Blackjack's House Edge Next to Roulette, Craps and Slots

The house edge is the number people reach for when they compare casino games, and it deserves the reach: it is the cleanest published measure of what a game costs. Blackjack players quote roughly half a percent, roulette players hear about five, and the comparison usually stops there, as though the numbers were prices on a menu.

The comparison is worth doing properly, because the numbers do not all measure the same thing in the same way. Two games can carry the same edge and cost different amounts per hour. One game's edge is fixed no matter how you play, while another's rises sharply if you play badly. What follows is an educational tour of those differences, not a recommendation to play anything: every game on the list has a negative expectation, and none of this is advice to wager money.

The numbers side by side

Per the Wizard of Odds reference figures, the commonly compared games and bets line up like this:

Read the table with two cautions. The blackjack row is conditional in a way no other row is, which is most of what the rest of this article is about. And the slots row is a range, not a number: slot edges vary widely by machine and jurisdiction, are commonly cited between 2 and 15 percent, and are not posted on the machine, which makes slots the one entry a player cannot check. The framing behind these numbers, and behind blackjack's in particular, is in our guide to the blackjack house edge, with the underlying probability in our piece on blackjack odds and probability.

Same denominator, different meters

An edge is a percentage of each bet resolved, so comparing games honestly means keeping the denominator in view. The number tells you what a game costs per dollar wagered. It says nothing about how many dollars per hour you wager, and that second quantity varies enormously between games and tables.

Blackjack is a fast game. As our piece on hands per hour lays out, a blackjack table can run from around fifty rounds an hour when full to well over a hundred with fewer players, while a roulette wheel gets through meaningfully fewer decisions in the same hour, per the published pace tables. Pace does not close the gap between half a percent and five, but it does mean the cost of an hour is never read off the edge alone. The comparison that describes an evening is edge times total action, the arithmetic our guide to expected value walks through.

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The number that behaves differently

Here is the real difference between blackjack and everything else on that list. Roulette's edge is fixed. Double zero roulette costs 5.26 percent on essentially every bet on the layout, and there is no way to play it better or worse; the player's behavior does not enter the number. The craps pass line is what it is. Slots are priced by the machine, invisibly.

Blackjack's half percent is conditional on two things the player controls: correct strategy and decent rules. Play by feel and the cost climbs well above the headline number. Change one printed rule and it moves too: a 6:5 blackjack payout alone adds about 1.39 percent per Wizard of Odds, more than the entire edge of a well-played game, as our piece on 3:2 vs 6:5 payouts details. Two tables of the same game can sit a percentage point or more apart, and the tools for reading those differences are in our guide to how rules stack. The conditionality cuts both ways: blackjack's number is among the lowest on the list for a player who meets its conditions, and unrecognizable for one who does not.

Side bets live at a different altitude

The comparison above is for each game's main bet. Every game also carries optional extras priced far above its headline, and blackjack is no exception. The side bets sitting next to the main wager, the pair bonuses and poker-hand payouts, carry published edges from the low single digits up into the twenties depending on the bet and the paytable, as our guide to blackjack side bets documents. A player who compares games by their headline edges and then places side bets has quietly left the comparison behind.

A lower edge is not a promise

The last caution applies to every row of the table: a lower edge is still an edge. Every game on this list has a negative expectation for the player, blackjack included. What the half percent buys is a slower expected loss, not a different destination, and over any single session variance dominates the average so completely that results in either direction are routine. Our piece on variance and losing streaks covers exactly how wide that noise is. None of this is a recommendation to play anything; it is the arithmetic for anyone who wants to know what the games cost, taught the way everything here is taught, with virtual chips and no wagers.