In just about any form of gambling, whether it’s on the horses or in a casino, even an online casino like Sky Vegas, there are certain people that seem to win consistently whilst other people barely ever get a look in. Gambling, of course, has a large element of luck, so is it simply all down to the fact that certain people have more luck than others?

The simple answer is, of course, ‘no’. If you’re at the races and you consistently bet on rank outsiders it’s no surprise if you lose more money than people who bet on the favourites. The same applies for casino games like and even themed slots like the Deal or no Deal game (slots with themes), if you pick carefully and know a little about what you’re doing, you make your own luck, and win more often.

Of course, it goes deeper than that, there is a famous story of a person who studied the horses so deeply that he used to consistently win huge sums of money, so big, in fact, that the bookies banned him from their shops. The trick was to study the form guide of each horse in incredible detail, he would then use this – along with some pretty hefty statistical calculations – to work out which horses had odds that were too short, or too long, and bet accordingly to profit from the distance.

This kind of approach can be replicated across any discipline, basically, you need the ‘real’ odds in each situation, whether that’s a slot machine or a game of poker. If you can clear out the extraneous noise (represented by popular betting lifting a horse to favourite status when in fact it’s a turnip) you can make clear decisions based on mathematical probability.

Any decision based on probability (if the odds are good) has a better chance of coming off. That doesn’t mean, however, that you’ll always win, far from it, probability works over time, so the more you play, bet, or pull the handle, the more the numbers will fall into line. It’s the same as with flipping a coin, if you flip a coin once it’ll fall heads or tails, if you flip it 100 times, or 1,000,000 times it should settle evenly into exactly half heads, and exactly half tails.

So, to win successfully and consistently at any game that involves odds, probabilities, or numbers, what you need to do is find a system to work out the true odds (the game mechanics, the ‘house edge’ or how good the horse really is), then, once you find that system, put it to good use, let it run enough that any accidents (illness, injury, a freak hand) are counted into the odds and ultimately may well achieve that all important aim: winning consistently.