The Mehaffeys escorted me past the blinking slot machines and into the pit, where we sidled up alongside a gaggle of players peering over the wheel—watching the silver ball zip along the rim. John explained the math: A standard roulette table has 36 numbers—half red, half black. Hit your number, and you’re paid 35 to 1; bet on a color, and you double your money. Quantitatively speaking, a roulette wheel fashioned this way would be totally fair. “Theoretically, over a million spins, you’d get 100 percent of your money back,” said John.
Where the house maintains its edge is in the two additional numbers foisted upon the roulette wheel, a single zero and a double zero, both painted green. With those digits in place, betting on red or black is no longer a 50/50 proposition, and if a player is lucky enough to score a win on a 7, or a 12, or a 28, they’re still making what they bet back by a multiplication of just 35—despite the fact that those green spaces allow for 38 potential outcomes. All this is to say that each zero added to a roulette table increases the revenue it scrapes from players by 2.7 percentage points. So, in a moment of incredible audacity, the power brokers of Las Vegas decided to sharpen their advantage, festooning a gauche and unsightly triple zero to their wheels, plundering our wallets more efficiently than ever before.
Why would anyone put up with those bad odds? That’s not quite the right question to ask. Later on in the day, I watched a bachelor party descend upon a triple-zero wheel, despite that, right next to them, bathed in fluorescent light, a double-zero table—encircled by empty seats—waited for customers. The serene, vodka-buzzed tourists either didn’t know or didn’t care that they were inches away from a much better deal. Vegas happily feasted upon that ambivalence all night long.
Vegas seems to have exported its triple-zero philosophy across the Strip. Another casualty is blackjack, which remains the most popular casino attraction in the city. Historically, the game has followed a golden rule. If you are dealt 21—an ace and a 10—you’ve hit blackjack, and your wager is paid out on a 3-to-2 ratio. (A $100 bet nets $150, and so on.) But Vegas has since altered the rules. Now, on most tables, blackjack is rewarded with a 6-to-5 equation; that same $100 kicks back only $120, significantly curtailing just how lucky someone is allowed to get. Again, it’s not hard to see why Vegas casinos made the change. “They’re tripling the house edge,” John told me. “It went up from about 0.66 percent to 2 percent.”
Even if a gambler is willing to tolerate these perversions of tradition, the price of admission in Vegas has skyrocketed. According to John’s research, in 2020, 38 casinos in the greater Las Vegas gambling market featured tables dealing 3-to-2 blackjack capped at a $5 minimum bet. (As in, to play, you need to risk at least $5 per hand.) These days, that group has dropped to six casinos. Prowl through the Strip after dark, sift through the pits, and you’ll feel the difference. Most table games in 2025 force patrons to sacrifice painful amounts of cash to its maw—$25 minimums are basically standard. Fifty-dollar minimums aren’t uncommon either. Even more deviously, some Vegas properties force customers to pay a premium to access friendlier rules. I came across exactly one ultra-rare single-zero roulette wheel on the Strip, which felt a little bit like uncovering the hutch of the last surviving dodo. Naturally, it was stowed away in a high-limit room.
John told me that Vegas initially ratcheted up its minimums during the pandemic in reaction to the crunch of COVID-era gambling. Social-distancing mandates limited the number of players that could gather at casino tables, so operators made up the difference in scale—squeezing more money out of the few gamblers risking infection to play. It is less clear why those juiced wagers stuck around once the coronavirus receded, outside of the obvious: Gamblers are willing to pay them.
Oliver Lovat, a real-estate consultant at the Denstone Group who serves as an adviser to several Vegas casino properties, said I needed to understand that cheaper games are no longer economically prudent in the city. Between inflation, upkeep, and labor costs—including a Nevada minimum wage that jumped to $12 last year—Lovat argued, the salad days of low-minimum blackjack have been legislated out of the fray. After all, it is telling that no matter how much Vegas tourism declines, the city’s gambling revenue continues to tick upward. In August, gaming revenue on the Strip increased by 5.5 percent. Downtown, it was by over 8 percent, and the Boulder Strip was up almost 10.
“It’s not viable to run a $5 blackjack table anymore. You will lose money running $5 blackjack,” Lovat said. “Now, some places still have it. But they’re running it at a loss.”
