The Most Common Mistakes Made by Casino Players

Posted by Harry Kane on Wednesday, April 21, 2021

While new player accounts are continuing to increase year-on-year in the UK’s iGaming market, it widely thought that the amount wager per individual declined slightly throughout 2020.

While this highlights the fact that players may be adopting a more fiscally responsible approach, however, gamblers throughout the UK continue to make common mistakes that can undermine even the best laid betting strategies.

We’ll explore these in the article below, while asking why they can be so damaging for players over time.

1. Failing to Manage Your Bankroll

Perhaps the biggest mistake made by any gambler is the failure to manage their bankroll, which refers to the amount of money that you’ve set aside to wager on your chosen games.

Firstly, it’s important to establish a viable bankroll, and one that can be deployed across all your chosen verticals on a weekly or monthly basis. This sum of money should never be more than you can afford to lose, as this will help you to get the most from your gambling experience without ever spending outside of your means.

Playing without a budget is an incredibly high-risk strategy, particularly when you consider that games such as slots often create distort sensory experiences that encourage you to believe you’re willing when you’re actually losing money.

When deploying your bankroll, we’d also recommend that you prioritise weighted balance management, which will allow you to tailor your stakes according to the odds, probability and value proposition of each individual bet.

For example, you can increase your stake incrementally when backing odds-on outcomes, which are highly likely to come in but tend to offer reduce payouts. Conversely, you should utilise a minimal stake when backing outcomes with long odds, as these are less likely to pay out but will deliver considerably higher returns.

You can also base your bankroll management and betting strategy on the return-to-player (RTP) rate of each individual game. This rate refers to how much you can expect to recoup on average for every £1 wagered, so prioritising games with a high RTP rate (in excess of 97%) can help your bankroll go further over time.

Finally, you can use accumulated statistics and historical payout information to determine which slots or tables are the most rewarding. This will inform your bankroll management strategy further and boost your performance incrementally over time.

2. Playing at the Wrong Online Casino

As the iGaming market has continued to grow, the number of online casino platforms available has increased markedly.

However, this has also precipitated a rise in the number of unlicensed casino operators, which operate outside of the jurisdiction of the UKGC and may occasionally be little more than sophisticated fronts for cyber thieves and rogues.

Worryingly, the proportion of players using unlicensed operators almost doubled to 4.5% in 2019/20, while the black market also grew to account for 2.5% of all stakes within the industry as a whole.

This represents a clear threat to the market, while it also suggests that players are being lured by unlicensed operators who are offering increased payouts and no affordability checks (amongst other things) while maintaining a professional casino platform.

It’s crucial that you don’t fall into this trap, so be sure to appraise each site in detail before depositing your hard-earned cash. You can do this simply by ensuring that the site has published its licensing details at the bottom of its homepage, as to operate legally in the UK it must have been accredited by the UKGC.

You can also search the UKGC register of licensed businesses here, with this representing a quick and efficient way of reviewing individual sites and ensuring that they’re legit.

Once you’ve ensured that you’re dealing with a reputable operator, the next step is to review the site’s games’ library and welcome bonus in full.

With the former, make sure that there’s a broad range of games to suit your personal preferences, while also reviewing the estimated RTP or payout rate for the entire site.

As for the welcome bonus, you’ll need to review the terms and conditions in addition to the headline deposit match and advertised number of free spins (if applicable), while also paying attention to the wagering requirements and how much you’ll have to play through before completing a withdrawal.

3. Chasing Losses

While gambling is essentially a fun pastime, it can also become incredibly addictive and trigger compulsive behaviours over time.

Make no mistake; there’s a relatively fine line between recreational and problem gambling, while the 24/7 nature of online casinos means that there’s little opportunity to escape once you’ve already started to develop compulsive behaviour.

To help avoid this, you’ll need to recognise the opportunistic nature of gambling (particularly games of chance like slots and roulette), while understanding that casinos use random number generator (RNG) software to create demonstrably fair outcomes.

This means that there’s never any rhyme or reason to winning or losing sequences, so you’ll need to play each session according to your bankroll and predetermined goals. More specifically, you should avoid the temptation to chase losses, as it’s not guaranteed that a losing streak will be followed by a winning one.

This also puts us in mind of the classic gambler’s fallacy, which suggests that if a coin is flipped 10 times, it will land on heads and tails five-times each. However, each flip produces a 50/50 chance of either outcome being landed, so it’s statistically just as likely that the same result will be produced with every spin.

You should also attempt to keep your emotions in check when gambling, as you may tempted to chase losses purely out of frustration or as an emotive reaction to losing a particularly large sum of money.

Prevention is better than cure in this respect, which is why effective bankroll management is so important as it prevents you from over-committing in the first place.

Another sensible move is to limit the amount of time that you spend wagering, so try to stick to a fixed number of sessions that last for a predetermined amount of time.