About the Author HOW A MATH NERD PLAYS CRAPS
Todd Gades is a 37 year old software developer for a large financial institution. He holds a Bachelors Bachelors of Science degree in computer science and a minor in mathematics from St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Todd is not a professional gambler and does not claim to make a living from playing craps. Instead, he has a unique insight into the game of craps and hopes to simplify the game as well as provide techniques for playing craps smartly so that anyone can play the game and have a good shot at coming out ahead. Todd is married to Amanda Gades and they make their home in Lakeville, Lakeville, MN. Todd can be reached on Twitter @YoEleven_
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1 : Introduction Introduction ............................................................ 3 Chapter 2 : Why Craps? ............................................................ 5 Chapter 3 : The Game ............................................................... 8 Chapter 4 : Craps Lingo .......................................................... 12 Craps Table Layout ............................................................. .... 14 Chapter 5 : The Bets ........................................................... .... 15 Chapter 6 : Roll Distributions and Probability ....................... 20 Chapter 7 : House Edge ...................................................... .... 22 Chapter 8 : The Best Bets ....................................................... 23 Chapter 9 : Bankroll............................................................ .... 24 Chapter 10 : The “Luck” Factor .............................................. Factor .............................................. 28 Chapter 11 : A S imple 6/8 Strategy ........................................ 29 Chapter 12 : An Expansion of the Simple 6/8 ........................ 32 Chapter 13 : Betting “Units” ................................................... 35 Chapter 14 : Betting the Passline ............................................ 37 Chapter 15 : Passline + Come ................................................. 39 Chapter 16 : More On Place Bets ........................................... 41 Chapter 17 : Buying the 4 and 10 ........................................... 43 Chapter 18 : A Combination Strategy ..................................... 44 Chapter 19 : Expanding on the Combination Strategy ........... 46 Chapter 20 : Guarantee a Profit .............................................. 48 Chapter 21 : Other Systems .................................................... 51 Chapter 22 : Martingale Betting ............................................. 55 Chapter 23 : Fibonacci betting ................................................ 57 Chapter 24 : “Pressing” Strategies .......................................... 59 Chapter 25 : True Stories ........................................................ 62 Chapter 26 : Etiquette ............................................................. 69 Chapter 27 : Electronic Games ............................................... 72
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Chapter 28 : Build Your Own System .................................... 74
How a Math Nerd Plays Craps Chapter 1 : Introduction The game of craps, I believe, is easily the most fun game in the casino. And aside from counting cards or cheating at a game, it offers the best chance to actually win money. The “poker boom” of recent years has brought a lot of attention to casino gambling. More and more states are allowing casinos as a source of revenue, and more and more people are gambling in hopes of being like the people pe ople they see on TV winning money. Let’s face it though, not everyone can be a poker professional. Very few can, actually - ditto for being an expert card counter at blackjack. Not to mention the chance of being caught and banned from f rom casinos forever! Craps, however, takes very little skill to play well very well, in fact. Played well, I believe it is the easiest game to consistently have the best shot at making money. You can play with almost no house edge at times, meaning you only need to get slightly lucky lucky to be successful. Just one or two random rolls of the dice out of 100 in your favor can turn the tides and give YOU the advantage over the casino. Even if the dice are slightly profit from craps. There out of your favor, you can still profit are no “basic strategy” systems to memorize with large
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and complex tables that end up being not-so-“basic” not-so-“basic”,, and no shrewd ways of playing which require advanced intelligence. This can be a beatable game in the short haul, which is what most of us play, and I hope to tell you the best ways of how to do it. I’m a self -professed -professed math nerd and proud of it. True, it doesn’t make a lot of women swoon, but it does help a lot in terms of earning money, keeping money, and making money grow (no, not on trees…at trees…at least not yet). I have a degree in mathematics and have always enjoyed applying it in real life. Applying mathematics at a craps table in order to make money while gambling seems more interesting to me than calculating the strength of a bridge or ideal insurance rates, how about you? In my college days pursuing a computer science degree, I spent a lot of late nights in the computer lab working on programming projects. One night my lab partner and I got bored and decided to download what was a new phenomenon back then - an online casino! We fired up the craps table and were completely lost as to just what the #@%& was going on. Sometimes bets won, sometimes they lost. Sometimes the same number rolled on the dice would win for a bet and sometimes it would lose for that same bet! “WTF is going on here?” here?” we thought. It must be a software error! So we decided to figure out what the program's glitch was, looked up the rules to the game and found out the program was working correctly, we just didn’t understand the game! It turned out I had found the game which intrigues me to no end. end. The math involved here, the probabilities,
the house edge, betting strategies, money management strategies, betting progression theories… there’s some serious depth and potential here. And it isn’t difficult to play this game well! So what is this book about? I’ve taught many of my friends the game of craps. Some play it with me, some don’t. Some win money, some don’t. But, suffice it to say, we have fun, and I’m addicted to it. I’ve been successful playing craps. I’m not going to BS you; I don’t play thousands of dollars for hours upon hours, winning tens of thousands of more dollars. I go with my wife and friends to Las Vegas and we want to hit the pool, we want to hit the buffet, we want to do some people watching. We're truly "low-rollers". For the most part, I’d say I’ve recouped about a third of all my Vegas expenses playing craps. Are there mega jackpots? No. Go waste time and money at the slots if you want a shot at that. Do I earn tons of “comps” points such that casinos are a s k i n g m e to come play and giving me tons of freebies to keep me happy? No. A math nerd plays to win some money for dinners, get some free drinks while playing, maybe help pay for the airfare, and some extra “entertainment” bucks. This book isn’t about math. I won’t bore you with a bunch of formulas and advanced concepts. They might just bore and confuse you even more and turn you off to the game. Instead I’ll try to explain the math in more real-world terms. If you can count chips and do some simple adding and subtracting, you will easily be able to handle the math involved in the game of craps. The
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math cannot be avoided at times, but I’ll try my best to keep it simple.
Chapter 2 : Why Craps? Why does a math nerd choose craps to play? Why does a math nerd gamble in a casino at all? These are both great questions. All casino games are set up for the player to lose. Yes, all. Including craps! An extreme math nerd would avoid a casino altogether and buy 10-year treasury notes or something similarly FDIC insured. *Yawn* I can’t chastise him that much, because those products will make you money, but seriously? Booorriiing…..!! I’m interested in taking a risk of losing some of my hard-earned money, though, and likely you are too if you’re reading this book. Blackjack is one game that a player can get an advantage over the house if he or she is an expert player who has memorized “basic strategy” and is a perfect card counter. Card counting is an entire book in and of itself, but it takes months and years of practice to learn and play it perfectly. Then you actually have to get away with it in a casino, and casinos are becoming more and more adept at catching card counters! Teams of counters have been able to further exploit this advantage and even increase it. But again, very few people are able to perform this expert skill. Even fewer could be part of a successful counting team. A solo card counter may be able to get away with it if he or she is good. But a card counter must play a
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very long time in order to eek out a small 2% or so advantage. The casinos normally have this advantage, and they are open 24 hours a day and always playing, which is why they are the winners in the long run. On top of that, casinos are now changing the rules of blackjack to dissuade counters. They will pay less than the traditional 3 to 2 for blackjacks and/or increase the number of decks in play - both of which are not advantageous for the player. Another problem I have with blackjack is the shuffle. Assuming a player has “basic strategy” memorized and plays it strictly and every player at the table plays it strictly, the player’s destiny is essentially determined once the shuffle and cut is complete. Those cards are not coming out randomly; they are in a set order. The shuffle itself may mix up the cards very well, but it is not random by any stretch of the definition. That small 2% advantage comes into play assuming a player goes against many shuffles, whereby you are likely to see a fair distribution of cards such that it “appears” random. I’ve been at a blackjack table where I played perfect basic strategy and yet lost 7 hands in a row. Why? The shuffle simply was not in my favor. Had I gone outside the basic strategy and done something incorrectly, I could have potentially altered the outcome of my hands to shift them in my favor. (Maybe I should have!) But you are essentially a robot if you are playing basic strategy blackjack. There’s no creativity in playing
like a robot. Craps, on the other hand, is full of creativity! (More on that soon…) The opposite can also be true; the shuffle may be so much in your favor that it doesn’t matter much how you play, those cards are just coming out winners for you over and over. This is where a counter really does his damage. Personally though, it really bugs me when I’m playing how the math and strategy dictates I should play, but I keep losing because the deck’s order was against me the entire time. What about slots? A math nerd would say that slots are simply a waste of time. They require no skill and are boring. They are not random either, despite clever computer algorithms that make it look like the numbers are random. The machines are programmed to pay out a certain amount and keep a certain amount. In many states, this is actually a legal requirement, not a casino’s choice. Over the long run every machine will have to pay out a big jackpot or it will be breaking the gaming laws. You may, I emphasize m ay , be able to track how long certain machines have gone before they’ve paid a jackpot to help determine when it may be a good time to hop on, but let’s face it, you’ve got better things to do. If you must play slot machines, play low denominations and make sure you get a free drink or two while you play. How about Video Poker? This c an be a lucrative game for a math nerd. But again, there is a different basic strategy for every type of poker game which needs to be memorized and practiced. On top of playing 6
hundreds or possibly thousands of scenarios perfectly, you must get a machine with a favorable pay table in order to get your 98% or 99% expected payout, and then hope you get some favorable hands dealt to you. And you have to find a machine that no one else is using! There are a lot of people in the casino who know which machines have the good pay tables, and those machines are the ones people flock to. Live poker is a game that can be beaten, but again, this takes years of practice in reading people, knowing how to tell tells (pun intended), and take advantage of weaker players, all while knowing when you, yourself, are beat and when to get out of a hand. Very few people are successful in this business. Roulette is a fun game, but the house edges on the bets are very high. If you can find a wheel with only one single-green-zero slot, you’ve got better chances of coming out ahead, but realistically the bets in this game have a house edge that are too high for a math nerd to take seriously. Craps however is a game of virtually true randomness with the dice throws, excellent bets with house edges as low as 1% or lower, and a helluvalotta fun to play! Many people shy away from it because it looks very complex. My hope in this book is to break down the complexity of craps into smaller parts that are simple to understand. Some people are embarrassed to step up to a craps table because they don’t know how to play. Or worse – they get up to a table thinking they are a hot shot only to lose their shorts because they don’t
know how to play. I’m here to show you the good bets, the not-so-good-bets, explain the game, and tell you the best ways of how to win. Craps is a good mix of skill and luck. The luck, of course, is in the dice throws. The skill is in making good bets, knowing when to bet more, knowing when to bet less, and in managing your money wisely. Winning at gambling always feels good, no matter what game you are playing. But unlike losing at blackjack or video poker, when I lose at craps it is more a feeling of, “Oh well, the dice just weren’t rolling my way this time!” than a feeling of “It didn’t matter what I did because the cards just kept coming out against me, there’s nothing I could do about it!" or "This stupid machine! ” In craps, all that needed to have happened was for that one die to have flipped a hair more to one side and avoided a bad number for you. In blackjack, guess what? If you sat down when the deck was in a bad shuffle for you, you’re screwed and that’s final. This is why I love craps. Anyone can easily make the best bets in the house and get extremely low house edges. Craps is a very social game and you can play with friends or even make new friends at a table. All of this and it doesn’t require memorizing any complicated perfect systems, doesn’t require advanced intelligence, and doesn’t require hours and days and months and years of practice. So here it is… how I, a math nerd, plays craps…
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Chapter 3 : The Game If you already know the rules of the game, I’ll be honest, skip this chapter. The one-liners contained herein aren’t that good. Go directly to chapter 6. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200. (Well, hopefully you will on the felt). Okay for those of you still left and not yet bored out of your mind, first thing you do - hop on the internet and download a craps game. There are many out there, either online casinos (which don’t require you to play with real money) or a standalone software program. “Practice makes perfect” is what my mother always said, and I believe it to be true here as well. Once I get into talking about my strategies, you’ll find being able to practice them on a computer simulation game is an invaluable asset. But let me talk about the live game. First, there’s one guy in a casino uniform holding a big stick. No, he does not whip you with it, even if you ask him to. He uses it to gather up the dice as the shooter throws ‘em. On each end of the table stands a dealer in an equally bad and matching uniform. He’s the one taking your chips when you lose and giving you more when you win. In between the dealers is the boxman, usually wearing a normal business suit, thank goodness. He’s there to monitor everything, track comps, rule on any iffy-bets that some drunk slob threw out onto the table just as the dice
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were being thrown, and generally harass you about your funny looking Minnesota driver’s license after he cards you (It happened to me, seriously!). Around the rest of the table stand the players. Which brings me to another point - why the #@%& don’t they bring chairs? But I digress… Here’s how the game works. I’m not going to discuss the bets right now. Instead, you first need to understand the flow of the game before you start throwing chips on the felt. If you don’t understand how the game works, then you’ll lose chips like we did with the online casino back in the college computer lab, I promise. Let’s say a brand new table opens up with a group of frat boys on spring break. The guys start throwing chips around and the dice are handed to one of them by the stickman. Don’t worry about how the frat boys are betting just yet, we’ll get to that. For now, I just want to explain the flow of the game. The person rolling the dice is called the “shooter ”, and he rolls the dice to the opposite end of the table to start a game. Think of a “game” as a series of rolls, as short as 1, as long as infinity, during which the shooter either wins or loses. I know what you are thinking: “Whoa math nerd! Infinity? Stop talking theoretical BS here, WTF does that mean?” A “pass” means the shooter has won a game. A “miss” means they’ve lost the game.
“Ok ok… so how do you win?” You know in the movies or on TV, people jump up and down whenever someone rolls a 7? Or the Elvis line, "Let me shoot a 7 on every shot"? If it’s the first roll of a new game and you toss a 7, bingo! That’s an immediate pass (win). Same if it’s an 11. “Oh yeah, 7 come 11, I’ve heard that before!” The flip side though… and you’ll see EVERYTHING in craps has a flip side… is craps. 2, 3, and 12 are called the “craps” numbers. If the first roll of a new game is craps, it’s an immediate miss (loss). These rules for 2, 3, 7, 11, and 12 only apply to the first roll of the game, called the comeout roll. It has nothing to do with a closet, it’s just the first roll of the game. It’s an important term, though, so remember it! Read this paragraph again. Repeat it until you firmly have a solid understanding of the comeout roll. (Hint: it’s in the boldface text!) Now that you know the first roll of the game is the comeout roll, maybe you’re wondering, “How can you tell if the next roll is a comeout roll?” There are 3 ways to know if the next roll is a comeout roll. First, the stickman will say it’s the comeout roll just before the shooter throws the dice. Second, the black pucks in front of the dealers will say OFF. Look on your internet craps game or software program, you will see a round black marker about the size of a hockey puck that either is black and says OFF or is white and
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says ON. Third, if a new person becomes the shooter, his or her first roll is always a comeout roll. Again, the stickman will say something like, “new shooter coming out!” Okay, so we covered 2, 3, 7, 11, and 12 for the comeout roll, what about the other numbers? This is the meat of the game. 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, and 10 are the other possible numbers you can roll. If this happens, that number becomes the “point”. The shooter’s goal is to then roll that same number again which is called the “point” before he or she rolls a 7. Again, read this paragraph one more time. It’s important you understand what the points are, and how the shooter tries to roll their point a second time. Let’s go through a quick example… Let’s say the comeout roll is a 7. It’s a pass! “Way to gooooo, shootah!” High fives all around! A new game starts right away, because the previous one just ended with a pass/win (remember I said a game could be as few as 1 roll?). Next comeout roll is a 2. Craps! A loser! Well… easy come, easy go, right? Let’s give this a 3rd try…. New comeout roll is 5. Okay, that’s a point number. The point is a 5. The dealer will now take the black puck which says OFF, flip it over to the white side that says ON and move the puck next to the number 5. “So what’s this point thing mean again, math nerd?”
