Easy Casino Games to Learn If You Have Never Gambled Before

I remember the first time I ever went to a casino. It was an incredibly overwhelming experience, and I made a lot of mistakes along the way, despite the fact that I had been gambling online for months before I went. My friend that came with me had never gambled before at all, so it must have been even more overwhelming for her.

If you have never gambled before, I strongly recommend that you start online before you go to a land-based casino. That way, you can get the basics of the games down, and you do not have to worry about interacting with other players or dealers or the casino environment. You can play as much or as little as you want, and you can pause to check the rules when you need to.

Even if you do choose to gamble online, there are so many games available that it can be incredibly overwhelming. I did not even know where to start. If you simply choose the first game that you see, either you will end up playing something that you do not like, or you will not know what you are doing, which will make it hard to learn.

To help you avoid any of those mistakes, I am going to recommend three casino games that I think are easy to learn. I will also give you a brief introduction to these games so that you know the basics before you start playing. More importantly, I will also include other resources that can help you learn the game in more detail.

You will probably notice that I have included multiple games in two of these sections. Slot machines and video poker are remarkably similar, so you can choose which one is more interesting for you. In the same way, baccarat and blackjack are similar games with a few variations.

I will explain the differences, but once you learn one of these games, you should be able to understand the other without too much more hassle. So, here are the three easiest casino games for beginner gamblers to learn.

Slot Machines and Video Poker

Slot machines are most definitely the easiest game in the casino to learn. All that you need to do is insert your money, pull the lever or push the button, and hope that the symbols line up in your favor. It is easy enough that a small child could do it if they were legally allowed to.

The only other thing that you need to know about slot machines is that they have multiple pay lines, which increase how much you pay. If you play on a penny slot machine, your actual bet could be as much as twenty-five cents per spin because you would bet one penny on every pay line.

Three-reel slot machines typically have nine pay lines, but five-reel devices can have up to twenty-five. You could choose only to play one pay line, but that would make it a lot more challenging to win. Each pay line represents another way that you can win if the symbols line up, so the more pay lines you use, the more chances you have of winning.

Video poker is very similar to slot machines, but there is one significant difference. When you play video poker, the device will deal five cards for you. The object of the game is to make the best possible poker hand out of the cards you get dealt. You get to choose which cards you want to keep from that first deal, and which ones you want to get rid of. Any cards that you get rid of will get replaced by other cards automatically.

It will help if you have a basic knowledge of poker hands before you play video poker, but it is not absolutely necessary. More importantly, it is not difficult to learn them. Some of the hands, like three or four of a kind, are obvious and easy to figure out. Other hands, like flushes, straights, and full houses, are a little bit more confusing.

When you play video poker in a land-based casino, the machine should have some images on it to help you, or you can click on the name of the hand for a reminder. Either way, the paytable will tell you which hands are better than the others.

Slot machines and video poker are both excellent games for beginner gamblers. If you are nervous about gambling or overwhelmed by learning the games, these two options are the best place to start. However, slot machines have some of the worst odds in the casino, so if you are concerned about the possibility of losing, you might want to give roulette a try instead.

Roulette

When you see a roulette table for the first time, you will probably be overwhelmed. You might think that I am crazy for suggesting that it is an easy game to learn. That is because roulette has a lot of options, but it is not really that hard to grasp the basic concepts of the game.

The croupier will spin the roulette wheel and throw a ball on a track in the wheel. When the wheel stops spinning, the ball will land in one of the numbered pockets that are on the table. Your job is simply to guess where the ball will land. There are lots of ways that you can make your predictions, and you can make as many predictions as you want to.

Roulette bets are separated into two sections; inside bets and outside bets. Inside bets are when you choose a specific number or a few numbers to bet on. You might wager that the ball will land on eight, or you can select a set of numbers that are next to each other on the table.

For example, you could play a street bet that covers the numbers seven, eight, and nine, or you could play a corner bet that includes eight, nine, eleven, and twelve. The inside bets pay more when you win, up to thirty-five times your initial bet. But, they are also harder to win than outside bets because they are more specific.

There are several outside bets that you can choose from, and they generally focus on a category of numbers. For example, you can bet that the ball will fall on an even number or an odd one. Those bets have almost a fifty-fifty chance of winning, but it is not precisely even because the zero and double zero space do not count as odd or even.

