The main way we’re different: Superior content

Last update: September 2, 2023

It seems like most other Vegas and gambling sites all write pretty much the same stuff. Badly. But on Easy Vegas I provide a ton of exclusive information and tools that are simply not available anywhere else. And when I cover topics already covered elsewhere, I cover them better than other sites do, making the articles more comprehensive and/or easier to understand. What you get with Easy Vegas, versus the other guys, is superior content. Here's a rundown of how we're dramatically different from other Vegas and gambling sites.

Unique stuff available only on Easy Vegas

These things are available only on Easy Vegas. No one else has even attempted to create any of this content.

Gambling tools

Average Loss Calculator. The #1 thing every gambler should know is how much s/he's likely to lose from a certain amount of play. But almost no one else covers it, and absolutely no one else gives you that information in a handy calculator where you can see and compare the results for different games. This is the golden content right here, baby. (see the calculator)
How Much to Bet calculator. Given a certain bankroll, how much can you afford to bet per round on table games or slots, for a certain number of hours? My calculator makes quick work of that. Good luck finding this anywhere else.
Comps calculator. Figure how much you can earn in comps, compared to the average loss from gaming, for various games, speeds, tightness, and time. (try the calculator)
Roulette Odds Calculator. You'd think someone would have done this already, but no. So I did. My calculator figures the odds of hitting x times in a row, average number of spins to see streaks of various lengths, the chances of not hitting numbers, and more. (try it)
Roulette Number Generator. Results are nicely color-coded. (try it)
Baccarat Shoe Generator. (try it)
Craps Rolls Generator. Color-coded results, each come-out round on a separate line, option to show or hide individual dice values. (try it)
Baccarat commission calculator. See the house edge for 4%- and 5%-commission baccarat, at any bet size. (on my baccarat page)
Lottery vs. Megabucks calculator. Compare the odds, cost, average amount returned, and net expense. (see the calculator)
Lottery return calculator. My calculator provides a visual to explain why there's no practical advantage for waiting for a lotto jackpot to get bigger before playing. (see the article)
Martingale system tester. Run a live computer simulation to see how far you get before you bust out. (try it)
Craps teacher. I wrote a little program to walk you through making a standard Pass-Line bet. Most other articles just describe it with text, but I let you actually run through the steps. Even besides the tutor, this page has received praise for being easier-to-understand than most, important for such a complicated game. (see my craps page)
House Edge Simulator. Other sites try to explain the house edge with words only. But it's hard to understand mathematical concepts that way. So my article includes an interactive simulator you can run which makes the concept easier to understand.

Other best exclusive stuff

Historical map of the Strip. Point to any casino, and see what casino it used to be. Find that anywhere else.
$30,000 Betting System Challenge. To show that people selling betting systems are frauds, I offer a $30,000 prize to any system seller who can show that the system they're selling actually works. How many other sites are offering up cold hard cash to debunk betting systems? (Hint: None.) The Wizard used to have a similar challenge, but retired it over a decade ago.
Sortable list of Vegas casinos. Sort by area, price level, casino size, age, room size, and more. Also lets you do a secondary sort on a second column. Nobody else has this.
Who owns which casino. Only Easy Vegas has a complete and up-to-date list of who owns which casino. And it's not just a list, it's organized and color-coded.
Vegas casino timeline. A list of casino births, deaths, and name changes. It took a lot of time to put together, which may be why no one else even tried.
List of Megabucks jackpot hits. Nowhere else but here.
Shopping Malls. I show how the malls stack up by number of shops and square footage. Other sites wish they were this cool.
Penalties for online gambling. I run down the exact penalties for online gambling in each state (in state's where online gambling is illegal), which links to the official statutes. Nowhere else but here.

Casinos / Hotels

Casinos which removed their table games. Only Easy Vegas has that list.
Vegas casinos surprisingly unprofitable. A rundown of casinos' struggles with profitability and bankruptcy.
Casino predatory practices and suggested reforms. No one else will touch this.
Casino Hall of Shame. If you like reading quality, free sites like Easy Vegas, then you'll want to know when casinos threaten those sites (which threatens your ability to keep reading them), like when the Sahara baselessly sued a popular local blogger. I started a Hall of Shame to highlight that abuse.

Vegas, general

How much to tip housekeeping, based on annual earnings. I dug up figures on how many rooms a housekeeper cleans per day, in order to figure annual earnings based on various tip levels, so you can have a good idea of how much to tip. (see the figures)
Cheapest buffets. Listed for the strip, near-strip, and downtown, and by each day of the week, in a convenient table format. (see the list)
Grocery stores near the strip. A nice list including which bus to take, where to catch it, how often it runs, and how long the trip takes. Strip food is pricey, so this is handy for those on a budget. (see the list)
Vegetarian-friendly spots. There are some vegetarian sites about Vegas (that's all they cover), but no general Vegas site covers this topic. (see the list)
How many games in each arcade. I painstakingly counted them. My last survey was 2010, so it's dated and I need to re-do it, but nobody else has ever done it. (see the table)
Theme song. This one's not really important, but Easy Vegas is probably the only Vegas/gambling site with its own theme song (kind of).