The shooter will now roll over and over and over until they either roll the 5 again, in which case, the game is another win, people jump up and down and scream (oh.. so this is why there are no chairs!), or they roll a 7 and the frat boys start swearing and bragging about how much better THEY could have done. If he does roll a 7, that’s called s e v en i n g o u t , and it means the game is lost. The dealer will flip the puck back to the OFF side and move it to the end of the table. The dice will then move to the next player on the left, and the whole shootin’ match starts over with a new comeout roll. So what does this mean for betting? Right now I’m just explaining the flow - how a game starts, how it ends and how the dice move around the table. But generally, you can make a bet that the shooter will win their game, OR you can even bet that the shooter will lose their game. If you are correct in how you bet the game will end, you’ll win. If you’re not, you’ll lose.
Here’s another example which will help you newbies :
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Player 1 is the shooter: come out roll is a 6 point is 6)
(The
Player 1 throws again: trying to roll another 6… nope, it’s a 5. Player 1 throws again: trying to roll a 6… nope it’s a 9.
Player 1 throws again: it’s an 11 (notice this is NOT a win because it’s not the comeout roll) Player 1 throws again: it’s a 6! Winnah winnah 6! The game is a pass or win! New game, player 1 keeps the dice and throws on the comeout roll: it’s a 3. Craps a loser! (But he keeps the dice because he did not seven out) Player 1 throws another comeout roll: it’s a 10 (The point is now 10) Player 1 throws: trying to roll another 10, but instead it’s a 7! Seven out! The game is a miss or loss, and the dice are given to the next player New shooter… player 2: come out roll is 7! Automatic win on the 7 since it was a comeout roll! Cue shouting and high fives! Player 2… a new come out roll is a 4. (The point is 4) Player 2…shooting for the 4: It’s an 8. Nothing exciting happens here. Player 2 throws again… and this time it’s a 4! Winnah winnah 4! Player 2 made their point! Cue high fives once again!
Got it? That’s the flow of the game. Notice how the same shooter keeps the dice until he or she sevens out. That is when the table is wiped clean of all losing bets, winners are paid and a new shooter starts. Try a few games on your internet game or software program and you should be able to follow it after a short time. You can now step up to a table and know just what the heck is going on. But uh… you have no idea how to bet yet!
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Chapter 4 : Craps Lingo Here’s a list of terms I’ve heard and know about which you may also hear. I will use a lot of these throughout the book so hopefully these will help you out. Shooter : The player who is throwing the dice. Line / Front Line : Same as the Passline. Backline : Same as Don’t Passline Seven out : When the player rolls a 7 instead of their point number. The game is considered a “loss”. Line Away : What the stickman often says when a shooter sevens out. Pay the line : When the stickman often says when a shooter makes his or her point. The game is considered a “win”. Comin’ out : The next roll is a comeout roll. Craps : A roll of 2, 3, or 12. Bones : Dice Checks : Same as chips
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Nickel : $5 chip Quarter : $25 chip (You may ask a dealer when buying in to give you “nickels”, or “quarters”, or both) Aces : A roll of 2. (Each die has a 1) Ace-Deuce : A roll of 3. No-field 5: A roll of 5. (The field loses when a 5 is rolled) Forty-five: A roll of 9 where the dice show a 4 and 5. Sometimes also called a “Colt”, as in the handgun, “Colt 45”. Puppy Paws : A roll of 10 where the dice show two 5’s. If you look, they resemble puppy paws. Yo / Yo 11 : A roll of 11. Eleven sounds very similar to Seven, so to avoid confusion, people will say Yo instead. Boxcars : A roll of 12. Hard : a roll of doubles, i.e. 2,2 or 3,3, etc. Easy : a non-doubles roll, i.e. 2,6, or 4,6, etc. 3x, 4x, 5x odds : The maximum bet allowed in odds is 3times your bet for the 4 and 10, 4-times your bet for the 5
and 9, and 5-times your bet for the 6 and 8. Some tables will have different variations but 3x, 4x, 5x is common. Color me up : Asking the dealer to count your remaining chips and give you the correct change in fewer chips. (i.e
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one $100 chip instead of twenty $5 chips... it's easier to carry)
Craps Table Layout
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Chapter 5 : The Bets Look at a picture of a craps table. Pretty wild, huh? Or as a Canadian would say, “Pretty wild, eh?” Better yet, look at one with chips on it. Even crazier! But hey, I’m here to help. Passline – This is the “outer ring” closest to where you stand, and where you typically see chips directly in front of a player. What does it mean? It means you’re betting that the shooter is going to pass, or win this next game. It pays “even money” which means you’ll win the same amount as your bet if you win. Remember the 7 or 11 on the comeout roll? That’s the passline. Remember making the point? That’s the passline. Remember sevening out? That’s the passline. The passline is used in many of my strategies, so you should take some time to understand it. If you bet here and the shooter rolls a 7 or 11 on the comeout roll you will win the same amount as your bet. If the shooter makes the point you will win your bet. But if you bet here and the shooter loses the game, either by throwing 2, 3, or 12 on the comeout roll, or by sevening out, your chips are swept away to the dealer’s stack. NOT what a math nerd likes to see! But the house edge here is only 1.4%, which means that over time, for every $100 wagered on the passline, the casino is expected to take $1.40 in profits for themselves. That’s outstanding in terms of casino odds. You will
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always want to make bets with the lowest house edges because mathematically, these are considered better than bets with high house edges. Once you've bet on the passline and a point has been established, you cannot remove that bet, it is locked in place until the game has finished. But wait, there's more! The passline unlocks the key to the best bet in the house. The only bet in the entire casino which has 0.00% house edge. No, I'm not joking. That's right... NO HOUSE EDGE! It's appropriately named the odds bet. If you've made a bet on the passline and a point is established, you can then add more money to the bet and get paid TRUE ODDS on those extra chips if the point number is rolled again. You make this bet by putting more chips behind your passline bet in the unmarked area of the felt. There are no markings on the felt for the odds bet. The casino probably doesn’t want you to bet here because they have no edge. However, dealers will often ask you about adding odds to a passline bet. It’s their job to get more money on the table. Besides having no house edge, another great thing about odds bets are you can also increase or decrease your odds at any time or even taken them completely off the table. Here's an example describing betting on the passline and also adding odds: (Warning, math ahead!)
$5 Passline alone : always pays even money. If the point is 4 or 10, there is a 2:1 disadvantage (meaning you should lose 2 times for every 1 time you win). If the point is 5 or 9, there is a 3:2 disadvantage, and there is a 6:5 disadvantage if the point is 6 or 8. $5 Passline + $10 odds : pays $5 + true odds if you win :
If they make the 4 or 10 as the point, you'll get paid $25. ($5 pass + 2/1 x ($10 odds)) So you risked $10 more, but won $20 more! If they make the 5 or 9, you'll get paid $20. ($5 pass + 3/2 x ($10 odds)) So you risked $10 more, but won $15 more! If they make the 6 or 8, you'll get paid $17. ($5 pass + 6/5 x ($10 odds)) So you risk ed $10 more, but won $12 more! Playing "double odds" in this example, $10, or twice your passline bet of $5, reduces the house edge down to a measly 0.6%. That’s almost nothing! Passline + odds is very powerful.
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Don’t Pass – Simply put, it’s the exact opposite of the passline with one exception: the 12 will not win on this bet, it will push (meaning it doesn’t win or lose). Not many people bet on the don’t pass line. If they do, they are said to be betting on the “dark side” and can be the target of a lot of negative chi. However, it also has a 1.4% house edge, so for a math nerd it’s actually a really good bet. But like the red-headed stepchild, it just doesn’t get much attention. This bet is really good on a “cold” table, where shooters are not making their points and are sevening out often. Like the passline, it pays even money for winning bets.
Field – This bet looks really enticing. 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 12! Look at all those numbers! And it pays even money! If the next roll is one of these numbers, you win. Otherwise, you lose. Ah… but a math nerd would do some counting here… there are 16 ways you can make these numbers, out of 36 total possible rolls. Uh… 16/36 is quite a bit short of even 50-50, which is what the bet pays if you win. 16 ways to win and 20 to lose!? However, most casinos pay double for the 2 and 12, some will even pay triple for the 12. So that brings you up to as high as 19 wins for 20 losses which is better, but that is still short of 50-50. This setup with the payout double for the 2 and triple for the 12 has a house edge of about 2.75%. Not bad, but we can do better.
Come – This is exactly the same as the passline, except you only bet here after a point has been established. I know what you’re thinking, “Huh?” The come bet often confuses new craps players, but it's not that difficult to understand if you can see it in action on your online craps game. Within the game where the shooter establishes a point for the passline, you can have separate new mini-games for the come bet! Wild!!! It pays the same amount as the passline - even money. It also pays on the 7 or 11 if it’s not a comeout roll and loses on 2, 3, or 12. Otherwise the chip is moved up to the new point number just rolled and you’ve got a new “come point” working outside of the passline point! As you might expect, the house edge here is also 1.4%. You can also add “odds” bets to come point numbers just like the passline. Put the chips down on the felt and tell the dealer you want to add odds to the bet. The dealer will stack the extra chips on top of the come bet. Try this bet on your online craps game simulation and it will make more sense. Again, you only make a come bet after a point has been established (when the puck says ON). Don’t Come – Exactly the same as the don’t pass bet, except it’s made after a passline point is established. Again, the same exception “push” rule for the 12 applies. “Push” means the bet does not win or lose, nothing happens. Also, it has a house edge of 1.4%.
Place bets – Don’t see the word “place” on the table? Stop looking; it isn’t there. Look at the large numbers, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10. This is where the dealer will put your chips when you tell them you want a place bet on one of these numbers. Place bets are great because you can make them, increase them, reduce them, or even take them completely off the table at ANY time during the game. And unlike the passline or come “point”, the number only needs to be rolled once to win on a place bet. So, how’s it work? Very simple - if the number you bet on is rolled before a 7, you’ll win. If the 7 shows up instead, you’ll lose. Beware that by default, on the comeout roll these bets are considered “Off”, meaning they won’t win if the number is rolled and they won’t lose if the 7 shows up. You can, however, ask the dealer to make your place bets “On” during a comeout roll if you wish. This is one reason why the puck says On or Off. You can easily tell if your place bets are working or not by looking at what the puck says. The payouts for place bets vary on the number and this is important to understand. Most of the bets I have described up until now all pay even money. But this is where some of the complexity of craps comes into play and, unfortunately, why many people shy away from the game because they don’t understand all the payouts. But they aren’t too difficult to understand if you look at them in pairs:
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The 4 and 10 each pay $9 for every $5 wagered.
The 5 and 9 pay $7 for every $5 wagered. The 6 and 8 pay $7 for every $6 wagered. Yes, that’s correct, SIX dollars wagered. The place 6 and 8 should be made in six-dollar increments.
The house edge for these bets also varies based on the number. 6’s and 8’s are pretty good at about 1.5%. A math nerd loves place bets on the 6 and 8, and you will see I use them extensively. The 5 and 9 are a little worse at 4%. There are some instances when a math nerd will place the 5 and 9, but not too often. The 4 and 10 have a house edge of 6.67%. A math nerd NEVER places the 4 and 10 at this price…but… Buy bets – …Instead, a math nerd will BUY the 4 and 10! If the right conditions exist, that is. A buy bet works the same as a place bet, except that the casino pays true odds for the bet, minus a charge or “vig”, as the casinos call it. Think of it as a fee you are charged for the privilege of having the casino pay you true odds for a winning bet. Always ask the dealer what they will charge if you buy the 4 or 10 before you make the bet. A math nerd will look for a casino that will charge only $1 if you buy the 4 or 10 for $25 and it wins. The 2:1 payout on this bet is $50, minus the $1 charge, which is only 2% of the winnings. Not a bad deal. A math nerd will NOT buy the 5, 6, 8, or 9, as the buy bets have a higher house edge than the “equivalent” place 5, 6, 8 or 9. There is no box on the table for a buy bet, instead the dealer will put your chips on the number much like a place bet and will
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put a small token on top of the bet which says "buy" to indicate it is a buy bet. Lay bets – These are the opposite of a buy bet. Again, the casino will charge you a fee for this bet. If you “lay” a number, you are hoping that the number is NOT rolled before a 7. A math nerd might lay the 4 and 10 after a big winning session with about a 2.5% house edge, but will otherwise stay away from these. Again, ask the dealer how much they will charge you to lay the 4 or 10. Sometimes these bets are also called “no” bets, meaning you want to bet against the number. “$20 no 4” would be the same as “$20 lay 4”. Again, a lay bet looks similar to a buy bet on the table, with a token labeled "Lay" placed on top of the chips. Big 6/8 – This works like a place bet on the 6 and 8, but only pays even money. Do yourself a favor, pretend like you don’t see Big 6 or 8 because it is a rip-off . If you win a big 6 bet with $5, you win $5. Alternatively, if you win a place bet with $6, you win $7! Place the number instead and earn the extra money. Casinos put this bet on the table with big numbers and close to the players as a sucker bet to players who don’t know what they’re doing. Feel free to point and laugh at someone you see betting big 6 or big 8. A polite math nerd, though, would explain to the person the difference and tell them to place the 6 or 8 instead. Some casinos have eliminated the “Big 6 /
Big 8” bets from their tables altogether so you might not even see this bet on the table you play at. Proposition bets – These bets are in the middle of the table, and the stickman usually controls these bets as they are closest to him. Generally speaking, a math nerd will NEVER make a proposition bet with any seriousness in hopes of winning. These include the “hardways” bets, where you are hoping that a 4, 6, 8, or 10 is rolled as a “double” pair: (2,2), (3,3), (4,4) or (5,5) before the number is rolled the “easy” way, such as 4 being rolled as (1,3) or 8 being rolled as (6,2) or (5,3). The “doubles” way is the hard way, hence the name. Hardways bets will win if you roll the number the “hard” way before your roll the number the “easy” way or a 7, in which case they lose. Other proposition bets are that the n e x t r o l l will be a 2, 3, 7, 11, or 12, or several combinations of these. Some of the combinations have fun names like “Horn”, “Hop”, “ Any Craps”, “C and E” or “ Any-7”. The payouts for prop bets look high (30 to 1, 15 to 1, etc), but the house edges for these bets are all very high. The only time a math nerd might play these bets is when he is making a “tip” bet for a dealer or another player. Yes – you can make bets for other people at the table, including the dealers! If you’ve been winning, show your appreciation for the shooter or the dealer by placing one of these exotic bets for THEM. Even if you’ve been losing, consider making a simple tip bet for the dealers as you leave the table. Yes, you are throwing money away,
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but it might really make someone’s day if that bet wins for them. The “fire” bet is another proposition bet that you see at some tables. It is a bet you would make when a new shooter first gets the dice. If they make 4 unique point numbers or more, you will get paid a handsome sum. As you may have anticipated by now, it has a very high house edge and should really be avoided. It would make for a pretty fun story if you had a really hot roll and actually won on a “fire” bet, but you’ll probably waste a lot of dollars trying to win a “fire” bet. Some tables also feature a bet called "All Small, All Tall, All or Nothing At All". All Small is a bet that the shooter will roll a 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 before rolling a 7. All Tall is that they will roll an 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 before a 7. And All or Nothing At All is that they will roll every number EXCEPT a 7. These can be fun and have high payouts, but seriously high house edges, too. A math nerd stays away from them. These are the bets generally accepted at a craps table. Focus your attention at the passline, odds, and place bets if you want to review this chapter again.