All of the numbers on the roulette wheel are either red or black, except for the zero and double zero. So, you can place your bet based on color as well. If you win one of those bets, you will earn the same amount as you staked. You can also bet on a set of twelve or eighteen numbers at a time. Those bets pay two to one, instead of one to one.

The basic premise of roulette is easy to understand, but all of the betting options can be overwhelming. When I first started gambling, I avoided roulette because I thought it was going to be a lot more complicated than it really is. Once I had learned the game, I was annoyed with myself for not learning it earlier because it was a lot easier than I thought it would be.

If you are overwhelmed with all of the betting options in roulette, just focus on betting red or black, or even and odd. Those bets are incredibly straightforward. Once you have done those a couple of times, you will begin to see how the other betting options work.

The more you play, the quicker you will learn all of the bets that you can make. I promise that it is a lot easier than you think when you first see the table. Do not let the number of options scare you away from learning the most straightforward table game in the casino.

Baccarat or Blackjack

When I first started gambling, everyone I talked to told me that blackjack would be the easiest game to learn. I agree to some extent, but I would add a caveat. Blackjack is an easy game to understand, and it is straightforward enough to figure out how to play it. But, it requires a lot of memorizing to learn how to play it well.

The object of blackjack is to get a hand that is closest to twenty-one without going over. You compete against the dealer. Both the dealer and the player get two cards to start with, and the player gets to choose whether they want to hit (receive another card) or stay. There are specific rules that the dealer has to follow to determine when they get extra cards.

Blackjack is one of the best games in the casino because it can have an incredibly low house edge. If you play correctly, the house edge is only 0.5%. Anyone can play perfectly because you can figure out the odds of winning in every situation by using basic math. There are more face cards in the deck than any other single card, so you can assume that the next card will be a ten, most of the time.

No one wants to sit around and do math while they are playing blackjack. So, mathematicians have figured out precisely which move you should make based on the total value of your hand and the value of the card that the dealer is showing. They have put this information together in charts called strategy guides.

If you use a strategy guide to determine exactly what to do in every single situation, you can play a perfect game of blackjack. Keep in mind that a perfect game does not mean you will never lose. It simply means that you made the best moves to give you the best statistical chances of winning.

As long as you use that strategy guide, the house edge for blackjack is only 0.5%. However, if you use a strategy guide that does not match with the variation of the game that you are playing, or if you make the wrong moves, the house edge of the game goes up. It is excellent to use strategy guides as a resource while you are learning, but if you really want to master the game of blackjack, you will need to memorize most of the chart.

All of those people who told me that I should learn blackjack first are people who have never heard of baccarat, or they have never played it. Baccarat was one of the last casino games that I learned how to play, but it is now one of my favorites, and it was even easier to learn than blackjack.

When you play baccarat, you have to choose whether you think the banker or the player will win. The player hand is just a placeholder for the game, so you do not actually have a hand dealt to you. Some variations of the game allow players to take turns acting as the player, but most of the time, the dealer simply deals the cards for both hands.

Both the player and the banker’s hands receive two cards at the beginning of the game. There are specific rules that determine when the player gets a third card and when the banker gets a third card. You do not need to worry about those rules because the dealer will automatically issue a third card when it is necessary.

After the third cards are out, the hand that has the higher value wins. However, the values in baccarat are counted a little bit differently. You always drop the digit in the tens place. So, if the hand is eight plus seven, the total is fifteen, but it is really only five because you drop the one in the tens place.

All that you have to do when you play baccarat is to choose between the banker, the player, or a tie. However, tie bets are rare, so I do not recommend that you bet on a tie regularly. Because of the rules that determine which hand gets a third card, the banker is more likely to win than the player’s hand. So, the best way to play baccarat is to simply bet on the banker every time.

Conclusion

One of the best parts of gambling is the fact that there are so many different games that you can play. It is fun to have variety and to explore everything that the casino has to offer. But, it does take time to learn how to play all of the different games in the casino. That process can be overwhelming, and some games are more accessible to learn than others.

Slot machines and video poker are remarkably easy to learn. Roulette seems complicated, but it is easier than you might think. Baccarat and blackjack are both easy to learn and easy to play well once you understand the math behind the strategy. Once you learn these games, you will feel more confident tackling the other games in the casino, as well. You will be a gambling master before you know it.