You might be familiar with the house edge, but the math behind the entire word remains gibberish. However, these complex formulas are what get the house their wins and explain your losses. With that in mind, you now understand that waking up on the right side of the bed is actually a number in terms of winning at an online casino.
This number is called Variance. In simple terms, variance shows how far you’ll fall from the house edge. Easy stuff huh! No? Well, read on to find out more.
The Explanation Behind Variance
The explanation behind variance can be a bit tricky, but shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Take, for example, a game at an online casino that requires you to flip a coin. The tail loses, the head wins. In this game, you have a 50:50 chance of winning. This means that the variance is low in this game.
In the above example, you can see that variance simply shows you various possibilities. You will expect to get something close to the main result in low variance games which acts in both ways. In short, as variance increases, so do your chances of.
Using Variance to Choose an Online Casino Game
This is how you can use variance to your advantage as far as game selection is concerned. Games with a high variance give you a chance of landing huge jackpots, but you’ll lose on a regular. Vice versa is also true. If you intend on staying a while with some standard wins, then a low variance game will do.
High Variance Games
These types of games are most popular with gamblers because landing a win has low odds, but if you manage to do so, then you are in for a big win.
The old-school 1-line slots with 3 reels have the highest variance while slots with multiple lines have the lowest variance because you sprinkle a bit of your stake on each line. Video slots have paytables that indicate variance. The latter will increase when the line payouts decrease and the feature prizes increase.
Video poker comes in second because wins can be quite huge with a low house edge that more often than not lower than in the slots. Single hand poker, however, offers the highest variance compared to multi-hand poker. The same concept as in multi-line slots applies in multi-hand poker as well.
Low Variance Games
Table games have the lowest variance at any online casino. Even if you use the most optimized strategy, the game ends up as the coin toss used as an example earlier.
Other online casino games with low variance include baccarat, blackjack, craps and other poker games such as let it ride and red dog.
There you have it. An in-depth look at what this ‘ghost’, the variance is. So, the next time you scour online casinos, you’ll have an idea of how to do the same in terms of variance.