The price of an hour: what each game costs per hour at your stake and pace

A price per bet is not a price

Every game on this site publishes its house edge, and we have spent a month computing them exactly. But an edge is a price per bet, and nobody plays one bet. What a session costs depends on three things — the edge, the stake and the number of bets — and the third one is where the games differ most. A 1% edge paid 900 times an hour is a bigger bill than a 2.7% edge paid 100 times. This article puts the three together.

Per hundred bets

Start with the stake-and-edge part and leave pace out: what 100 bets of $10 cost on average, which is simply the edge times $1,000.

Mines runs 1.0–2.5% depending on the rung (small multipliers cost more); dice between its round targets runs up to 1.97%. Expected cost is the average over many sessions — any one hour can land far from it, which is the subject of the risk-of-ruin and doubling pieces.

Read down the column and the games sort into four groups: the 1% originals and blackjack, the 1.5–2% streak games, the 2.6–2.8% table classics, and the 3–7% slots and Double. The gap between the top and bottom of the table is a factor of twelve at the same stake. That gap is the whole point of knowing the edge — and it is still only half the price.

The communal games set the pace

Four games run on the house’s clock, not yours: Crash, Wheel, Double and Dragon Road. Their round lengths are constants in the engines, so their hourly cost at a flat stake is fixed too.

Crash’s flight is the only variable: the multiplier doubles every 10 seconds and the round busts at a point with P(bust > x) = 0.99 ÷ x, so the average flight is ≈14.3 s; one round in a hundred busts instantly. Dragon Road Player is 1.37%, Tie 14.3%.

Double is the outlier and worth saying plainly: at $10 a spin it costs about ten times what Crash costs at $10 a round, because it has six times the edge and runs half again as fast. Nothing about that is hidden — both numbers are printed — but neither is printed as dollars per hour, and that is the figure that matters to a wallet.

The self-paced games cost what you set

Dice, limbo, plinko, mines, keno, the card games and the slots have no round timer; the pace is yours. The arithmetic is the same — stake × bets per hour × edge — and the pace term is the one that moves most.

Multiply any cell by the edge ratio for another game: ×2.7 for roulette, ×4.19 for Hanabi, ×6.67 for Double. Auto-bet at $10 on Double would be about $2,400 an hour.

Two things fall out of the table. First, pace is a bigger lever than game choice: moving from one bet every 10 seconds to auto-bet multiplies the hourly cost by ten, more than the gap between dice and Double. Second, the stake lever is linear and honest — $1 bets cost a tenth of $10 bets per hour — which is why the doubling piece found the opposite about reaching a target: small bets are cheap per hour and expensive per goal.

What to do with the number

Decide what an hour is worth to you before it starts, and pick the stake and pace that price it there. At $1 a bet and a relaxed pace, every game on the site costs less than $10 an hour in expectation; at $10 and auto-bet, none costs less than $36 and several cost hundreds. The games that feel the same — a chip on red, a chip on a colour in Double — are a factor of 2.5 apart per bet and nearly 4 apart per hour.