What Are Hot and Cold Tables in Casinos
There are plenty of different casino strategies around - some more prevalent and popular than others. One of the most basic and widely used by casino fans is the hot and cold table strategy, which is widely used in table games. The whole theory behind this strategy is to play at hot tables to increase winnings chances whilst avoiding the cold tables.
Whilst we’re talking about land-based casinos in this article, you can find great online casinos at casinosource.ca. Playing at an online casino also slightly boosts your chances of walking away with a decent prize, as this type of casino has lower overheads, meaning they usually have a slightly lower house edge. But, enough about house edges, let's talk about hot and cold tables.
Hot Casino Tables Explained
Hang around a casino long enough and you hear players talking about a certain table being ‘hot’ - and they aren’t talking about the temperature of the casino! In simple terms, A hot casino table is a certain table in the casino that a player has had a good winning run on. A cold table is the opposite - one where they’ve lost consistently.
The theory behind this is that a player could make some decent money simply hopping between hot tables and leaving when they get cold. But there’s also a reverse theory played by certain players, who look for cold tables with the logic that these cold tables are due to turn hot soon.
Can casino tables really be hot and cold?
Whilst this method is actually a common strategy that you’ll see players using in gambling hotspots like Las Vegas, can these tables really be hot or cold? Well, that’s a bit more complicated than you may think.
Any casino that’s fair is supposed to have game results that are completely and utterly random. So no matter if a player is going on a fiery winning streak, that could change in an instant.
Whilst many players argue that not only tables can be hot or cold, but casinos themselves, these players can only call these results with hindsight - they can’t pick a winning table or casino before the result is played.
So hot and cold tables don’t actually exist?
As you can probably imagine, many players can easily convince themselves that a certain table is hot whilst others are cold. It’s a very easy way to explain why the table you’re at is seeing you constantly lose whilst the table right next to you doesn’t stop paying out.
There are two main reasons why many gamblers believe this:
The gambler's fallacy: The simple truth is that any fair casino will give a player the same chances to win at any table in the venue. Each result of any casino game is totally random: it’s all down to chance.
This means that sometimes, players will go on wild winning streaks or just keep losing. There’s no way to predict these streaks in advance and they’re bound to happen at some point - it's just something that happens with random chance.
Any betting strategy that relies solely on picking out hot or cold tables falls into the trap of the gamblers' fallacy - a belief that the previous result of a game will affect the outcome of the next one. This is widely used in roulette - if a certain color hasn’t appeared in a while, there’s a belief that the next result must be the opposite color. In reality, the chances are still 50/50.
The Law of large numbers: The other reason many gamblers somehow convince themselves of hot and cold tables is the law of large numbers. Many gamblers see a group of players consistently winning at a certain table and think that table is hot. But what they aren’t taking into account is the law of large numbers.
This special law dictates that the larger any sample size is, the more accurate the results will be. So when a player sees a group of people winning at a certain point, they’re actually only seeing a small sample size of total players. When you take into account the actual sample size of everyone playing at the casino, the results will be totally random and not shaped by previous results in any way.
So what should you do?
There is absolutely no way to predict the next result of any casino game. The best advice you can take is to simply find a strategy that increases your odds of playing that game - there are plenty of articles and online books with well-known betting strategies that have no reliance on the previous result. Every table game has plenty of strategies that can boost your chances, even if only by a small amount.
Equipped with a decent strategy and sound, logical play, you stand the best chances to actually win casino games.