Vigorish, or vig, is the general name for how a house makes money on a bet it would otherwise break even on. It appears in three shapes.
A shaded payout. Craps any seven pays 4:1 where true odds are 5:1. The missing unit is the vig, and it is invisible unless you know the true odds.
An explicit commission. Baccarat charges 5% on winning banker bets. Without it the bet would give the player a 1.24% advantage, so the commission is not a service charge but the entire reason the bet can be offered.
A rake. In poker the house takes a percentage of each pot rather than betting against you, since the players are wagering among themselves.
Where the numbers come from
Related terms in odds & money
- House edge — The average share of each bet the casino expects to keep over the long run.
- RTP — Return to player: the mirror of house edge, quoted as what comes back rather than what is kept.
- Expected value — The average result of a bet if it could be repeated indefinitely.
- Variance — How widely results scatter around their expected value.
- Standard deviation — A measure of how far results typically stray from the average.
- Bankroll — The money set aside for gambling, kept separate from money needed for anything else.
Where an entry quotes a number, that figure comes from the computed sections of this site rather than from another glossary, so the definition and the derivation cannot drift apart. Each entry links to the page where the number is worked out.