10 Gambling Slang Terms to Remember Before Coming to Vegas

So, you have a trip booked to Las Vegas, the casino capital of the world, but you are afraid you won’t fit in with the high rollers?

Well, if you are new to the gambling scene, you might have come across some words and phrases you weren’t too sure of. This list of useful gambling terms can be heard about the roulette tables and slots in Vegas, so let’s see how many of these you know the meaning of.

Bankroll

This is the amount of money that you have to gamble with. So if you walk into a casino with $100 dollars that you want to play with, that’s your bankroll. The same applies to online casino playing, as your bankroll is the amount you have sitting in your account.

In terms of responsible gambling, it’s suggested that you decide upon your bankroll before playing and then stick with it. This makes it easier to avoid the risk of wagering with more than you can afford to lose.

Buy-In

In this case, the slang term refers to the amount you need to pay to enter a game. It’s most typically used in poker, where you need to pay the buy-in to take a seat at the table.

In other games, you simply decide how much you want to wager. With slots, you either put your tokens into the slot or else you choose from the list of accepted bet amounts if you’re playing an online slot.

Cage

If you’ve ever been to a physical casino and wanted to find the cashier, then it’s the cage you were looking for. This is the location where you can change your dollars into chips or vice versa, so it’s important that you find out where it is as soon as you get in.

When playing online, there is clearly no need for a physical cage. Your financial transactions are carried out by clicking on a button, usually marked as ‘cashier’ or ‘account’ or similar. The idea is exactly the same, though.

Double Down

You might have heard the phrase double down used in different situations, as it’s entered our everyday language as a way of describing how someone decides to increase the stakes on an existing bet.

In fact, it comes from blackjack. Doubling down is an option you’re given, and it means you’ll double your stake but only get one more card. This makes it an interesting type of bet but one that comes with some risks.

Flop

This term is most commonly heard in poker games such as Texas Hold’em and Omaha. In these games, the flop is what we call the round when the first three cards are dealt face up.

Each betting round after that has a different name, but you don’t need to know these names if you’re playing online. In these games, the rounds are simply played one after another although you may see the flop and other betting rounds explained in the rules.

Gambler’s Fallacy

Have you ever been convinced that a certain number will come up in roulette because you haven’t seen it for so long? This is an example of the gambler’s fallacy in action, as it’s a term that shows us how we wrongly believe that past random events have an effect on future random outcomes.

Casino games are, generally speaking, games of chance. In some games, we can affect our chances of winning or losing to some degree. But the gambler’s fallacy lets us see that every spin made or hand dealt is unique and random.

House Edge

Following on from the last point, you might wonder how the casinos make money if the games are totally random. Shouldn’t the players win about 50% of the time? The key to understanding this is in the house edge, which is the factor that guarantees that the casino comes out ahead.

While each game is random, the gameplay or rules are shifted very slightly in favor of the house. We can see this clearly in the example of the roulette wheel, where the presence of one or two zero pockets means that you should lose slightly more than you win in the long run.

Payline

This term refers to slot games. A payline is a line across the screen that you can form winning combinations on. Anyone set of matching symbols across this line will pay you a prize.

Some slots have a fixed set of paylines, while in others you need to choose how many you want. There’s also a growing trend for slots with a large number of ways of winning rather than fixed paylines.

Progressive Jackpot

Progressive jackpots are most typically seen on slots and give you the biggest wins available on these games. But how do they work? It’s very simple, as each person who plays contributes a small amount of their stake to the pool of funds.

This is why the amount keeps rising until someone wins it. The process of claiming the progressive jackpot varies by slot, as on some it’s won randomly while others contain a special bonus round.

Whale

This term is used for the casino’s biggest-wagering players. Whales are high rollers who are happy to place massive bets on games and often spend incredible sums in a single visit to a casino.

They make up a small percentage of the total number of players in a casino at any given time, but their big stakes mean that they may win or lose a lot more than the rest combined.