Gambling

Martingale: chances of winning based on length of play. All the other sites will tell you (rightfully so) that the Martingale is a dangerous betting system. But nobody tells you what your chances of winning would be in using it for 1 hour or 8 hours in various games. They can't tell you, because they don't know. But I modeled it, so I have the answers, and I share them with you.
How much to tip dealers, based on annual earnings. Ditto, as per cocktail waitresses, above. (see the table)
How much to tip cocktail waitresses, based on annual earnings. I sat in casinos for hours and counted how many drinks individual waitresses served in an hour. That, combined with their minimum wage less the 20% tip-out to the bar staff, lets me calculate how much they'll make per year at various tip levels.
Special way to tip dealers. I came up with a "tip on top" tipping method that makes dealers happier but doesn't cost you any extra money.
How to win a million dollars at a table game with a $5 bet. An interesting thought experiment, with numbers. (see article)
Special discount on Roulette in Atlantic City. In Atlantic City, you get half your bet back on even-money bets when the ball lands on 0 or 00, slashing the house edge in half to 2.63%. Some sites do mention this one, but it's pretty rare. The book The Complete Idiot's Guide to Gambling Like a Pro doesn't see fit to include it anywhere in its 332 pages.

Slot machines

Jackpot odds. What are the odds of hitting the top jackpot on a slot machine? Good luck finding out anywhere else. When I was first learning about slots, I read a book called The Slot Machine Answer Book which, ironically, did not bother to answer that very important question. (Probably because the author, like most other gambling writers, had no idea.) I thought it was kind of arrogant to call a book The Slot Machine Answer Book and then not answer either of the two most important questions about them. Anyway, I tracked down the jackpot odds for 14 different slots and listed them all in one table, sorted from shortest to longest. I also show how many weeks / months / years of full-time play it would take to hit those jackpots, on average. Because nobody else has. (see the article)
How much of the payback comes from the jackpot. If a slot pays back, say, 95%, players want to know how much of that 95% comes from the top jackpot. 20%? 10%? 2%? What? This is one of the two important questions not covered in The Slot Machine Answer Book. But I've got the goods for you, listing the figures for every slot I could got data on. The Wizard of Odds does have some of these figures scattered throughout his site as part of other articles, but I address this topic head-on with all the data in one table. (see the table)
Minimum paybacks & actual returns in every state. I painstakingly searched for the minimum slot payback required by law in every state that has slots, along with the actual returns reported by the casinos. (see the table)
Slot machine simulator. I programmed an exact replica of the Blazing 7s slot machine based on the actual PAR sheet from the manufacturer. You can run it for any number of spins and any number of sessions, and see statistical data of the results. (try the simulator)
Slot machine malfunctions. I run down 16 different cases (every case I could find), explaining what happened and why.
List of Megabucks jackpot hits. I've got the only list on the entire Internet. (see it)
Par sheets. My article is the only one that's aggregated par sheets from various sources, as well as adding several of my own par sheets for free. (see it)

Stuff covered better than elsewhere

"I also always include a link to Bluejay's site on a given topic. His information and writing are just too solid to leave out." —Gambling Hero network

"I was checking out some of the articles on [his] site and they are excellent. You don't see the usual garbage reiterated on multiple gambling sites but [rather] well thought out and researched articles. A couple articles that I thought were pretty awesome and a great read..." —Casino Regular

Vegas

List of Vegas casinos. Listed in all kinds of ways: color-coded by area, North-to-South for Strip casinos, and standard alphabetical order. No one else lists and counts the casinos like I do. Which is probably why my article is the #1 result in Google for this topic. (see the list)
Maps. Most Vegas sites don't even have a strip map, and most of the rest have maps that are horribly outdated, showing casinos that no longer exist, and failing to show new ones which do. My maps are current, and I include things that the others don't (the free trams, the Tesla tunnel stations, the pedestrian bridges, the Welcome to Vegas sign, the bus routes from the airport, and on and on). (see maps)
Things to do in Vegas. Hundreds of things to do, incredibly organized, all on a single page, with prices. You won't find a list this useful anywhere else. (check it out)
Free Things to See & Do in Vegas. Organized neatly by type of item, and sorted from south-to-north, so you can make a walking tour of it. (see the list)
Largest & smallest casinos. Most other sites show a wildly wrong figure for the gaming area at Circa. The proper figure is 100,152 square feet, which I pulled from the official report from the Nevada Gaming Commission. Everyone else (including Wikipedia) simply repeats the wrong and ridiculous 8,002 sf that came from Circa's own press release, and didn't have the expertise to realize how implausible that figure is. 8,002 sf would make it the smallest casino in Vegas. Some sites were even worse: Las Vegas Sun, which ought to know better, put the size at a mere 7,000 square feet, as did Eater.
Largest & smallest hotels. My list of the number of rooms at each hotel is the most accurate on the entire Internet. That's because I bother to research using excellent sources, like the casinos' SEC 10K filings. With other sites, one of them publishes bad data and then everyone else copies them. Wikipedia rarely shows a source for its room figures, and whatever it shows is usually wrong.
Bally's disambiguation. There have been casinos with the same name (Bally's, MGM Grand, and Horseshoe) and multiple locations each. All other sites which address this try to explain it in paragraph form, which likely leaves the reader more confused than when they started. Easy Vegas is the only one which does the explanation the clear way, by putting each casino name in a table.

