Percentage Take for Roulette in Casinos
Online Roulette Guide
One of the questions we often ask ourselves is this: of the total amount bet at casinos, what percentage is bet on roulette compared to slots and other table games like blackjack?
We have all heard the rumours about the slots and how they reperesent the biggest chunk of the casino’s business- but what are the actual numbers? What percentage of the casino’s winnings come from roulette exactly? Whether you are on the Strip in Vegas, out of town at the Red Rock Casino & Spa or indeed even in Macau you are going to be interested in these numbers.
It turns out that these numbers aren’t that easy to get hold of, as the online gambling industry isn’t exactly generous when it comes to sharing figures. But we can get quite a lot of information from studies done across land-based casinos in Nevada, for example, and infer some results.
One of the more interesting reports we found was compiled by the University of Nevada in their Statewide Nevada Table Mix report (1985-2017).
In this report, the UNLV states that over this period roulette has increased by about 50%. They focus on the “Big 4” casino games: blackjack, craps, baccarat, and roulette and all other table games are classed as “Others”, then chart the revenue share per game, and the unit share per game.
Roulette has come up from a share of around 5% of the total table games activity to around 10%. Craps is 11%, baccarat is 8% and blackjack dominates at 54% as you would expect, although this dominance has reduced from around 85% in 1985. The rest of the table games make up the difference.
Unit Share By Casino Game: Credit: UNLV. For 21, read “blackjack”.
On revenue share, roulette again comes in at around 10% and the big money is flowing into baccarat which now equals blackjack in terms of revenue share.
In 2017, UNLV estimates that roulette generated revenues of around $367 million of a total of 3.7 billion total table gaming revenue across the whole state. Blackjack generated revenues of $1.2 billion – the largest of the table games.
If we look at the total revenue across the state, it comes to $11.5 billion in 2017. The difference? That would be slots which pulls in a massive $7.5 billion of the total, or around 65% of the revenue.
In comparison, roulette makes up around 5% of the total revenue.
So now you know why the Bellagio and the Sands frees up so much space for blackjack and slots, and increasingly baccarat! The latter’s growth is no doubt driven by an influx of Chinese gamblers who fancy a change from Macau.
What is the Casino Game Split Online?
We can expect some difference in splits, but these Nevada figures give us a good guide as to the casino game split online.
The major difference we expect between online and land-based trends will concern baccarat which will have a much lower share online than offline – just because of the table limits and the Paucity of games online – live baccarat will pick up the lion’s share of the revenue, but we would expect the roulette numbers to be higher online due to the large availability of different games (both virtual and live). We would estimate that online roulette makes up between 10-15% of total online casino revenues compared to 5% offline. Blackjack would be the big beast of the table games sector, with slots mopping up the lion’s share of overall revenues.