Guides
What an Hour of Play Costs: Expected Loss Calculator
House edge is a percentage of everything you wager, not of what you bring. Multiply your stake by the rounds you play and you have the amount at risk; multiply that by the edge and you have what the session is expected to cost. Nobody puts that figure on a sign.
Written by the Moes Almanac editorial team
Expected cost per hour
25
- Expected cost for the session
- 75
- Total amount wagered
- 15,000
Figures are in whatever unit you entered — the arithmetic does not care about currency. "Expected" means the long-run average: any single session can land far above or far below it, and that scatter is variance, not luck running for or against you.
The whole calculation
Expected cost is house edge multiplied by total amount wagered, and total amount wagered is stake multiplied by rounds played. That is the entire formula. It fits on one line, and it is the single most useful thing on this site — not because it is clever, but because almost nobody performs it.
The number that surprises people is the total wagered. A hundred units a round for fifty rounds an hour over three hours is fifteen thousand units through the table, from someone who would say they were "playing with a few hundred". The house edge applies to the fifteen thousand, not the few hundred.
This is also why pace matters as much as stake. Halving your rounds per hour halves the cost just as surely as halving your bet, and a live dealer table does it for you without asking.
What this cannot tell you
It cannot tell you what will happen tonight. Expected cost is an average over a very large number of rounds, and a single evening is not a large number. You may finish ahead; the calculation is not a prediction of any particular session.
It also assumes you play the bet you selected, correctly, for the whole time. Switching to a worse bet, or misplaying a blackjack hand, moves the real figure above the one shown here — never below it.
What it does tell you, reliably, is the price of the entertainment over time. If that number is higher than you expected, that is the calculation working.
Frequently asked questions
- Why does the total wagered matter more than my bankroll?
- Because the house edge applies to every unit that crosses the table, not to the money you walked in with. The same hundred units bet fifty times is five thousand wagered, and the edge is charged on all of it. This is why a small bankroll can fund a large amount of wagering, and a large expected cost.
- Does playing faster change the house edge?
- No — the edge per round is fixed by the rules and payouts. What speed changes is how many rounds you play in an hour, and therefore how much total gets wagered. Doubling the pace doubles the cost of the hour without changing a single probability.
- Can I use this to work out how much I will win?
- No, and no version of this calculation produces that number. Every bet described on this site has a negative expectation, which means the long-run figure is a cost in every case. A session can end ahead through variance; the average cannot.