House Edge: The Price Tag on Every Casino Game

By Alex Boiko · Editor · Crypto Casinos Codes · last reviewed 25 August 2026

Every casino game has a built-in price, and the casino publishes it — just not in large print. It is called the house edge, and once you can read it, you know what any game costs before you place a single bet. This guide explains the number, shows it for every game on this site, and turns it into dollars.

What the House Edge Actually Is

The house edge is the percentage of every bet that the casino keeps, on average, over the long run. A 1% edge means that for every $100 wagered, the casino expects to keep $1 and return $99 to players. Not on any single bet — on a single bet anything can happen, which is the entire appeal — but averaged over thousands of rounds, results converge on that number with brutal reliability.

The edge exists because payouts are set slightly below the true odds. The cleanest example is European roulette: a single-number bet wins 1 time in 37, so a fair payout would be 37×. The actual payout is 36× (35-to-1 plus your stake). That missing unit, spread over all outcomes, is the edge: 1/37 = 2.70%, identical on every bet type on the table.

RTP: The Same Number, Upside Down

Slots and originals usually advertise RTP — Return To Player — instead. RTP is simply 100% minus the house edge. A 96% RTP slot has a 4% edge; a 99% RTP dice game has a 1% edge. Two things to keep straight:

• RTP is a long-run average over all players, not a promise to you. Your session can land anywhere; the average is what you pay for the privilege of finding out where.
• RTP applies to turnover, not to your deposit. If you deposit $100 and recycle winnings until you have wagered $1,000 total on a 96% RTP game, your expected loss is 4% of $1,000 = $40 — not 4% of $100. Recycling is how a small edge eats a whole deposit.

House Edge by Game: The Full Table

Here is every game on this site, its edge, and what that edge costs per $1,000 of total wagering:

Read that last column twice. For the same $1,000 of action, keno can cost twenty times what blackjack does. Game selection is the single cheapest decision in gambling, and it is made before any bet is placed. Nothing you do mid-session — bet sizing, streak chasing, progression systems — changes the percentage; it only changes how fast you get there.

Notes on the table

• Blackjack at ~0.5% assumes basic strategy. Play by feel and the practical edge is closer to 1.5–2%. The rules matter too: our table uses six decks with the dealer standing on soft 17.
• Crypto originals cluster at 1% because the format is a marketing decision as much as a maths one — a low, published, provably-fair edge is the crypto-casino pitch. Changing the mine count in Mines or the risk level in Plinko changes the variance, never the edge.
• Slots vary by title. The RTP is usually buried in the info screen. Two visually identical slots can differ by two full percentage points — always check.
• American roulette (double zero, 5.26% edge) costs almost double the European wheel for the same game. Never play it when a single-zero table exists.

Worked Example 1: The Same Night, Three Games

Suppose you bet $2 per round at 5 rounds per minute for two hours — a normal pace on originals. That is 600 rounds and $1,200 of turnover. Expected cost of the evening:

• Dice (1%): $1,200 × 0.01 = $12
• European roulette (2.70%): $1,200 × 0.027 = $32.40
• Keno (8%): $1,200 × 0.08 = $96

Same stakes, same pace, same two hours of entertainment — an eight-fold difference in the bill. The session cost calculator runs this exact computation for any bet size, speed and game you choose.

Worked Example 2: Why a $100 Deposit Disappears

Deposit $100 into a 96% RTP slot at $1 per spin. After 100 spins you have not lost $100 — on average you have lost $4, and you keep spinning with what came back. Each recycle of the balance pays the 4% toll again. On average the balance survives roughly $100 ÷ 0.04 = $2,500 of total spins before reaching zero — which sounds generous until you notice that at 8 spins a minute, $2,500 of turnover is about five hours. The deposit was never going to survive; the edge just decides how long the ride lasts. The bankroll calculator models this survival time properly, variance included.

Worked Example 3: Rakeback Shrinks the Edge, Never Flips It

A 1% edge game with 10% rakeback returns you 0.1% of turnover, for an effective edge of 0.9%. Boost the rakeback to 20% and the effective edge is 0.8%. On $10,000 of monthly turnover that is $20 back — real money, worth claiming, and exactly why we track which casinos pay it (see the rakeback calculator and our reviews). But note what did not happen: the number never went negative. No rebate offered by any casino makes the expected value positive.

What the Edge Does Not Tell You: Variance

The edge is the average; variance is the spread around it. A 2× Plinko row and a 1000× Plinko row can carry the same 1% edge, but the second pays almost nothing almost always and a fortune almost never. High variance means your actual session result will sit far from the expected loss — sometimes gloriously above it, which is the sensation the whole industry sells. Short-term wins are variance, not an escaped edge. Play enough and the average reasserts itself; the table above is where every long run ends.

Try the Numbers Without Paying Them

Every game in the table is playable here for free with the exact same maths — all games, all slots, fake credits, no account. Watch the edge work over a few hundred rounds of Dice, then price a real session with the session cost calculator before any money moves.