Chapter 6 : Roll Distributions and Probability Now that I’ve talked about the bets and how the game works, we need to take a look at the dice and see really what’s going on here. We’ve all thrown dice in board games since we were kids, but do you really know what numbers are most likely to show up? A math nerd will quickly tell you that when throwing 2 dice, there are 36 different number combinations that can show up. 1 thru 6 on one die and 1 thru 6 on the other. 6 times 6 is 36. Here is a diagram showing the roll possibilities: Total – (first die, second die) 2 – (1, 1) 3 – (1, 2) (2, 1) 4 – (1, 3) (2, 2) (3, 1) 5 – (1, 4) (2, 3) (3, 2) (4, 1) 6 – (1, 5) (2, 4) (3, 3) (4, 2) (5, 1) 7 – (1, 6) (2, 5) (3, 4) (4, 3) (5, 2) (6, 1) 8 – (2, 6) (3, 5) (4, 4) (5, 3) (6, 2) 9 – (3, 6) (4, 5) (5, 4) (6, 3) 10 – (4, 6) (5, 5) (6, 4) 11 – (5, 6) (6, 5) 12 – (6, 6)
Bookmark this page as I will refer to this chart many times throughout this book. It is very important.
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Notice that the 7 is the most common number which should be thrown. It can be made six different ways. That’s why it is such a key number in the game of craps. In the bet descriptions in the previous chapter, many of the bets are won or lost when the 7 is rolled. No matter what one die is showing, the number 7 can always be made by the other die. Notice also that “pairs” of numbers have the same likelihood of showing up. The 2 and 12. 3 and 11. 4 and 10. 5 and 9. 6 and 8. Now it’s making sense why the bets on these pairs pay out the same amount if they hit, right? You should remember these pairs, as many of my strategies involve betting pairs. Now, in a perfect world where the laws of probability are strictly obeyed, every group of 36 rolls would produce one and only one of every combination in the chart listed on the previous page. “What the heck are you talking about, math nerd?” I mean, if you took 2 dice and rolled them 36 times and kept track of each die, you would use every possible one of the combinations on the chart, without any repeats. Now I’m going to tell you that is impossible to do. Well, ALMOST impossible. I’d be willing to bet it’s never been done, although I have no proof of this. The truth is, you’re going to have a mix of everything in the previous chart. You may have rolled only three 7’s when you should have rolled six of them. You may have rolled three 12’s when you should have only 1. Hell, you could even have thirty-six 12’s! But over the long run of hundreds and thousands of rolls, the roll distributions will
look pretty similar to the chart. Every roll is independent of the previous one, so you cannot say that you can predict a certain number is “due” because it hasn’t showed up in awhile. Nor can you say other numbers are repeating and will certainly show up again. Sure, it’s possible a shooter may hold the dice the same way, toss them the same height, hit the same spot, and the same numbers appear to be showing up, and more power to the guy who can do this (I do believe I’ve seen it done once, and I won a lot of money from that shooter), but a math nerd knows this cannot be relied upon. Now that I’ve said all this, consider again a group of 36 consecutive rolls. Try it once yourself and write down how many times each number showed up. This is an important exercise, so yes, seriously, go grab a pair of dice and do it! The probability says there should be five 6’s rolled. Did you get exactly five of them? It’s possible, but not likely. What if you got ten 6’s? I would certainly want to have been betting on that number, wouldn’t you? What if you got only one? I would hope I hadn’t been betting on it! I just did 36 rolls of my own and rolled only three 6’s instead of the expected five. Not good if I’m betting on the 6! So, if there were only three 6’s, there must have been some numbers showing up more often than they should have, right? I had the 8 appear nine times, almost twice as often as the probability says it “should” have been rolled. This is why I like to bet equivalent “pairs” of numbers, like the 6 and 8 together as you’ll 21
read in my strategy chapters soon. Together, these 2 numbers showed up twelve times instead of the expected ten. If I had been betting only on the 6, I’d be pretty disappointed, but the 6 and 8 together would have been pretty good! In groups of 36 rolls, you will almost always have some numbers showing up more often than they “should”, and some showing up less often than they “should”. There’s no way of knowing which ones these will be, when a “cold” number will turn “hot”, or vice versa, but know that it definitely happens. Many of the strategies in this book try to take advantage of these temperature changes in hopes of catching cold numbers warming up or hot numbers cooling off. I like to think of dice rolls in craps as a series of 36 rolls. Which numbers were hot, which numbers were cold? Of course, the past does not predict the future, but the rules of probability say that eventually, the cold numbers must heat up and the hot numbers must cool down.
Chapter 7 : House Edge Okay I mentioned earlier about the house edge of various bets. What’s up with that and why is it important? One simple way to think of it is: it’s the amount of money that the casino does NOT pay you for winning bets that the mathematical probability says it should if it were a perfectly "fair and square" game. Still confused? Let’s step outside the box for a moment and think of a river current. If you jump off a dock into a river with a flowing current, you’re going to be taken downstream by the moving water. The higher the percentage of house edge that a bet carries, think of it as a faster river current, and you’ll need to swim even harder to make it back to the dock. Smaller house edge bets would be a slower river current, making it easier for you to swim back to the dock. In other words, “get back to even”. Expanding on this river current analogy, you should also think of the amount of money you are betting. Let’s say you are betting a high amount, $100, on a good bet like the passline with a house edge of only 1.4%. Then you bet $1 on a bad proposition bet like Any-7 with a house edge of over 16%. There is a far greater weight assigned to the good bet than the bad bet, so in this instance a math nerd shouldn’t yell at you for playing that horrible Any-7 for $1. Just don’t get into the habit of playing these bad bets too often.
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Every time you have a winning bet, think of taking the number of swim strokes upstream into the current equal to the number of dollars won. Every time you have a bet lose, take that number of swim strokes downstream. If you’re above the dock, you’ve won money. If you’re below the dock, you’ve lost. Now, also consider the length of time you play. The longer you play, the longer you have to fight that current. Even a slow current, if you stay in the water long enough, will make it hard to swim back to the dock. The less you play, the less current you have to fight. That’s why a math nerd won’t play craps for hours and hours on end. Most math nerds are not marathon swimmers. You probably aren’t, either. Typically, I play craps for about 20-30 minutes. Usually this is sufficient enough time for me to have won or lost enough to quit. More on “when to quit” later... The house edge is probably the most important thing to a math nerd because all casino games, including craps, are set up so the casino will win over the long haul. Generally speaking, the fancier looking the bet, the better it is for the casino and the worse it is for the player. The “odds” bet with no house edge isn’t even marked on the felt anywhere! Minimizing the house edge is vital to a player who wants to win money consistently. So now I’ll start to tell you what the best bets are, how to play them, and how to hopefully win on a consistent basis.
Chapter 8 : The Best Bets This should be a short chapter. The best bets are those that win! Yay, chapter done! Uh…okay, Uh…okay, you want more than that, I gotcha. A math nerd will tell you the best bets are those with the lowest house edge, and the math nerd would be correct. So that rules out ALL of the proposition bets, but includes the bets like passline + odds (or come + odds). odds). The don’t pass line alone also qualifies even though not as many people play it. Place bets on the 6 and 8 are also some of my favorites, as you will soon find out. Other acceptable bets for a math nerd are the field, place 5/9, and buy 4/10. There you have it, those are the only bets a math nerd will make at a craps table! A math nerd will also tell you to get the lowest possible house edge, and you should listen. That means make the minimum bet on the passline (or come) with a house edge of 1.4% and the maximum amount on the odds with 0% house edge. edge . And you know what? He’d be right! I’ve been to a casino where the minimum passline bet was $2 and they let you bet up to 100-times that on odds. $2 on passline and $200 $200 in odds!?! odds!?! That table is a math nerd’s dream come true! That’s almost a 0% house edge for the combined bets! bets ! But let’s be realistic here, I’m not willing to bet $202 $202 on a single number showing up instead of a 7 because that’s that’s usually my entire bankroll for that session.
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This strategy of passline + odds offers you the best chance to come out ahead in the long run and if you're going to be playing a long time, say, several hours or more, this is the only way way to play. But craps is a game with so many options and it can be insanely fun to experiment with. Just passline and odds alone is great, great, and it’s a strategy I often play, but play, but there are many other strategies and bets which can still give you outstanding chances to consistently come out ahead as well as get you more involved with with the game. Therefore, I will offer a few other good strategies with low house edges that you can play. But before I give you a bunch of fun strategies for you to try out I need to explain more about bankroll and money management which is probably more important than important than good bets vs. bad bets.
Chapter 9 : Bankroll If there’s only one rule in this book you should follow it is this: Don’t gamble more than you can afford to lose. lose. Read that sentence again. Read it a 3rd time. Got it memorized? Beyond all the bets, house edges and systems I explain in this book, that one rule is by far the most important. I’ll repeat it because it’s so important – important – D DON’T ON’T GAMBLE MORE THAN YOU CAN AFFORD TO LOSE! So you’ve looked at your budget and you’ve got some extra money you’re willing to lose. How much do you play with? This answer to this first depends on the table minimums. My rule is – is – the the lower the table minimum, the better. Typical table limits may be $5 $2000 or $10 - $5000. The lowest minimum I’ve ever seen was $2 – $2 – that was a fun table! Unless you’ve really got a lot of extra money on hand, you won’t be betting anywhere near those upper limits. If you’re that kind of player, I doubt you have the free time to read this book, anyway. Usually I end up playing at a $5 table, which means the lowest I can bet on the passline is $5. The lowest I can bet on place 6 or 8 is $6. One point to remember about the minimums is they do not apply to the proposition bets like the hardways or any-craps. The casino will gladly take even $1 on these because there’s such a high house edge for these bets.
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Okay… so so let’s say you’re at a $5 minimum table, what is a good amount to buy in with? This really depends on how much you plan on betting. If you are only going to bet $5 on a simple bet like the passline or the field, you won’t need to buy in for much more than, say, $50. If you are going to throw in some place bets, maybe odds for the passline, then multiply whatever the most money you expect to have out on the felt by about 10. This should be what you buy in for. If this goes over your limit of what you can afford to lose, then you either have to bet less or find a lower minimum table, or go home! There’s no mathematical basis to basis to this 10-fold number, but you want to make sure you can withstand a couple of bad luck hits to your bankroll and still have some in reserve to fight back. What about when to quit? This is a good question and a tough one to answer. answer. It follows the old adage of, “buying stocks is a science, but selling stocks is an art form.” One good answer for when to quit quit is, quit quit before your plane or bus leaves for home! But I hope you won’t be playing THAT long. long. Instead, set some win goals and loss goals. A 10-20% win of your initial bankroll is certainly a reasonable win goal. That’s $10 to $20 if your buy-in was $100. It might not sound like much, but when you consider you are fighting a house edge - swimming against that current - ANY profit, really, is good since all casino games are set up for you to lose. Most people consider a 10-20% gain in the stock market a good gain for an entire YEAR!
Also consider where you have been during the game with your bankroll. Did you lose a bunch right away but have fought back to get even with the house? Maybe that’s a good time tim e to quit. Are you already up 20% on your very first roll? Maybe that’s that’s a good time to keep going; your next bet is essentially playing with the house’s money. Here are the limits I try to adhere to. Notice I said “try to”. No one is one is perfect, this is a fun and infectious game and you can get caught up in the action VERY easily, as you will read later in my true stories chapter. First of all, I say quit if you have lost half of your buy-in amount. Obviously the rolls are not going your way at this point. Swallow some pride and take a few chips with you away from the table and try again later. Losing is bad enough, but nothing is worse than leaving with nothing! It’s happened to me and it wasn’t a good feeling losing my last chip. One trick I sometimes use is to put half of the chips in my pocket and leave them there. If you buy in for $100, put $50 in your pocket a nd don’t touch them. That forces you to leave the table with chips if things go badly. On the upside, also quit if you’ve doubled your buy-in. 100% profit may seem like a wild expectation, and it is. That is why I say if you have have doubled your buyin, you’ve you’ve been been at a very hot table, and it is probably going to cool down. Take your profits and leave. If you really want to stay, pocket your original buy-in plus about half of your winnings and play with the rest.
