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7 Gambling Games Played in Bars and Taverns

I write a lot of blog posts about gambling games. You can categorize them in all kinds of ways, too. I’ve written about card games, dice games, gambling machines, and lottery games. I’ve written about casino games, poker games, and even bingo.

But my favorite kind of gambling is the gambling done at my local bar. I usually don’t face a house edge there either.

Of course, the list of gambling games that get played in bars and taverns is probably endless.

1 – Yahtzee

I just came across Yahtzee recently in my hometown. It seems like at least half the bars in town offer the game. And at first, I was confused by it.

You see, I don’t drink, but my best friend does. We went to a local bar that had the word “game” in its name and she asked me if I wanted to play Yahtzee.

I said sure, because the bar had board games you could play on a shelf behind the bar. She and I each gave a dollar to the bartender, and the bartender handed over the dice along with the cup. But I didn’t get a scoresheet.

My friend suggested I roll the dice first, which I did without even shaking up the cup. As it turns out, the way Yahtzee works in these bars is that you throw in a dollar, and you get to roll five dice.

If you get a Yahtzee on that roll, you win the pot. The pot is made up of the dollar bills of all the people who have played with you up to that point.

I thought it would be interesting to calculate how big the pot would have to be before this became a positive expectation bet. It wasn’t hard to do, I just needed to know the probability of rolling a Yahtzee.

The probability for getting a Yahtzee of a single number is 1/6 X 1/6 X 1/6 X 1/6 X 1/6, or 1/7776. Since there are six different possible ways to get a Yahtzee, we can divide the denomination by 6 and get 1296.

This means that this game is only profitable to play if the pot is over $1295. I’m not sure if the bar owners were keeping any of the profits or not. If they were, they sure did have a profitable game on their hands.

2 – Tournaments

When I was younger, I participated in a weekly shuffleboard tournament for about 10 years. You got to draw your partner, which meant that even if you weren’t a good player, you still might be able to win the tournament. You just needed to get lucky and draw a good partner.

It cost $10 to play in the tournament, and all that money was put into a pool to be split by the winning team. Second place got a free entry into the following week’s tournament.

Often, the owner of the bar would put up $50 or $100 to increase the size of the pot. In gambling terms, this is called an “overlay,” which made this tournament a positive expectation deal, as long as you didn’t spend a lot of money on a bar tab you wouldn’t otherwise have.

If you had 32 players, you had a pot of $300 plus $100 from the owner, or $400. You have 30 players paying $10 each to enter, plus two players who got in free because of last week’s tournament. Your $10 entry in the tournament has an expected value of $13.33 because of the overlay.

That assumes, of course, that you’re an average player. If you’re so terrible that even drawing the best teammate in the bar as your partner still won’t help, the expected value is lower. But still, any chance to get an overlay is probably worth taking.

Most game tournaments in a bar work similarly regardless of whether you’re playing pool, darts, or whatever.

3 – Poker

It’s rare to find a bar that hosts a real poker game, although I used to play at a bar in Dallas which did just that.

Most of the time here, when a bar offers a poker game, it’s a freeroll where the winner of the tournament gets a $50 prize.

Most of the time, the bar hosts two tournaments in a night. And in the kinds of bars I visit, you usually have two tables full of players.

Being a freeroll, this kind of tournament has a positive expectation, but it’s a lousy hourly rate to win if you’re good at poker.

Suppose there are 20 players in the tournament. Your expected value is $2.50 if you’re an average player. You just divide the $50 by the number of entrants in the tournament.

If you’re twice as good as the other players, your expected value might be $5, but who wants to spend two or three hours playing a game with an expected value that low?

4 – 8-Liners

In Texas, many bars have what are essentially slot machines. These are called 8-liners because the ones around here have eight pay lines.

How does such a game have eight paylines? Well, imagine a 3×3 grid. If you get three across horizontally or three across vertically, you win. You also win if you get three across diagonally. That’s eight ways to win.

The laws in Texas strictly limit what you can win on such a game, but most of the bars hosting these games ignore those laws. At one of my neighborhood bars, you used to have to wait until Friday to pick up an envelope full of money.

I never played the 8-liners there, but I had a buddy win $400 on one of those games. He was not a regular at the bar, and the bartender told him he’d have to come in and get his envelope from the owner on Friday when she was there.

5 – Sports

In the past, I’ve written about how the best move you can make as a sports bettor is to find an individual who’s willing to bet you straight up using whatever lines you agree to. When you bet with a bookmaker of any kind, he’ll usually require you to wager $110 to win $100.

When you wager with an individual, you don’t have to risk that extra amount, which means that your expected value gets closer to 50/50.

And if you’re cannier than your opponent, you have a better chance of making a profit. But you’re more likely to find a bookmaker at your local bar than you are just about anywhere else, besides Vegas.

Another popular way to bet on sports in a bar is through one of the betting pools. I used to love buying squares before a big game.

The way that works is that the admin of the betting pool creates a 10×10 grid with digits across the side and the top. The digits are assigned randomly after the squares have been bought.

You buy your squares, and at the end of each quarter, you win a percentage of the pot if the final digits of the squares match the score.

This is basically a lottery with no skill involved, and it uses the scores from the games to determine the winners.

6 – Individual Bets on Games of Skill

Earlier, I wrote about how you could participate in a tournament at a bar playing shuffleboard, but I also mentioned how a lot of bars also hold pool tournaments and darts tournaments.

You don’t have to wait for a tournament to bet on any of these games. All you need to do is find another patron at the bar who’s willing to put some money on the outcome of a game.

Be careful of hustlers, though. One night, I was playing shuffleboard with some buddies and had a few too many drinks. I lost 15 to nothing to one of my friends.

A woman at the end of the bar was paying attention and thought she could take advantage of my condition, so she bet $100 that I couldn’t beat her at shuffleboard.

My buddies begged me not to play. But I won 15 to nothing. She got angry, so I didn’t make her pay. But if I had it to do over again, I probably would have insisted that she pay up. After all, she had no qualms about taking advantage of me when she thought I was a little too intoxicated to win.

7 – Trivia

I sometimes visit one of my local taverns for trivia night. You play on a team, and if your team wins first place, you get a $50 gift card. Second place is a pair of movie tickets.

Those prizes have monetary value. And since it costs nothing to enter, it’s a freeroll.

I enjoy playing trivia and consider it entertainment, so it’s all upside for me, even though my share of the prize is low and the hourly wage is next to nothing.

Conclusion

Those are my favorite gambling games that I’ve played in my local bar. What are your favorite bar games, and how much do you wager on them?

Leave a note in the comments, because I want to hear about your experiences