at an online casino. They can be used with all of the above methods too, to further reduce your monthly outgoings.
Gambling Therapy
Our selections so far have focused on ways to reduce your losses if they are a mild inconvenience or you’d like to take your gambling to the next level. However, for some players, their losses become a serious issue that needs addressing.
For these problem gamblers, there is an application to help manage their impulses to wage money. Gambling Therapy is a free service available on iOS and Android that offers guidance in a variety of methods. It features a quiz to tell if you have a problem, information about coping with urges, meditation exercises, information about limits and self-exclusion, and a host of contact numbers for if you are really struggling.
Although an application like Gambling Therapy should not be used in place of professional help, they can provide support between sessions and serve as a handy way to stay on track whilst battling addiction.
About the Author
Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.
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