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Anything in between a loss of 50% or gain of 100% is sort of a gray area. You really need to think think about where you’ve been in your game play and where you’re at now. at now. If you have been up 75% but now find yourself only up 25%, a math nerd would say you should quit; your numbers are are cooling off. If you were down 40% but are now even, you may want to quit, happy to have gotten back the chips you were down. down. It’s really all about how you feel and whether you can leave the table happy. Think of the 2 examples above. Would you be happier having been up 75% but walking away up 25% or would you be happier having fought from way down back to even? That’s a difficult question to answer. I can justify either scenario as being better. Also, I would say that 3/4ths of all craps players are ahead at some point during their game. 3/4ths of those people lose it all back, and more! Don’t be one of them! If you’re ahead, pocket your profit and profit and leave. Even if that means you win on your very first roll, a math nerd might just get up and leave right away. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that. I’ve done it. I’ve paid for a few meals that way. Here’s yet another another scenario for you to ponder and one that I hope you will come across. Let’s say you bought in for $100 and planned on making a $5 passline bet with $5 in passline odds, an excellent strategy as I will soon explain. A $100 initial buy-in makes sense for this strategy. Now let’s say after 30 minutes the dice were really hot and you’ve doubled your money to $200. You could definitely quit here and I hope you would
seriously consider it. But let’s say you’re in the mood to keep going. Set aside $125 - $150 in your pocket. This is your initial buy-in plus $25-$50 in profit. Don’t touch it! This will leave you about $50-$75 left in chips to play with. Now step up your bets. Maybe do $5 passline with $10 in odds. Maybe add a field bet to the original passline + odds. You’ll have more fun cheering for more numbers and potentially increasing your earnings even faster. And if the dice turn against you, which they eventually will, you still have that profit saved in your pocket and you can walk away ahead even if you start losing. Also, here's a trick that I use to help keep an eye on my bankroll during a game. With a bunch of chips in the trays in front of you, it can be difficult keeping track of how much you have. Let’s use the example where white chips are $1, red chips are $5, and green chips are $25. Typically when I play, I have mostly red chips, some white chips, and some green chips. I try to use the white or green chips as separators for the red chips. I will stack in front of me 5 red chips, then a white chip, then 5 red chips, then a white, etc. That makes it visually easy to see quickly how much money I have in front of me. Each group of red chips is $25, and the separators are each $1. Or you can separate green chips with red chips if you are a little higher end player than I am. It just gives you a quick way to add up how much you have by glancing at the colored sections of chips and doing some mental math.
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Another trick that I have used and really like is how to separate your bankroll across several days. Typically when I travel to Las Vegas it’s over an extended weekend so I might have 3 or 4 days worth of gambling in front of me. Let’s say you bring $500 to gamble with for a weekend. Separate that into $100 for each of the first 3 days, and maybe $200 for the last day. On Day 1, use your $100 as your buy-in. Follow some win/loss limits for that day as you play. If you follow the loss limit, especially, you will have some money to carry over to the next day. Let’s say you had a good day and you’re up $60. Take that $160 and add it to the $100 for Day 2. Now you’ve got $260 to buy in with, and you can make some more bets, or bet more money on each of your good bets. Maybe Day 2 didn’t go as well as planned, and your $260 dropped to $210. Take that money and add it onto another $100 for Day 3 for a new buy-in of $310. See the pattern? As you progress throughout a multi-day stay, you’ll always have some money to play with. If you follow the win/loss guidelines, you’ll generally have MORE money each day to play with. I would hate for you to be at a cold table your first day and lose most or all of your bankroll and not have much to play with the next couple of days! Of course, you can split up your own bankroll however you want. If you’re a higher end player, you could split up $5000 into $1000-$1500 each day, for example. And maybe even take that a step further and
say you’re going to take your $1500 per day and split that into a $500 buy-in, 3 times per day. The possibilities are nearly endless. As I stated at the very beginning of this book, you aren’t going to win tens of thousands of dollars playing craps. Craps is not like some slot machines were you can put a few dollars in, and possibly walk out with $50,000 or more. Personally, my own bankroll for a weekend in Las Vegas is between $500 and $1000 for the entire trip. I’ve typically ended a weekend ahead anywhere from $100 to $350 (I believe was my best trip). It’s not huge winnings, that’s for sure, but I’ve been able to consistently come out ahead on all of my weekends in Las Vegas except one trip where the dice simply weren’t landing my way. And that trip I was only down about $60 over 4 days of play which isn’t too horrible. I believe the key to winning at craps is money management. The dice will do what they do. You can’t control that. But you can control how much you come to play with, what you bet on, how much you bet, and when to leave. I’ll say it again. Don’t gamble with money you can’t afford to lose. None of my strategies or systems will make you rich. They’re meant to provide a good way to play as well as you can against the house and give you a good chance to win money over a medium length period of time, say an hour or less.
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Chapter 10 : The “Luck” Factor Okay you've read about the dice and how each throw is random and independent from the others. I’ve mentioned how we need to fight the river current which is always working against us when we are betting. And it works against us in different ways – the type of bet, the amount of money we wager on that bet, and the total amount of time we play. I concluded the last chapter saying I hope to give you a strategy which gives you a good chance at winning over about an hour at the table. (Warning! Math ahead!) First, though, think of the lottery, where you bet a dollar and then pick 5 or 6 numbers from about 50 pingpong balls. If you get them all right, you win millions of dollars. You have to be EXTREMELY lucky to do this. Most mega jackpot lotteries have odds of 1 in hundreds of millions! You’re far more likely to be struck by lightning. But, now think of flipping a coin and seeing if it lands heads up. It’s a 50/50 chance, right? You don’t need to be all that lucky to flip a heads. What about flipping 2 heads in a row? That’s a 1 in 4 chance. In other words, flip a coin twice and repeat this four times, one of those should result in getting 2 heads. If you had two groups where you got both heads, I would call you slightly lucky. If you had 3 groups where you got both heads, I would call you very lucky. If none of the groups had both heads, then you would be slightly unlucky.
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You could do this all day long, keeping track of coin flips, but you’ll get bored quickly, trust me. But the math will eventually work out that about 1/4th of the time, you’ll flip 2 heads in a row. You will have streaks where that happens more often than it should, and streaks when it rarely happens. Now change the thought of flipping a coin to tossing dice. The same rules about probability apply. You will have streaks where numbers are rolled more often than they should, and streaks where they do not. Look back at the 36 rolls of dice you did earlier. See that some numbers showed up more often than they should? Others showed up fewer times than they should have. If you do another series of 36 rolls and keep track of them, you’ll probably see that the totals evened out a bit from your first 36 rolls. My craps strategies aim to hopefully take advantage of these small short term fluctuations in how many times various numbers are rolled, versus how often the probabilities say they should be rolled. Using good bets and solid money management, you don’t have to get that lucky in order to be a successful craps player. This book is titled “How a Math Nerd Plays Craps”, not how a math nerd “always wins at” or “makes money at” craps. This is important to understand because this IS gambling, and all of the bets (except the odds bet) do have an advantage for the house. So these strategies are designed to give you the best chance at winning at a game that you’re not supposed to win at.
Chapter 11 : A Simple 6/8 Strategy This is really the first “system” I learned, and the only system I played on my first trip to Las Vegas. I won about $300 in $7 and $14-increments that trip playing only 4 times and that’s how I became hooked on the game of craps. First I’m going to tell you what many people do, and why I believe it’s wrong. People usually bet the table minimum and then increase their bets as they win, called "pressing" the bet. Their idea is to bet only a small amount, win, and then press the bets up to build more off your profits, and build and build exponentially. But sooner or later that 7 will roll and they’ve now lost everything that they had “won”. The word “won” in the previous sentence is in quotation marks because they never really won anything. Those chips were sitting out on the felt in no man’s land, they were never in your chip tray. I always like to think of chips on the table as the casino’s chips, not yours. They are only yours when they are in your tray or in your pocket. Also, with this type of betting, when the 7 hits you’re down your original minimum bet from your own stack. Not cool! I say, put the BIG BET OUT FIRST and THEN REDUCE your bet after it wins. That’s right, pocket some chips after a winning wager. Those are now MY chips once they are in my pocket or on my chip tray and I earned them. Uh... actually whoever rolled the dice
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earned them for ya. Thank them, even if you are not a believer in good karma or positive chi. It’s polite, and a lot of math nerds are polite. You will see this pattern in almost all of my systems, where you start with a large wager, then, after it hopefully wins, you reduce your bets and pocket profits. “Ok, enough rambling, math nerd! What’s the system?” Okay okay… You wanted the best, you got the best! Here it is : Let’s assume you’re at a table where the minimum bet is $5. Don’t bet anything on the comeout roll. Sure, you’ll miss out when the shooter bangs out a few 7s and 11s and everyone else is jumping for joy. But this strategy does not call for a passline bet. After a point is established, either the 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, or 10 it doesn’t matter, you take $24 off your chip tray, put it down on the table in front of you and tell the dealer, “place the 6 and 8 for $12 each”. You can also shorten it to “Twelve dollar 6 and 8” if you want. The dealer will know what you mean, this ain’t his first rodeo. Note that a typical buy-in amount based on my money management philosophy for this strategy is about $240. Okay, make it an even $250 or $300 just so the dealers don’t look at you funny. Now you wait for the shooter to roll, hopefully a 6 or 8! If he does, you’ll win $7 for every $6 bet. You’ve got $12 out there on each number so a math nerd calculates you’ll win $14. You don’t care which number hits, either the 6 or the 8 as they have an equal chance of showing up (remember I said in chapter 6 to bet pairs of numbers?) and you have the same amount bet on each
number. You cheer for the 6 or 8. But unfortunately, if the 7 does show up, it’s lights out and you just lost $24 and you take 24 swim strokes downstream! Ouch!
“Okay okay, I see now, I was just handed $26, which is $2 more than what I put out there to start with… so I’m up $2? No matter what?”
Let’s be more optimistic though. Look back at the roll distribution chart in chapter 6. A math nerd will add up that the 6 or 8 can show up ten different ways on the dice, whereas the one bad number, the 7, can show up six ways. So you’ve got a 10 to 6 advantage of winning on each roll, that’s 62.5% which is a decent amount over 50/50.
Exactly! You’ve got it! Take 26 swim strokes upstream against that very slow river current of 1.5% which is the house edge for place bets on the 6 or 8. And you’ve still got $6 out there riding on each of the 6 and 8, which you can think of as betting with the house’s money now. Even if the shooter sevens out and you lose the chips on the table, you’re still ahead $2 from where you started. $2 might not sound like a lot, but remember, ANY profit is good in a casino.
Here come the dice…Bang! The shooter rolled an 8! Great! The dealer will take $14 off HIS stack and sort of look at you like, “uh… what now, buddy?” Tell him “Reduce my 6 and 8 to $6 each”. Now he’ll do a doubletake, maybe even have you repeat yourself, because most people will press winning bets up. Not a math nerd! The dealer will do what you asked him to do and will hand you a stack of chips. Put them in your tray. “So what just happened? How much am I up?” Let’s look - originally you put $24 out there. You just won $14 with the winning roll, and you’re br inging back $12 of your original opening bet. That totals $26 being handed back to you. Count it when the dealer gives it to you! Dealers are people too, and while they rarely make mistakes, it sometimes happens. I've only had this happen twice that I know of and the dealer was happy to correct the mistake both times.
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Let’s keep going with this system. The shooter will roll again, and guess what? That same 10 to 6 advantage you have over the 7 applies. The dice have no memory, right? Let’s say they roll a 3, nothing happens. Then a 12, nothing happens. Then a 7… seven out! Your $12 out there is now gone. But you are ahead $2 and upstream from where you started! Think what would have happened if instead you started with the minimum $6 bets on each of the 6 and 8, pressing the winnings instead. You would have won $7 when the 8 rolled, pressed up that 8 to $12 taking back $1 for yourself, and then the 7 rolled and you would have lost everything out there. Now you’re down $11! Up $2 or down $11? It doesn’t take a math nerd to tell you which is better. But let’s continue to be optimistic. What if the shooter didn’t roll a 7 when you had $6 on the 6 and $6 on the 8? Instead, that 62.5% works in your favor again,
this time with another winning roll of an 8! The dealer takes $7 off his stack, chastises you for not betting more (but screw him!), and you say “take all my bets down”. Now he’s REALLY going to chastise you for quitting. Don’t be intimidated! Actually most dealers will not do this, or if they do, they’re probably joking with you. I had one dealer at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas tell me I was playing smartly by taking my money down. I gave him a nice tip bet which won him $15 when I left the table ahead about $50. But I digress… So you just won $7 on another winning 8, and I told you to take the remaining $12 off the table. That’s another $19 being handed to you. You were already up $2, now you’re got another $19, so the math nerd does some mental math… hey, $21! Blackjack! Uh.. wrong game, sorry. Take 19 swim strokes upstream and then set a safety net against the current. “Huh? Safety net? You’re taking this river analogy a little far, math nerd.” Here’s what I mean – you just took all your bets off the table. You cannot lose any more. The river current isn’t even affecting you now! You’re ahead $21 for playing intelligently and getting a little lucky, even though that 10 to 6 advantage is always in your favor. Now you wait for the shooter to either make their point or seven out. You don’t really care. Order a White Russian from the cocktail waitress. Explain what you’re doing to the cute girl you chose to stand next to, she might be wondering how you’re winning.
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So to summarize this system – wait for the point to be established, then bet $12 on the place 6 and place 8 each. If (hopefully when) you win one of these bets, take your $14 winnings and reduce your place bets to $6 each, taking another $12 back and locking in a $2 profit no matter what happens next. If you’re lucky and get that second win, take that $7 in winnings and the other $12 off the table, and you’re now up $21. There’s only one feeling better than winning money with this system, and that’s when you’ve taken all your chips off and you see that 7 get rolled. You did not lose anything because you do not have any bets out there! There it is. That’s the system. It’s that simple, and I’ve used this system more than any other system. And that’s the truth.
Table 1 Simple 6/8 Regression - $24/$12/off
Situation
Profit or Loss
0 hits on the 6 or 8 (immediate 7-out)
- $24
1 hit on the 6 or 8, reduce bets, then 7-out
+ $2
2 hits on the 6 or 8, take all bets off
+ $21
Chapter 12 : An Expansion of the Simple 6/8 Okay so you’ve practiced the simple 6/8 regression strategy. You like it. You’ve used it. It’s worked some of the time for you and other times it hasn’t. There have probably been a few time s when you’ve won your 2 hits, taken all your chips off the table, then a series of more 6s and 8s show up before the 7 out or the shooter makes the point. About now you're thinking, ”Dammit!, all these 6's and 8's and I'm lettin’ ‘em go with nothing out there! Geez, this system is kinda monotonous. $12, 6, off. $12, 6, off. (yawn) Got anything ... uh... MORE?!” Hell yeah I do! Like before, start with the normal $12 on the 6 and 8 and reduce to $6 each after the first hit, locking in your small $2 profit. After the 2nd win, though, pocket the $7 profit, but keep your other chips out there on the 6 and 8. You are still guaranteed to be up $9 even if the dirty 7 shows up. But now you’ll make another $7 on the 3 rd hit, the 4th hit, etc. Let’s say you do win 4 times, where does that leave you? $14 + 7 + 7 + 7 for $35 in winnings and $12 still out there at risk on the felt - a guaranteed profit of $23! At this point, a math nerd would probably take back the other $12 and pocket it all. But let’s say you’re greedy and you like this little hot streak and want to take a little more risk. You could, instead, press up the 6 and 8 back to $12 each and start the entire series over. Let’s say the
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hot streak continues and you get a 5th hit, another $14 win! Should you drop down to $6 each like the basic system? Absolutely! There’s nothing wrong with that, but now a very greedy math nerd might instead press the bets up to $18 each! Who knows, maybe the shooter's got the rhythm down and is hitting that same spot every time. I've seen it done... honestly (although there’s no proof it was skill instead of luck). Does it hit again? Go to $24 on each number! Why not? You're still pulling back even MORE profit each time, and winning more each time. If you get a string of these wins in a row, trust me, you'll be feeling fine, even if Tiffany still has not come back with your White Russian! I will explain a similar system like this with betting the passline in a later chapter along with a true story of how it worked nicely on a great hot roll. This variation gives you a little more action, but remember, you’re also in that house edge “river current” all this time, too, and when that ugly 7 shows its head, and it will, anything out there on the felt is GONE. A math nerd would rather be keeping small profits in HIS chip tray than seeing massive unrealized gains out there on the felt getting stacked into the dealer's stack after losing. Here are two tables summarizing a couple variations of the strategy.