Gambling

How much to tip dealers. The advice on almost every other site is useless because they give a figure but don't tell you how often to tip it! For instance, they might say that if you're betting $5 a hand, $5 is a good tip, but is that every hand, every other hand, every ten hands, every 15 minutes, every hour, what? That's a range of $5 to $500 an hour, which is incredibly ambiguous. I pioneered putting the tip amount in a "per hour" format, which is the only advice that is actually useful.
What online gambling is legal/illegal in each state. There is no other state-by-state list in table form for casino, sports, and poker on the whole damn Internet. And unlike everyone else, I list my sources. I also include the date that legal online gambling started in each state, and list what the potential penalties are (if any) for playing at a non-licensed site. Nobody else goes into that level of detail. As one reader said, "It's a great page, Michael. I love the way you've created the table in a unique way, I don't recall seeing that depth of info on similar tables elsewhere (and I look at a fair number of pages :-) )." (see the list)
Blackjack strategy. I'm confident that no other site teaches you strategy from the ground up like Easy Vegas does.
Counting cards. The easy-to-understand summary at the top is like no other.
Gambler's Fallacy. Most other writers try to explain this concept with words only. But pictures make math concepts so much easier to understand. That's why I include them. More than one gambler has commented that this article helped the light bulb to come on for them.
Proper lottery analysis. All the other sites will tell you that the lottery is a horrible game, especially compared to a game like blackjack. They're wrong. They're considering only one factor in the equation. (see article)
Myths & Facts in the movie "21". The leader in the movie is called Mickey Rosa, who was based on the real-life John Chang. Well, Chang himself linked to my article running down what's accurate and fake in the movie, calling the article "well-researched".
Gambling taxes. When it comes to how to report your gambling winnings and losses, most other sites get it wrong. Even TurboTax gets it wrong, as do some accountants and tax specialists. I give the straight dope, backed up by IRS documents. (see the article)

Slot machines

Slots near the edges of the casino are not looser. Decades ago a gambling book stated that casinos put the looser slots near the edges of the casino, based on what a single slot manager told him. Since then, dozens of others have regurgitated that idea, stating it emphatically as fact (without attribution, or any other kind of evidence). But evidence matters. There was never good evidence that this idea was ever true, and there's certainly evidence to the contrary: the Wizard of Odds' infamous slot survey. He figured the exact paybacks on lots of slots at various casinos, and invariably found that they were all set similarly within each casino, with no difference based on location. (I helped the Wizard with the original research that was the precursor to this Vegas-wide survey.) Here's my article on slot machine myths.
How slot machines work. “Michael Bluejay's comprehensive explanation of how slot machines work [is], in my opinion, the best one out there.” —Gaming the Odds
Slot Returns & Paybacks. Most other sites throw around the terms "return" and "payback" without being explicit about whether they're talking about the theoretical return or the actual return. Mine is the only site that assigns definitions to two different terms (return = actual, payback = theoretical) and uses them consistently so there's no ambiguity.
How slots are random. I've got more evidence for this, all in one place, than anywhere else, including a live simulator that shows the results nearly instantly. (see the article)
How to program a slot machine. Instructions as well as the complete code in Javascript (sans graphics). If anyone else has published an article on this topic that's this useful, I haven't seen it. (see the article)

Bad stuff on other sites that you won't find on Easy Vegas

Promos that obscure the content

Seems like nearly every website these days has some stupid box that jumps in front of the article you're trying to read. I've never used those, and never will.

Undated articles

When you're reading an article such as "Where to Find the Cheapest Craps in Vegas", it would be nice if they gave some clue as to when they wrote or updated the article, so you could know whether the info was stale or not. Sites like Las Vegas Then and Now don't date any of their articles.

Lack of sources

Articles on other sites rarely list sources, and there's a reason for that: Many times the writer is just pulling the info out of his @$$. By contrast, for things I don't know firsthand, I have hundreds to thousands of sources across my articles (e.g., Is online gambling legal in the U.S.?)

Animated ads

Most other gambling sites have these annoying distractions. But I never have, and never will.

Sloppy writing

Examples could fill a book. I'll list some as I come across them.

"The dealer has the advantage [in blackjack] because the player has to go first. If both of you bust it isn't a tie, but YOU lose." (Wizard Of Odds). He's conflating two, separate concepts. One reason the house has the advantage is that the player goes first. (If the dealer goes first and busts, the player will certainly never risk busting.) But separate from that, if the player and the dealer both bust, then the player still loses. That is, a player bust always hurts the player, but a dealer bust doesn't always hurt the dealer. But even though these are two, distinct reasons, WoO identifies it as a single reason.
The Street reported that if the threshold for issuing W-2Gs for slot wins is raised, you don't have to report your wins to the IRS. This is flat-out wrong. Buried at the end of the article, the writer admits that all wins are still taxable, but only after saying repeatedly above that that they're not. (3/24/22)