If you’ve ever gone out of town to a casino to blow off some steam or gamed online on your lunch break in your mini van, you may not have noticed that almost every game in casinos restricts you to certain limits – how much you can deposit, wager, and god forbid – cash out. If you’re a conservative gambler, it’s doubtful that you have, but for the home-run swingers out there, you can encounter this pretty quick.
A lot of people wonder why casinos would do this, since their goal is to have people wager as much as possible while cooking in an overall win for themselves, right? You may see a crash game betting limit of only a few hundred dollars when in poker you’ve witnessed games where people had to put down thousands just for a blind. So what gives? Is this for your own good or is it a heavy-handed restriction of your own entertainment?
How Casino Maximums Are Set
What most people don’t know is that many limits on a variety of different transactions are imposed by the government, federal or state. From their perspective, they see gambling as a vice that often ruins people’s lives. Therefore, what they want to do is prevent the harm that gambling can do, after legalizing it on the heels of failed attempts to prevent it (in most cases) in the digital age.
One of the goals it has is tempering the intensity and the stakes. With slots being the most popular gambling genre by a mile, there are statutory limits on how much you can wager per spin in most Western countries. In Great Britain, that’s 5 pounds per spin – 2 pounds if you’re between 18 and 24. In Australia it’s determined by the state. In Germany, it’s recently been federalized, but it’s traditionally been as low as a single dollar.
The state imposes a ton of different tools to prevent addiction and people from betting the farm and losing it. They impose limits on deposit totals, total playing time, wagering totals, and withdrawal sizes. They also require casinos to have:
- self exclusion, such as GAMSTOP in the UK
- gambler self-imposed stop-limits for daily betting time, total bet amount, and amount per bet
- minimum spin times: Germany requires 5 seconds per slot spin
- mandatory ID checks: which help enforce limits
- cooling-off periods: before raised limits take effect
- Limited advertising, usually only during the very late or very early hours.
Governments are also slow to formally legalize fast, entertaining crash games like JetX.
Casinos’ Own Limits
The casino as well has an incentive to prevent too much extreme betting. This is because they profit they make is based on a baked-in, yet rather small margin. If someone walks in and bets a 500k on black and they win, the casino could be in for some serious losses.
For the casino’s predictable profit to play out the way it should, it’s in their interest to have less variance per bet, even if they do welcome heavy consistent betting, and definitely encourage it, with whales, the big spenders who contribute over 80% of the profits, being flown out and comped for in extravagant ways just to have them gamble.
Where Limits Are Unfair
A lot of people have gambling problems, but then a lot of people don’t and just want to have a good time, and they have to deal with a lot of annoying hindrances in trying to play. For instance, the fact that in many places, there is a delay in how often you can spin a slot can be pretty annoying.
Some people can afford to lose the amount of money they’re willing to bet, yet they can’t. Other people like to use a technique like the Martingale strategy – where you double the size of your bet each time, thereby making up for any previous losses and exiting once you’ve won. Then there are some people who have self-excluded from casinos but feel reformed and think they can control themselves, yet there is no way of getting back into it.
Then, let’s say you win a big jackpot – well too bad – you can’t take it all out right now because there’s a withdrawal limit for your own money. If you’re a local in Singapore, you’re often required to pay $150 a day or $3,000 a year just to get into the casino as a deterrent.
Bans on Particular Games
Not only are people hindered in all sorts of ways from gambling in the modern, legalized yet heavily deterred, gambling world – but a lot of the games they like to play are outright banned. One great example of that is crash games. These games already have limits imposed on them and you cannot usually bet more than a few hundred dollars at once.
By contrast, when it comes to Blackjack and Poker, the limits are sky high. One of the rationales for this is that they take place so fast and some people turn on autoplay and one bet can happen after another in no time.
One of the great things about these games is that they’re fun. People love playing them and people don’t like to wait. This is what makes them similar to slots – they are not slowed down by multiple humans taking time to think. So the speed and popularity are why governments are cold to crash games.
Crash games are leaders in terms of provably fair play, however. Due to the simplicity of the winning multiplier’s calculation, it works very nicely with this new practice of eliminating cheating by online casinos, which might not be legitimate. It does so by producing a result based on the player’s input seed and multiplying it by the randomly generated seed at the beginning of the game and then showing the multiplied result, which can be read afterwards.
How Players Work Around This
In the modern world, now that people gamble on their cell phones and tablets, people are always going to try to circumvent limits as their desire for adrenaline and risk looks for an outlet. This is especially true for the big whales.
Offshore Casinos
This is one of the most popular ways that people have used to evade betting caps. They could be on some small island or in Latin America and are very easy to play for a heavily regulated EU or Singaporean citizen. This allows them to stake thousands and play game after game every couple seconds. Reduced player protection is a problem in particular in areas like Latin America.
Crypto
These are often totally anonymous and have actually birthed entire genres, the most popular of which being crash games, themselves emulating the nature of the crypto market, where people have to bet on when the market will peak and jump out in time before their value crashes. Crypto is exchanged completely anonymously, although the ledger keeps track of every single operation and smart contracts execute operations automatically.
Multi-Account and Platform Spreading
This is popular not only to evade limits but also to prey on casinos’ bonuses, causing the ruin of a lot of casinos, which have to offer bonuses as the market is extremely competitive. Since players have access to a large number of casinos online too, this allows them to bet as much as they want total per day, evening gambling in multiple games at the same time, thereby bypassing delay laws. They could even gamble at the same online casino using different devices at once.
Even though KYC is imposed to prevent multiple accounts, people overcome this by illegally stealing strangers’ or loved ones’ IDs and using them.