Table 2 Expanded 6/8 Regression - $24/$12/keep bet at $12 until 7 out
Situation 0 hits on the 6 or 8 (immediate 7out) 1 hit on the 6 or 8, reduce bets, then 7-out 2 hits on the 6 or 8, leave bet alone, then 7-out 3 hits on the 6 or 8, leave bet alone, then 7-out 4 hits on the 6 or 8, leave bet alone, then 7-out 5 hits on the 6 or 8, leave bet alone, then 7-out 6 hits on the 6 or 8, leave bet alone, then 7-out 7+ hits
Profit or Loss - $24 + $2 + $9 + $16 + $23 + $30 + $37 + $44 + $7 more dollars each hit
Table 3 Expanded 6/8 Regression with pressing after 5 hits
Situation 0 hits on the 6 or 8 (immediate 7-out) 1 hit on the 6 or 8, reduce bets, then 7-out 2 hits on the 6 or 8, leave bet alone, then 7-out 3 hits on the 6 or 8, leave bet alone, then 7 out 4 hits on the 6 or 8, leave bet alone, then 7 out 5 hits on the 6 or 8, press the 6 and 8 up $6 each, then 7 out 6 hits on the 6 or 8, press the 6 and 8 up another $6 each, then 7 out 7 hits on the 6 or 8, press the 6 and 8 up another $6 each, then 7 out 8 hits on the 6 or 8, reduce to $12 each on 6 and 8, then 7 out
Profit or Loss - $24 + $2 + $9 + $16 + $23 + $18
+ $20
+ $29 + $81 !!!!!
Notice how in the above tables, after you get that first hit, there are no negative numbers. This is a very key point and is really the basis for how a math nerd plays craps! You only have to sweat that first hit with your biggest bet of the series, unless you are playing the
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expanded version where you start to press your bets after you have already pocketed plenty of earnings. In Table 3, you will see the huge jump from $29 to $81 at the end. This is when you are taking back some of your bets. It is highly unlikely you will win 8 times before you see the 7, but the point here is: when you reduce your bets, you really see your profits increase. It seems kind of backwards that when you bet less, you win more, but in this case it is true. Once you get that first hit, you must stay in profit range. Don’t increase your bets until you’ve won a lot. Or better yet, don’t increase them at all, instead REDUCE them, or take them off the table completely. Before you get overly excited about leaving bets out there and pressing them up, notice in Table 1 in the previous chapter, the simple system, you are ahead by $21 after just 2 hits and you remove your bets. Now look at Table 3 after 7 hits, you are ahead only $29. That’s only 8 dollars more than the first system, yet it took you 5 more wins to get there. That’s because you would have $48 on the felt at risk with the Table 3 system, versus nothing at risk with the Table 1 system. A math nerd would suggest you stick to the first system as you start to learn and practice the game of craps. Your bankroll will last longer, you will get to play longer, and you have less money at risk. Move to the other systems if you have already profited a lot.
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Chapter 13 : Betting “Units” For much of the rest of this book, I will often talk about betting in terms of “units”. It’s all based on what the minimum bet of the table is. If the table minimum is $5, then a “one unit” bet would be $5. “Two units” would be $10. 3 units would be $15, etc. Remember that the place 6 and 8 must be made in $6 increments, so even at a $5 minimum table, a “one unit” bet would be $6 and two units is $12 for the 6 and 8. If the table minimum is $10, then one unit for most bets would be $10, or $12 for place 6 and 8. 2 units is $20 or $24. You get the picture. One special note about tables with a $10 minimum : Casinos will often accept a $10 bet on the place 6 or 8 even though these bets should be made in $6 increments. The payout for a $10 place on the 6 or 8 is usually $11. A math nerd would calculate it is more advantageous to bet $12 instead of $10, anyway, to boost your payout to $14 if it wins. I will also refer to odds on passline or come bets in terms of units. One unit of odds is equal to the amount of the passline or come bet, with exceptions for the point being 5 or 9. Recall that the odds pay out 3:2 for the 5 and 9. If you bet $5 on the passline and the point is 5, you will want to put out $6 in odds, not $5. Why? The casino will cheat you out of some money, that’s why! A 3:2 payout on $5 is $7.50, but every craps table I've ever played at, except one, does not have $2.50 chips or 50-
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cent pieces. They will instead pay you $7.00. But if you put $6 in odds, a 3:2 payout is a much nicer $9. So by risking an extra $1 in odds for the point being 5 or 9, you will win $9 instead of $7. Many dealers will even ask you to put down $6 if you try to put $5. They’re actually watching out for you! Similarly, triple odds for the 5 and 9 would best be made as $16, where you will enjoy a $24 payout should it hit. So let’s go through an example - assume you bet $5 on the passline and the point is 4, 6, 8, or 10. A single unit of odds would be $5, two units would be $10. If the point were 5 or 9, a single unit of odds would be $6 and two units, also called “double odds” is still $10. (Warning! Math ahead!) Quick quiz… I say to bet $5 passline with double odds, and place 2 units each on the 6 and 8. How much money are you betting? Well, $5 + $10 in odds, and place bets on the 6 and 8 are $6 per unit, so $12 on each of those numbers. 5 + 10 + 12 + 12…That comes to $39. Did you get it correct? One more – You already have $5 on the passline and the point is 9. Bet single odds on the passline, one unit on the 6 and 8 and one unit on the field. What is your total amount of chips on the table? $28! Did you remember single odds for the 9 is $6, not $5? Discussing betting in terms of units instead of dollars makes sense because not everyone plays at the same level as others. What might be a costly bet of $25 to one person might be a normal bet for someone else.
Other people reading this book might not be betting in dollars, but some other currency. You can use your own betting level amount and multiply it by the number of units I describe to determine how much you really would be betting.
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Chapter 14 : Betting the Passline I’ve mentioned the passline carries one of the lowest house edges on the table at 1.4%. That’s a very slow current to have to swim against! And also remember that adding the odds bet to your passline bet effectively reduces the house edge even further! This is the most common bet people play, many times the ONLY bet people will play, and a very conservative math nerd will likely do the same. Aside from the low house edge, it also lets you participate in the social aspect of the game since most people are rooting for the shooter to make his or her point, or roll some 7’s on the co meout roll. You always know when that happens because people scream for joy! Few things are as infectious as being at a craps table when everyone is betting on the passline and the shooter is making their points. Everyone’s jumping up and down, making money and high-fiving each other. “Oh waitress…?” Complete strangers who never knew each other become instant best buddies. Who knows, maybe you’ll see that shooter and his wife out at the pool or in the buffet line. You may have a new friend! I’ve had good rolls where other players high-fived me and said “you’re my hero!” And what’s more, the opposite isn’t really true. If you’re losing money for the table by rolling bad numbers, people don’t hate you, at least I
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have never witnessed any animosity towards a cold shooter. This is a fun, fun game all around. Okay enough nostalgia, let’s get to the betting. It’s pretty simple, throw money on the passline before the comeout roll (the puck will say OFF). If a 7 or 11 is rolled you win, but if it’s craps (2, 3, or 12) you lose. Repeat. I’ve told people who are going to Vegas that want a “simple strategy” for craps the following : “Put 5 bucks out on the passline. If the dealer slides you another chip, pick it up and put it in your tray. If he takes the chip away, put another one down.” You honestly don’t really need to do much more than that to have a solid craps strategy with a low house edge. You don’t need to know about probability or what the heck is going on over the rest of the table. No strange 7 to 6 payouts or 3 to 2 payouts. It’s an even-money bet, which is what most people are accustomed to seeing from other games like blackjack, baccarat or many roulette bets. Understanding the passline further, as I eluded to in chapter 5, add the odds bet to your passline wager to enhance its earning potential. “Geez you’re talking like my stock broker now!” Well, in a way it’s similar. You’re adding more shares to your position to increase the amount of money you’ll hopefully make. And a bonus – the odds bets pay a TRUE payout based on the probability. It’s like adding a dividend-paying stock to your portfolio! They, in effect, reduce the 1.4% house edge of your passline bet. So a simple passline and odds strategy might be:
On the comeout roll, bet 1 unit ($5) on the passline and after the point is established, bet 1 unit of odds ($5 for the point being a 4, 6, 8, or 10, and $6 if the point is 5 or 9). Cheer for the point! Your bankroll will increase very quickly with a hot shooter banging out a couple points for you with extra odds bets. An easy way to remember which points have the “odd/strange” bet amounts for “odds” is they are the “odd” numbers of 5 and 9. 4, 6, 8, and 10 are all even numbers. Or make it really simple and just double your passline bet in odds or ask the dealer, they will help you. The passline bet is really quite simple and good mathematically, too. Adding odds… even better! Look at the table below and see how the more odds you add to your bet, the greater amount you’ll win if your number hits. Passline alone will only pay you even money. A math nerd loves adding odds! Each table or casino may have differing rules on how much in odds you are allowed to add to your passline (or come) bets. The rules are usually displayed on a placard near each dealer on the side of the table along with what the table limits are. In Las Vegas, most casinos will allow "3x, 4x, 5x" odds, which means if the point is 4 or 10, you can place up to three times your passline bet in odds. If the point is 5 or 9, you can place up to four times your passline bet in odds. And for points of 6 or 8, you can bet up to five times your passline bet in odds. Other casinos may allow 5x odds no matter what the point is, or even 10x odds! Some, however might only allow 2x odds. If you plan on playing the passline,
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or come bets with odds, you'll want to find a table that allows the most amount of odds. Keep in mind, though, your bankroll. The more odds you use, the lower the house edge, but the higher the variance! For a math nerd, craps is often a battle between house edge, variance, and bankroll. Table 4 Passline and odds by point. 1 unit = $5
Point Passline only Passline + single odds Passline + double odds
4 or 10 (win/loss) +$5 / -$5
5 or 9 (win/loss) +$5 / -$5
6 or 8 (win/loss) +$5 / -$5
+$15 / -$10
+$14 / -$11
+$11 / -$10
+$25 / -$15
+$20 / -$15
+$17 / -$15
Chapter 15 : Passline + Come Remember my description of the come bet? “It’s just like the passline, except you play it after the comeout roll.” This can be somewhat confusing at first until you see it working. Try it on your craps simulation game on the internet. On the comeout roll make a passline bet and wait for the point to be established. Once it is, put a bet on Come and watch what happens. Let’s say the 7 rolls right away. Your passline bet loses of course, but the come bet wins! It’s like an insurance policy for the passline! Every non-comeout roll for the come bet works like comeout rolls for the passline. But if the 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 or 10 rolls, the dealer will move your chips up to that number and you’re cheering for that number (the come point) to roll again. And you’re still cheering for the passline point, too! Of course though, once that 7 shows up, they’re all toast. This is a way to get multiple numbers “working” for you. Remember the roll distribution we tried earlier? Some numbers show up more often than they should, some show up less. By spreading out your bets across multiple numbers, you have a better chance at catching that “hot” number. Let’s build a strategy. On the comeout, make a passline bet. After the point is established, make a come bet to get another number “working”. Then make another come bet until you get 3 numbers working. Now wait for either the numbers to win or lose. There is a 1.4% house
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edge on all of these bets, which as I’ve said is pretty good. But now you’ve got 3 times as much money out there, so you’re risking a lot more if the 7 shows up. If you’ve got extra money and are willing to risk it, add odds to the passline and come bets increasing their power. It’s what a math nerd with a sufficient bankroll would do. “Okay, math nerd, I’ve tried this and it’s fun, but it seems I maybe get 1 or 2 wins, then the 7 wipes everything away and I’m still down overall!” Yes… this is common. The 7 may be cold for awhile, but it is the most common number rolled so it will not stay cold very long, usually. Put another way, the 7 is the most likely number to heat up. How do we beat that? Well we can’t beat that, but we can play smartly. Let’s say you successfully get 3 numbers working, and you put 1 unit of odds on each come bet, as well as your passline bet. (We’ll say $5 = 1 unit) Let’s say the point is 4, and you also have the 5 and the 8 with come bets + single odds on each. The 8 hits and you are paid $21, your $10 original bet plus $11 in winnings. You’ve got $21 still out there on the passline and the 5. ($5 passline, $5 odds. $5 come bet on the 5 and $6 in odds). If the 7 shows up here, you’ll be down $10. A math nerd knows the 7 is more likely to show up than either the 4 or the 5, so it may be smart to remove your odds, taking back $11 of your original bet. So you’ve won $11 on the 8, and have $10 out there in come bets which you cannot remove. If the 7 does show up, you’re still ahead by a dollar. And if you get lucky and the 4 or 5 does show, you’ll be up even more. Sure, it would have been nice to have those odds
out there to collect more, but you should always be fearful of the 7. You may see some people playing strictly passline + come bets. A math nerd approves of this strategy as it has a low house edge. If you find that you really love the game like I do and you want to play for long periods of time, say, an hour or longer, this is the way to play. Bet ONLY passline + odds and/or come + odds. If you add odds to the bets, it reduces the house edge even more, but you also end up putting a lot more money out there. Even with single odds at a low $5 minimum table, you could very quickly have $40, $50, even $60 on the table which requires a substantial initial buy-in. With all of these numbers “working” for you - when that 7 shows up, you’re wiped out. Come bets are great when you get the same number rolled several times before a 7, but I have never had too much success in my personal play trying to get a lot of numbers working with multiple come bets. I have better luck with winning on bets where numbers only have to be rolled once which are the place bets…
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Chapter 16 : More On Place Bets Okay back to the place bets. I gave you a couple of options for playing the 6 and 8, where you reduce a larger starting bet down after winning. I firmly believe this is the best way to do it. I also gave you some options for playing longer after locking in a profit and eventually pressing the 6s and 8s back up to take advantage of a hot streak in the roll distribution you may be in the middle of. What about the other numbers? The only other place bets a math nerd will make are on the 5 and 9. These bets pay $7 for every $5 wagered. (A true payout would be $7.50 to $5). That 50 cents which you are not being paid will add up over time, so I do not recommend playing these very often. In contrast, the $6 bet on the place 6 or 8 should pay you $7.20, but actually pays you $7.00. That’s 20 cents you are not being paid, which is a far less percentage than the 50 cents for the place 5 or 9. Still though, these bets on the 5 and 9 can be useful at times. Let’s say you’ve been doing $12 on the 6 and 8, hitting and regression to $6 each, locking in $2 of profit. They hit again and you can either come down completely for $21 in profit, or let them stay there for another chance. What if, instead you placed the 5 and 9 for $5 each along with your $6 on the 6 and 8? Where does this leave you? Well… you had won $21 from your previous 2 winners and you would have $22 out there at
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risk, so you could potentially lose $1 if the 7 showed up right away. This setup is called 22-inside, and the dealers will know what to do if you tell them “22 inside”. Look back at the roll possibilities. There are six ways to make a 7, but 18 ways to make either the 5, 6, 8 or 9! This is a 3:1 advantage over the 7 and at this point you’re really only risking $1 of your original money. This is sounding better now, huh? Or a Canadian might say, “This is sounding better now, eh?” But I digress… It’s a pretty good advantage over the 7 at this time, and if you get a hit, then maybe take all the bets down and you’re now ahead $28! Or, take them down incrementally - if you get that next hit, maybe take only the 5 and 9 back off since they have the higher house edge and are less likely to show up compared with the 6 or 8. If you want to do it this way, a math nerd would keep the 6 and 8 out there for more possible wins. The place 6 and 8 are mathematically better than the 5 and 9. They show up more often and have a lower house edge. But place bets on the 5 and 9 can be useful! One special note about the 5 and 9, if you're betting higher amounts, say $20 or more, it might be advantageous to BUY the 5 or 9 instead of placing it. You'll want to ask your dealer about how they will handle the vig on a buy 5 or 9. If you are only charged the vig for a winning buy bet, go ahead and buy it instead of placing it. You might see a math nerd smile at the other end of the table. Back to the 6 and 8, what if you started with $18 on the place 6 and 8? I’ve done this myself and as long
as you get that first hit, you have a multitude of options. If one of these hits, it’s a $21 win. You can instantly regress down to $6 on each number to lock in a $9 profit. You could go to “22-inside”, which, again, puts you $1 at risk, but you are 3 times more likely to get a win over the 7 on every roll here as mentioned above. The nice thing about place bets on the 5, 6, 8, and 9, is that they all have the same payout - $7 per unit (of $5 or $6). This makes keeping track of how much you’ve won pretty easy, it’s always a multiple of 7. And you can take the bets off at any time unlike the passline and come bets. Want a good shot at a free cheap lunch? Use 22inside. You have a 3:1 advantage over the 7. Those are pretty good odds it will win you $7, which is enough for a combo meal at most fast food joints. How about a good shot at a free buffet? No, don’t stand there for 3 hours betting huge amounts earning “comps” points. Use 44inside! It’s simply $10 on the place 5 and 9 and $12 place 6 and 8. One hit and you win $14. Take all your chips off and head over to the buffet line. As you can see, there are many different ways to create place bet strategies. Again, I firmly believe that you start with the 6 and 8 betting more than the table minimum, lock in a profit with 1 hit, then gradually spread things out, possibly fanning out to the 5 and 9. If you are still winning, then consider pressing the bets up 1 unit at a time, pocketing the rest as more profit. Place bets kick ass, and a math nerd loves them! If you are a higher end player, this basic principal still applies. You could initially bet, say $60 on the 6 and 42
8 each and regress to $30 after one hit. Or go immediately to $44-inside. Or even go all the way down to the minimum $6 on the 6 and 8. In this case, you would have locked in $58 in profit after your first hit! You have many options when you’ve locked in profit and experimenting with the place 6 and 8, 5 and 9 in different betting amounts can be a very fun time at the craps table.
Chapter 17 : Buying the 4 and 10 All this talk about 6 and 8, 5 and 9… what about the 4 and 10? There are a couple of reasons why I don’t like to play the 4 and 10. First of all, each of them is only half as likely to show up as the 7. The two of them combined, then, have an equal chance of showing up as the 7 does. If you play them as a pair, it’s simply a coin toss in terms of the probability of either showing up instead of a 7. Look back at the roll distributions - I like the pair of 6 and 8 best for its 10 to 6 advantage, and then 5 and 9 together have an 8 to 6 advantage. Secondly, in order to get a “good” hous e edge for a buy 4/10, you may need to bet a significant amount more than your other bets. If you can find a table where they will only charge you $1 for a winning buy bet of $25, this can be a fun bet. A $25 winning buy bet on the 4 or 10 will pay $50, minus the $1 charge. That’s only 2% of your winnings. If you were to buy the number for only $10, you will win $20, but they will still charge you $1, which is now 5% of your winnings. The key is to bet the most such that they will charge you the least. You will want to ask the dealer what they will do for different dollar amounts before you make a buy bet on the 4 or 10. For a math nerd, it is difficult to play a good strategy like $12 6 and 8, then have to throw $50 more out there on the 4 and 10 which are less likely to show up. If you’ve got a big bankroll and were doing an “$88-
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inside” with “Buy $25 4/10”, I can see how this could be profitable if you get that first hit. Just PUH-LEEZ take some money off the table and lock in a profit. I have only made this $25 buy 4/10 bet in my life once and fortunately I was lucky enough to roll the 4 on my very first roll. I then took both wagers off the table and proceeded to roll two more 4’s. Oh well… Another guy on the opposite side of the table was betting the same way except he pressed his bets. Now the math nerd looks like the dummy, but hey, I was happy with my $49 win and it brought me back to even for my session after I was down! I quit after I finished rolling and was definitely relieved to have gotten back to even.
Chapter 18 : A Combination Strategy Hopefully by now you’ve gotten the hang of the game. You understand the bets and why some bets are better than others. You’ve practiced it on the internet or at home and you’re ready to move on to bigger and better things. Well, bigger for sure; better we h o p e . Here is a strategy using some of the best concepts from what you’ve already read. Bet the passline for 1 unit and wait for a point to be established. Then place the 6 and 8 for 2 units and put down single or double odds on the passline. Now, as your numbers hopefully start winning, go to the regression system with the place 6 and 8, and also regress your odds as well. “What?! – the math nerd is saying take a bet off the table which has no house edge! This guy’s a quack!” Yeah yeah yeah… I realize this goes against the ultra conservative math nerd who puts out all the odds possible. More power to him, but I like to take big wins at the beginning and then pull money back. Maybe, just MAYBE, I will make the ultra conservative math nerd a little happier by saying this – if you get your hits on the 6 and 8, take those bets off and instead place a portion of your winnings back into the passline odds. Now you cheer for the point! “Oh waitress…?”
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Starting this strategy over from the beginning, if the point number becomes a 6 or 8, the place bet on that number with the 1.5% house edge does not make sense because you can now take an odds bet on the passline which has NO house edge! So in this case where 6 or 8 is the point, place the other number that is not the point for 2 units and put down 2 units of odds for the passline. Now play the regression down on both the place bet and the passline odds and then consider adding some odds to the passline if you have locked in a profit after a couple wins. If you want to get 3 numbers working in this case where you’ve got a point of 6 or 8, tr y the come bet! If the shooter 7’s out right away, that come bet wins, which will “cancel” the loss on the passline. Also put odds on the come bet after it gets moved to a number to improve its earning potential. One note about come-bet odds : odds are like place bets on the come out roll – they are not “ON”. If you have a come bet on the 9 and double odds from the previous game and on a new comeout roll the shooter rolls a 9, you will only win even money on your come bet. You will not win 3:2 true odds on the come-odds, the odds are just simply returned to you. The reverse of this, however, if they roll a 7 on the comeout, you will only lose the flat come bet itself, you will not lose the odds, they are simply handed back to you by the dealer. You can, however, ask the dealer to turn your odds bets “ON”, just like you can with place bets. See how the passline and come counter each other? They will cancel each other out when the 7 shows
up. This is another reason people like making come bets when they have a passline bet. Try out this combination strategy on your own. You’ll find out that if you hit a hot streak, you’ll really pile up the winnings. But, with so many bets out on the table, that 7 will wipe you out quickly, too. A combination strategy like this will require a pretty decent sized buy-in to start with. If you’re following my money management strategy of adding $100 per day to your bankroll, a combination strategy might be good for the last day of your trip when you more likely going to have a larger buyin.
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Chapter 19 : Expanding on the Combination Strategy Now you’ve seen how I combine the passline/come + odds with place bets on the 6 and 8, regressing the bets down each time to pocket some profits. If you were to play this strategy as I’ve explained it without any changes for a long time, the house edge will eventually eat away at you and you WILL lose money. How do we attempt to counter this? Vary our bet sizes! You will certainly notice some hot and cold streaks while you are at the table. Bet more during the hot streaks and bet less during the cold streaks. “Wait a sec, math nerd, you’ve already sa id you can’t predict the dice. You’ve also said hot streaks cool off and cold streaks warm up. WTF?” Yes, both these things are true. There’s no guarantee that if the 6s and 8s haven’t been hitting for you for the last 2 hours, they will all of a sudden get hot. I believe, though, that you CAN tell if a table has been hot or cold. From this, you hope that you are in the middle of this hot or cold streak and you adjust accordingly. There’s nothing mathematic behind the word “hope” so a purist math nerd will take offense to that last sentence. But let’s be realistic, this is gambling, a lot of it is “hope” anyhow.
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Going back to the combo strategy, I said start with 2 units on your place bets and odds. If you’ve had 2 consecutive seven outs without getting any hits on your numbers, reduce your next bet to only 1 unit of place bets and odds (or leave the table completely!). This table appears to be cold so you don’t want to lose as much. Then, once you get two games in a row where you’ve won money and taken your bets down, you’ve locked in some winnings so you are now able to go back up to 2 units per bet. Get 2 more complete series wins in a row? The table could be heating up! Now start with 3 units per bet and when you win, regress down to 1, then off on another win. 2 more series wins? Wow things are hot! And now you can afford to risk more! Go to 4 units per bet, regress to 2, regress to 1, then off. Winning streaks like this are extremely rare, but if you are fortunate enough to be a part of one, get your money out there. As soon as you get 2 losses in a row, that’s a sign to me things are cooling off. I’d probably quit the game entirely at this point, ahead a good amount. But if you wish to keep playing, you could restart your “series” again back at 2 units as your base bet. Of course, remember your loss limit. I said 50% of your bankroll is a good loss limit. You may already be well below that after even a semi-cold streak. Don’t think that the dice are due to turn anytime soon. Also remember – the 7 is the most likely number to heat up. In all the systems I play, the 7 is my enemy. When I say the table is hot or cold, it is usually referring to the 7. If there are fewer 7’s being thrown,
then there are more of the other numbers, which hopefully you are betting on. If there are more 7’s being thrown, that means there are fewer of the other numbers being rolled, and it only takes one 7 for you to lose everything on the table. It’s worth mentioning again the amount of money you should consider for your initial buy-in. This strategy can have a pretty high maximum amount of chips on the table so you need to consider this when determining how much to buy in for. You want to be able to withstand a couple of bad hits to your bankroll if you hope to fight back and therefore you’ll need a substantial buy in to play a system like this.
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Chapter 20 : Guarantee a Profit The title of this chapter is a little misleading. There are no guarantees in craps. I say guarantee a profit after 1 hit , no matter how small that profit may be. The simple 6/8-regression is an example of this as you read earlier. 22-inside, then off, is another example. In a casino game that is set up for you to lose, a math nerd tries to keep as much as possible OFF the table so you are not swimming against the current more than you necessary. Instead, have that safety net set up so you cannot be taken downstream. Play with the casino’s money as much as possible, not your own. Even with my combination systems, there are ways to guarantee a profit after 1 hit. You really need to practice this to get the hang of it so I hope you downloaded a good simulator game like I suggested! You must be able to keep a tally of how much money you’ve won so this requires quite a bit of concentration on your part when playing it live. Hopefully by practicing the place bets on the 6 and 8, passline or come bets and odds, it has become almost second nature to you, knowing exactly how much you are winning with each hit. And remember my trick for stacking your chips, using the different colors as separators? This will come in very handy for this system. I will now use dollar amounts instead of “units” in most of these examples because that’s the bottom line
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we need to look at in order to guarantee a profit…dollars won. Start with a $5 passline bet and assume the point is 4, put double odds on the passline for $10 and $12 on the place 6 and 8 each. You’ve just risked $39. Let’s say the place bet on the 8 wins for you, a nice $14 score! Now reduce the bets on the table such that you have fewer than $14 at risk. You could take down all the place bets and leave the passline + $5 in odds. Or you could take all the odds off locking in more profit. Since you cannot remove the passline bet, as an option you could leave $6 on either the 6 or 8, but not both. Since I prefer to always play the 6 and 8 as a pair, I would likely choose to leave the passline + $5 in odds which has a lower house edge than the place 6 and 8 and it also impresses a math nerd. Now wait for the point to be decided. If the shooter 7’s out instead of making the point-4 (which is twice as likely to happen in this case), start this series over again. You will have an overall $4 profit. But, let’s say the shooter does make the 4. You win an additional $15 for a total profit of $29. Repeat this system for the next point, placing the 6 and 8 for $12 each and double odds on the passline. Again you have $39 at risk, but with your previous winnings you are gaining ground! Now let’s say this system has been working for you and you are ahead about $60. Now expand the system up to 3 units of odds and place bets. You will have $56 or $57 at risk, depending on how much you
have in passline odds. This is less than the $60 profit you have accumulated thus far, so even if the 7 screws you over here, you are still ahead for your session. But if the numbers keep coming your way you’ll be winning even more, allowing you more options. For example – you have the $18 place 6/8 and passline of 5 + 15 in odds. Let's say the 6 hits, giving you a $21 win. Now reduce your bets on the table so you have less than $21 out there. What are your choices? One option is a passline bet with no odds ($5) and place 6 and 8 for $6 each, which is an outlay of $17, locking in a $4 profit. Another would be passline + single, double, or even triple odds. This is still locking in a profit, while giving you that excellent passline + odds bet. Let’s say you reduce to $6 place 6 and 8 and remove the passline odds. Now the 8 hits! You now have even more choices instead of just paper or plastic. Take those winnings and replace some of the passline odds? Yup! Or how about take the 6 and 8 completely off and instead put the passline odds back? Yup! What about taking EVERYTHING down? Yup! All are good choices for a math nerd. You have more freedom with this system which makes it more fun. Your winnings can really pile up quickly if the dice are behaving. As long as you get that first hit, you are golden because you can reduce your bets locking in a profit. Remember, AGAIN, the 7 is the most likely number to be rolled and the most likely number to “heat up”. Much of the time spent in this strategy, quite
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honestly, is managing small $1 thru $4 profits. To me, that’s still better than losing a lot. But, losing a lot is also possible with this system. Got $39 out there and the 7 shows? You’re screwed. It’s just how the game works. Remember in my combination strategy I said reduce to single-unit bets on the 6 and 8 and odds if you lose a couple in a row (or leave the table completely!)? Do this here as well. Even with a $6 place bet winning you $7, removing everything except the passline bet will yield a $2 profit in this case. Trudging around in the trenches eeking out $1 or $2 profits is a lot better than losing your shorts. Unless you don’t like your shorts, of course. Maybe you’ve tried this strategy on your simulator but you are getting points which are 6 and 8. This is quite common, of course, but it throws a bit of a wrench into the numbers I listed above. Recall how I said it is better to take passline odds for a point of 6 or 8 instead of placing the number? That is still true here! Place the “other” number for $12 and take $10 in passline odds. Now make a come bet to get 3 numbers working and add double odds to it. This scenario will give you a bet total of $42. Keep track of these numbers and how much you are winning if your numbers hit. Reduce your bets to lock in a profit. One way this strategy can get you into trouble is if the dice have been cold and you’ve reduced your bets to single units. The point is 8 so you take $5 in odds and place the 6 for $6 and do a come bet. Now the 6 hits so you are paid $7 and the come bet goes up to the 6 and
you take your passline odds off. Oops, wait a sec… you still have $10 out there but only won $7? You didn’t lock in a profit! Easy solution - if you have reduced to single unit bets, don’t make a come bet to get 3 numbers working. Hope and pray the 6 and 8 bring you back out of the hole and net you some chips to increase back to 2 units where you have more flexibility. Other things that can throw a wrench into this type of system are the “natural” wins and losses, which I have not written very much about. By these, I’m talking the 2, 3, 7, 11 and 12s which either win or lose your base bet on the passline or come. While the place bets and odds provide the most amount of your wins or losses, these “natural” wins and losses absolutely do affect your bottom line. Let’s say you just made a point of 4 with single odds for a payout of $15. Great! Now the next comeout roll is a 2 and you lose $5. The next comeout roll is 12 and you lose again. Now they finally establish a point of 6. You may want to adjust your bets keeping in mind you just lost $10 on the passline during the last two comeout rolls, eating away much of your last win. The opposite is also true, maybe you made the point of 4 with single odds, then won 3 more naturals of 7 or 11 for another $15! You may then want to increase your place bets in the next round, or keep the odds up longer than you may have before. Every dollar counts! There you have it, perhaps my best complex system to date.
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These systems are ones that I, a math nerd, have used or would use. In the next chapter are a few others that I don’t personally play, but they may interest you. Hopefully you will have success with them if you give them a shot.
Chapter 21 : Other Systems Field bets! Field bets! Come getcha field bets! These can be fun to play. As explained earlier, you’re betting that the next roll is 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, or 12. The 2 and the 12 pay double your bet. Sometimes the 12 will pay triple! Look for a table that pays triple if you want to make some bets on the field. Many people will make a field bet after a 5 is rolled. There is a craps myth that “After 5, the field’s alive”. There’s absolutely no basis for this claim, but it’s amazing how many people who never play the field will toss a chip out there after a 5 is rolled. Hell, even a math nerd has done it a few times! One interesting strategy using the field worth mentioning is called “anything but 7”. Okay okay, I lied earlier, I have played this strategy, and it worked. I did it out of desperation, however… which is NOT a good move for a gambler. But I digress… Here’s what you do: bet $5 place 5, $6 place 6 and 8, and $5 field. As long as the next roll is not a 7, you’ll win. If it’s a 2 you’ll win $10. A 3, 4, 9, 10 or 11, you’ll win $5. A 5, 6, or 8, you’ll win $2 (remember the field bet loses). And if it’s a 12 you’ll win $15 (assuming 3x payouts for the 12 on the field)! There’s only a 1 in 6 chance any given roll will be a 7, so there’s a pretty good shot this bet will work for you a few times. Don’t get greedy though, if that 7 does show up, you’re down $22.
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“Okay math nerd, what’s the math on this strategy?” Looking back at the expected roll distributions, out of 36 total rolls, you should expect to roll six 7’s for a loss of $132. Your wins work out to a +$123, so the net result is an expected loss of $9. So if you can avoid just 1 of these 7’s or maybe get lucky with an extra 2 or 12 and you can work this system into profit territory! Remember that the place bets are “OFF” on the comeout roll so if you play this system on a comeout roll, tell the dealer you want the place bets “ON”! Don’t Pass/Don’t Come - Not too many people play the “don’t” side of the game. They’re the ones quietly snickering when the rest of the table lets out a disgusted sigh when that 7 shows up. However, there are some very valid reasons for playing this way. Like the passline and come, the bet pays even money. But this time you are betting against a number that has just rolled. What have I been saying all along in this book? The 7 is the most common number to be rolled and the most likely number to “heat up”. Getting paid even money on the chances that a 7 is rolled instead of a 4? That’s golden! A 2:1 edge over the dice! Even the 6 or 8, which I have been pushing you to bet this entire book, don’t stand a chance in the long run against the 7. The don’t-6 or don’t-8 should win 6 times for every 5 times it loses. The risk on betting don’t pass or don’t come is when you first make the bet on the don’t pass or don’t
come, you have to fight the 7 and 11 which lose. True, the 2 and 3 help offset this (the 12 does not), but you do need to get “through” the don’t pass or don't come in order for you to be sitting pretty. It can be a lucrative bet, no doubt. My previous systems you’ve just read about deal with decreasing your bets, or leaving the table entirely when the 7’s start showing up and taking away your chips. Imagine switching sides to betting the "back door" where you can also profit. It’s like shorting a stock… you can win on the way down as well as on the way up! So you should consider playing the don’t pass/come if the table cools off. Here is a bit about don’t pass/don’t come odds. If you're only occasionally playing the don't, don’t use ‘em! Here’s why… once you get that don’t number established, you have an advantage of 2:1, 3:2 or 6:5 depending on the number. Getting paid even money for that wager is awesome! By adding more money to it, however, and getting paid the true odds of 1:2, 2:3, or 5:6 “dilutes” your advantage. Here’s an example to show this:
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$5 don’t pass number of 4. If it wins you are paid $5, even money. You risk $5 to win $5. $5 don’t pass number of 4 with $10 in odds. If it wins, the don’t pass bet pays $5, but the odds also pay $5. So you risked $15 to win $10? See why it doesn’t make sense? Plus – if they do roll the
number, which should happen 1/3rd of the time, you’re now out $15 instead of just $5! Next : Proposition bets – Some people go crazy with these, but there’s no arguing that the math behind these bets is not good for the player. Still, they can add quite a lot of entertainment to the game, for a small price of a buck here or there. Thinking back to many of the times I’ve played craps, a lot of the better memories actually involve these silly “bad” bets! I hit a hard 8 as a point once when I had a side bet with my friends along on that trip which said, the first of us to make a point the hard way, everyone else had to make four hardways bets for that person. I have also done from time to time a “2way hardways” bet. That means you bet $2, one dollar for you and one dollar for the dealers. They love it when you make bets for them. Normally you feel like it’s you against the dealer, but when you’re making bets for them, you’re all on the same page and they want to win as badly as you do. Many people will make an extra wager when the point is 4, 6, 8 or 10, that the shooter will make the point the hard way. Again, these bets simply have such a high house edge that in the opinion of a math nerd, these bets should not be made. But when they do hit, you hear an extra loud eruption from a craps table and the enjoyment you get from that might be worth the few bucks you sacrifice in this generally “bad” bet.
Another thing you will often see people do, they will bet “any craps” on a comeout roll. This bet pays 7:1 if a 2, 3, or 12 is rolled on the very next roll. (True odds are 8:1) People will put $1 on this bet as an insurance against losing a passline bet of $5 or $10 on the comeout roll. At first it sounds reasonable, since it protects the passline wager, but if you do this on every comeout roll over an hour or so, you’re going to lose a lot of $1 wagers compared with the protection you’ll receive against the 2, 3, or 12. Horn bets – Betting that the next roll is 2, 3, 11, or 12. People like these, mostly because I think it’s fun to say and the payout is big. A “horn high” bet is the same thing, except there is an extra dollar in play. For instance, a “$5 horn high 11” means $2 on the 11, and $1 on the 2, 3, and 12. These are common on comeout rolls as well, as it provides the hedge against craps, but an even stronger bonus for the 11, as the bettor wins their passline bet AND a big $30 for the 11. Every other number, however, means a loss. Hop bets – These bets aren't very common but I did seen one woman make a $10 hop bet and she won, so I guess that means I have the egg on MY face, huh? Or a Canadian would say “I have the egg on my face, eh?” But I digress… A hop bet is simply predicting what each die will show on the next roll. It could be anything, 1 and 6. 2 and 3. 5 and 5, etc. The bet pays 15:1 or 30:1 for the “doubles” numbers. It could be a fun wager if you really believe you are psychic. A math nerd stays away from this nonsense.
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“Straddle the point” This is a catchy little strategy I’ve witnessed at the tables a time or two. You start by making a 1 unit passline bet and wait for a point to be established. Then, whatever that point ends up being, you place the numbers on either side of the point number on the table for 1 unit. For example, if the point was 6, you would place the 5 and 8, the numbers on either side of the six. If the point was 9, you would place the 8 and 10. AHH!! Place the 10!?! Noo!!! This is why I disagree with the system. NEVER place the 4 or 10. One could modify this strategy easily to not include the 4 or 10. Alternatively, you could also make a $25 passline bet, then make your place bets for $25 (5/9), $24 (6/8), or buy the 4 or 10 for $25. The whole idea is that the shooter is trying to roll the point number, but might be off by just a bit, so surround the point number with more bets in case they are slightly off. To a math nerd, this whole concept is slightly off, but if you make these bets in a smart way, this strategy might be workable. “Playing both sides” I have seen only one player do this but let’s think outside the box for a minute. What is the best bet on the table? The odds bet. There is no house edge on this bet, hence no river current for you to have to swim against. In order to make the odds bet you have to make a passline bet. This itself has a very good house edge of 1.4%. But the 7 is still a major risk here, as both your
passline and odds bets will lose if you see a 7 get rolled while trying to make the point. What about that box right behind the passline called the don’t passline? It wins when the shooter 7’s out. That bet will cancel the passline bet. Now you are only risking your odds bet, which as I’ve said probably 100 times by now, has NO house edge! Let’s investigate this further. If you made both a passline and don’t pass bet, the 7 wins for the passline and loses for the backline. Ditto for the 11. The craps bets are the opposite, the 2 loses for the passline but wins on the backline. Ditto for the 3. But the 12? Ah ha! So there is a hole in this! The 12 loses for the passline but does not win for the don’t passline. So no matter what, these two bets are guaranteed to lose you money when the 12 is rolled on the comeout. There is no chance to win money making these two bets simultaneously by themselves. How bad is it, though? Out of 36 comeout rolls, the probability says only 1 of those should be a 12. It could be more, of course, but you can expect 1 out of 36. Remember how I’ve said the 7 is the most likely number to “heat up”? The 12 (and 2) would be the least likely to “heat up”. Okay so we’ve established we can expect to be down 1 unit over 36 comeout rolls between the passline and don’t pass in combination. Otherwise, these two bets are guaranteed to always cancel each other out. After a point is established, enter the passline odds! The expected outcome of your odds bets is always 0 since 54
there is no house edge. We’ve already surrendered the fact that we will lose 1 unit per 36 games for the 12 on the comeout, and the odds bets should also come out to 0, so this, like every other craps strategy out there, is still expected to be a losing strategy in the long run. But once again, think of the roll distributions over those 36 games. If you can get just slightly lucky and make 1 more point than you should, this becomes a winning system. If you can buck the 12 on the comeout, you’re always guaranteed that your passline and don’t pass will cancel. The odds are your “free ticket” to chances at pure profit. You could also make a come and don’t come bet and then add odds to the come bet after a number is established and it would have the same outlook at the passline + don’t passline bets together. Practice this yourself, it’s worth looking into.
Chapter 22 : Martingale Betting First and foremost, this is a risky style of betting and I do not condone it. Why am I even writing about it then? Mostly because I claim to be a math nerd and believe that this is a popular way people play but it can lead to disaster. So what is it? Betting a “Martingale” style of wagering on even money bets that means every time you lose a bet, you make the same bet for twice the amount you just lost. When you finally win a bet, that win covers all your previous losses and gives you a small profit equal to whatever your first bet was. Here’s a simple example : 1. Bet $5 on the field and lose. You are down $5. Now you double your bet : 2. Bet $10 on the field and win. You won $10, had previously lost $5, so now you have a $5 profit. Let’s work this example out a few more times : 1. Bet $5 on the passline and lose. You are down $5, double your bet. 2. Bet $10 on the passline, lose again. Now down $15, double your bet. 3. Bet $20 on the passline, lose again. Now down $35, double your bet.
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4. Bet $40 on the passline, lose again. Now down $75, double your bet. (see how this is growing quickly?) 5. Bet $80 on the passline, finally win. You win $80 on your bet and had a previous loss of $75, so you have a net gain of $5 which is the same as your original bet. Sounds promising, huh? The math is there. If you figure that the passline is a 50/50 bet (it isn’t, but it’s close enough for this example), you can do some extra calculations. Remember my example earlier of flipping a coin and how many times would you get 2 heads in a row? 1 in 4. What about 3 in a row? 1 in 8. 4 in a row? 1 in 16. If you were betting on tails this entire time, you would be hurting, but you are probably thinking the chances of losing so many in a row are very bleak. As long as you can avoid that “1 in a million shot” at losing so many in a row... you’ll be fine! Many people have made this mistake, and when it hits you, you will be down huge. In the previous example you were betting $80 just for a net gain of only $5! In the opinion of a math nerd, that’s not smart. Furthermore, this strategy requires an infinite amount of money. The tables I often play at have table limits from $5 to $2000. If you started at $5 and lost 8 bets in a row, your 9th bet would be $1280 which is approaching the table limit and you would have already lost $1275. And what if you lose that 9th bet? You cannot double your bet to $2560 because that’s over the table limit. Recall what I said about the distribution of
rolls, you may be stuck in that bad streak and losing everything you may have won up to this point. Martingale betting is very risky. Stick with better money management.
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Chapter 23 : Fibonacci betting No, Fibonacci is not a type of pasta. Although if it were, a math nerd would probably love it! The Fibonacci sequence is named after an Italian mathematician and has some similar properties to the risky martingale betting, but isn’t as risky. Let me explain the sequence of numbers and how it works. Each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two. For example, start with 0 and 1. The next number is the sum of those two, 0+1=1. Put that number at the end of the original sequence and now we have 0,1,1. The next number, again, is the sum of the previous two, 1+1=2. Now we have 0,1,1,2. Keep the sequence going, 1+2=3. 2+3 = 5. 3+5 = 8, etc. Here is a longer Fibonacci sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144. How does this relate to betting? Take a pair of numbers next to each other in the sequence like 5 and 8. Add these together and you get 13. Now look at the sum of the numbers before the 8 and you’ll find they all add up to 12. If you were to bet each of these numbers in sequence and keep losing, when you finally win 2 in a row, you will be ahead by whatever the sequence started with, in this case 1. Go even deeper into the series, look at 55 and 89. These total 144. The sum of the previous numbers is in the sequence is 143. Again if you bet $144 and won – you’d be ahead by $1. See the pattern?
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So here’s the strategy. Start with the first bet in the Fibonacci sequence. As you lose, move further down the sequence. If you win, move backward one number in the sequence and make that bet. If you win that one, you'll be ahead by the first number in the series, so start the series over. You can see, this betting strategy requires you to win 2 in a row to lock in your profit. “What? 2 in a row? You just got done saying with the Martingale system….. wtf?” I know, I know… But the difference with this system, however, is it doesn’t grow as quickly as the Martingale. Remember with the Martingale, if you had lost 5 in a row and started with a $5 bet, you’d be down 5+10+20+40+80 = $155. With the Fibonacci betting, the same 5 losses in a row would put you down 5+5+10+15+25 = only $60. This would be advantageous to players with smaller bankrolls. Let’s see how this would work compared with the Martingale in the previous chapter. I need to continue the examples in the previous chapter one more time, but with another win, because this system requires 2 wins. Also, I will multiply the Fibonacci series numbers by 5 since I’m usually playing at a $5 table. 1. Bet $5 on the passline and lose. Down $5. Move to the next number in the series, $5 again. 2. Bet $5 on the passline and win. You’re even, move back one number in the series, again 5.
3. Bet $5 on the passline and win. You’re up $5. Same net result as the Martingale. Things will make more sense with a second example : 1. Bet $5 on the passline and lose. You’re down $5. Next number in the sequence is 5. 2. Bet $5 on the passline and lose again. You’re down $10. Next number in the sequence is 10. 3. Bet $10 on the passline and lose again. You’re down $20. Next number in the sequence is 15. 4. Bet $15 on the passline and lose again.. You’re down $35. Next number in the sequence is 25. 5. Bet $25 on the passline and win. You’re down $10. Back up one number in the sequence, 15. 6. Bet $15 on the passline and win. Now you’re up $5. Again you’re at the same net result as the Martingale, but you were down at most only $35 in this example. You would have been down $75 with the Martingale. So the Fibonacci is a “little better” than the Martingale. Your bets won’t grow exponentially like they did with the Martingale. Unfortunately, you need to 2 wins to snag a profit. But do these two wins need to be in a row?
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Let’s go back to the example where you were down 35, bet $25 and won so you were down just $10. Let’s say you don’t get that 2nd win in a row. You bet $15 and lost, so now you are down $25. You march further down the series again to the $25 and let’s say you win this time. You’re even! You could now start the series over at $5 and just be glad it didn’t get any worse. If you, instead, went backward only 1 number like the basic system says to, you would bet $15 again and if you won it, you’d be ahead $15. Personally I would say you should have quit the series when you got even. But even more personally, I would say you should not play this system at all. It’s better than the Martingale, but it still requires an infinite amount of money if you work the true theory. If you’ve got that kind of money, you don’t need my help in the first place and you’re also not reading this book.
Chapter 24 : “Pressing” Strategies This strategy sounds like it goes against what I have said throughout most of my strategies, that you should NOT press your bets, but rather REGRESS them, like the basic “$12 / $6 / off” strategy o n the place-6 and 8. I’ve said how it’s a mistake to press your bets right away because when you eventually lose (and you will), you lose all, or most of your winnings, plus your original bet. But there is a way you CAN play a system that involves combining regressing and pressing your bets. I touched on this when discussing the place bets where you would start at, say, 2 units on the place 6 and 8, regress them down after a hit, and then start pressing them as you win more and more. You take back some profit each win, while increasing the bets so that if you do catch one of those “hot” series of rolls, you can really rake in some chips. Here’s a simple system for an evenmoney bet which works best on the passline, but could also be used on the field, though you’re less likely to win close to 50% of your bets on the field unlike the passline. Start with 2 units (1 unit = $5) on the passline. If it wins, take the $10 in winnings and $5 of your original bet off the table, leaving $5 on the passline for the next game. Now, even if you lose this bet, you’re still ahead $5. But let’s say it wins a 2nd time and the dealer slides another $5 chip your way. Now press that $5 back up to $10. If this bet loses, you’re still ahead $5 from where
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you started. So if the sequence goes win-loss, or winwin-loss, you’re up $5. But let’s say you hit a hot streak and the $10 bet wins. Now pull back $5 back to your stack and press the bet to $15. Win again? Pull back $10 in profit and press to $20. Get the picture? Each time you win you’re pulling back more and more profit, and increasing the bet to potentially win more. This requires a pretty hot streak of many wins in a row to really do some damage, but it’s not unreasonable to see 3 or 4 wins in a row during your time at the table. Of course, you can also see 3 or 4 losses in a row so you have to be careful and remember your loss limits if the dice are not rolling in your favor. I was fortunate to be playing this strategy when I went on a hot roll at the Excalibur in Las Vegas. I threw 9 consecutive winners (both points and “natural” wins) during 45 minutes of craps bliss! That was a loud table, believe me! Let’s see how the bets went down to see how much profit I made, and how much I *could* have made had I not reset my bets towards the end of that run. 1st hit - Bet $10, won $10, pull back $15 to my stack so I’m guaranteed +$5. 2nd hit – Bet was $5, won $5, press the bet back to $10 so I’m still guaranteed +$5. 3rd hit – Bet was $10, won $10, pull back $5, press to $15, guaranteed +$10.
4th hit – Bet was $15, won $15, pull back $10, press to $20, guaranteed +$20. 5th hit – Bet was $20, won $20, pull back $15, press to $25, guaranteed +$35. 6th hit – Bet was $25, won $25. At this point I figured the end of the streak HAD to be near so I pulled back the entire $25 winnings, plus $15 of the original bet for $40 and reset my series back at the $10 original wager. So I pulled back $40 and my guaranteed profit was now $75 and my bet was back to $10. 7th hit – Bet was $10, won $10, pull back $15 so the remaining bet is $5, guaranteed +$80. 8th hit – Bet was $5, won $5, press the bet back to $10, still guaranteed +$80. 9th hit – Bet was $10, won $10, pull back $5, press to $15 at which point I sevened out, resulting in a profit of $85. Not too shabby! If, instead of dropping back to $10 after I won on my $25 bet I had pressed it and kept pressing like before, the resulting win would have been $145. But the math nerd in me said I needed to play it a little more conservatively since I had already gotten 6 wins in a row which is rare. Hindsight is always 20/20 and I cannot be too upset with myself for not continuing to press the bets. I was thrilled with that hot roll and so was everyone else at the table. I think everybody but 2 people cashed out when I sevened out. Smart people… they were all ahead and QUIT WITH PROFITS! Good for them!
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Here is a similar strategy for pressing place bets. This strategy is best played after having a winning bet where you can guarantee a profit if the dirty 7 shows up. First, start with $18 on the place 6 and 8. (Or a higher starting amount, but for this example I’ll start with $18). After you get a win on either the 6 or 8, you’ll win $21. Take the $21 and reduce the 6 and 8 to $6 each. Now you’ll have a $9 profit if the shooter 7’s out. But if you get another win, that will be an additional $7. Take $5 off of your stack and drop it on the table asking the dealer to “press the 6 and 8 each”. So now you’re up to a $12 6 and 8, with a guaranteed $4 profit if they 7 out. After another hit, place the 5 and 9 for $5 each, taking back $4 into your stack so you’re guaranteed to be ahead $8 at this point and you have on the table $5 on the place 5 and 9 and $12 on the place 6 and 8. Next, if the 6 or 8 hits again, press the 5 and 9 up by $5 each taking back another $4 to your stack so you’re now up $12 in profit territory. But if the 5 or 9 hit for you instead, you have to decide whether to press the 5 and 9 immediately or wait for another hit. If you want to press right away, give the dealer $3 from your stack. Now you have $44-inside and this is where the strategy gets really fun. Remember the 5 and 9 have a 4% house edge and the 6 and 8 are at 1.5% each. So it’s better to have more money on the 6 and 8 compared with the 5 and 9 – plus, they are rolled more often! From this point on, I say if the 5 or 9 is rolled for you, take $12 of the $14 winnings and press the 6 and 8 $6 for each number, taking back $2 to your stack. But, if the 6 or 8 is rolled, keep the
entire payout for your stack and leave all remaining bets the same. If you are lucky enough to get to this point, you’re on a really hot streak! The 5 and 9 will always stay at $10 each, and are essentially a “feeder” for pressing the better 6 and 8 bets. You have a 3:1 advantage over the 7 with bets on the 5, 6, 8 and 9 so you’re sitting pretty at this point. And you’ve been locking in more and more profit the whole way. If you’ve got a really hot roll going on, you could see your place bets on the 6 and 8 climb to $30, $36, or even higher. You may end up becoming hoarse from all the screaming you’ll be doing as you collect more winnings!
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Chapter 25 : True Stories As I have said playing craps is a social game. Usually several people are all winning, or losing at the same time. Played with a group of friends, craps can be a lot of fun when you are all winning. And it provides a shoulder to cry on if you all lose. Even playing at a table with complete strangers, you form a bond with the other players when you’re “all in the same boat”. Nearly every time I’ve played craps live, other players at the table are rooting for the shooter, even asking their name to call out “Let’s go, Jim!” or whatever their name is. Here are a collection of more true stories I’ve been involved with at craps tables. In my very first trip to Las Vegas with the same lab partner I mentioned at the beginning of this book I won about $300 playing strictly the $12/$6/off regression strategy on the 6 and 8. The only time I strayed from this was when I was rolling and was forced to make a passline bet. I was 22 years old but looked more like 14. I had been carded a couple of times for simply WATCHING a craps game and not even standing at the table! I was pretty nervous the first time I bought in at the Tropicana at a $5 table, but I was confident I knew how to play that system and wouldn't make a fool of myself. I just needed the dice to cooperate a little! I dropped $60 on the felt for my buy-in and was surprised when the dealer didn't ask for my ID, but I played it cool and waited
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for a point to be established and then dropped $24 on the table and said "Place the 6 and 8, 12 dollars each". The dealer didn't bat an eyelid and set up the bets. A few rolls later a 6 rolled and I knew I was on my way! After just a few minutes, I found myself ahead by probably $40 or so, and at THAT point, the boxman asked for my ID. "Ah ha!", I thought to myself. Had I been losing, they wouldn't have cared if I was at least 21 years old, but now that I'm winning it's a different story! I only played 4 times that weekend but walked away with "big" profits each time (roughly doubling my $60 initial buy-ins). When I got home I couldn’t wait to tell everyone that the system had worked, and worked well! After this trip I taught several of my friends to play craps and I even bought a small craps table for my home (ironically costing $300 – the same amount I had won in Las Vegas). We had a lot of fun times working different systems and strategies. One of my friends was simply trying to lose all the fake-money chips he had, and in doing so, went on a streak of field winners rarely seen. He ended up winning every chip I had instead of losing all of his. Unfortunately, the following year in Vegas, this same guy was the only person to lose money at a REAL table when the rest of us were winning. I’m not sure he’s played a serious game of craps since. I taught a high school friend of mine the simple 6/8 strategy as well in about 10 minutes one day. He later told me he won over $200 on a cruise ship playing that system. How proud was I?!
Remember the Buy 4/10 strategy? I watched 2 guys at the Paris Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas go crazy with buying the 4 and 10. It was about 8 in the morning when the casino was practically empty. I stood there and watched as these guys fought the 7 and won hundreds, maybe thousands, on the 4 and 10. I did not know the color-dominations of the chips they were using so I cannot say for sure. The one time I finally got the courage to do this bet myself for $50 at the MGM Grand, I also won and immediately took my bets down. The first high roller I saw lose a ton of money was at the Aladdin (now called Planet Hollywood). He was doing what I’ve described as a good strategy - passline with come bets and full odds. That casino offered 3times, 4-times, and 5-times odds on the 4/10, 5/9, 6/8, respectively (Often shown on the table as 3x, 4x, 5x). His base bet was $100, so he was betting a total of $400, $500 and $600 per number after he had his full odds on each number. Now, one craps “myth” is that if the dice hit a chip when they land, that roll will be a 7. Again, there’s absolutely no justification whatsoever for this myth, but this guy would probably argue otherwise. A man on the opposite side of the table threw the dice towards him while he had every number working, all 6 of them, for $3000 total. You could tell by the high trajectory of his toss that the dice just didn’t look right. Sure enough, when they landed, chips splashed everywhere… “7 out, shooter’s a loser.” The shooter lost maybe $30. The high roller lost $3000. We came back about an hour later
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and the guy was still standing there, down another $5000 or so by our estimates. It was a tough night for him, indeed. The biggest high roller I ever saw was at the MGM Grand. I knew something was up when I saw chairs at a roped off craps table. The MGM has $25,000 chips which are larger in diameter than a standard chip and bright orange. They are called “pumpkins”. Soon enough, an older gentleman, his wife, and another couple started playing. The older man was playing with $5000 base bets on the passline and come. He threw out a couple of pumpkins for odds on the 6 or 8. I was in absolute awe at what I was seeing. Honestly, I didn’t see a whole lot because there were security guards standing a few feet away from the table and I didn’t care to put my scrawny 145 lb frame anywhere near them. But I watched him play for at least half an hour; he had to have bet hundreds of thousands of dollars. Interestingly enough, I don’t recall hearing one scream of joy, or scream of agony either. Whatever this guy might have won or lost at the table really made no difference to him. He was just “payin’ the bills” for whatever “free everything” (comps) he was given that weekend. I’ve been at many tables where the players betting $10 or $15 scream louder when they win than the guy next to him whose got $400 or $500 out there. To each his own… I suppose? Knowing when to quit is, of course, very important when playing craps. It is for any form of gambling! A hard lesson I learned about when to quit happened at the
Wynn in Las Vegas. I had been playing the simple strategy of just $10 passline and $10 odds for about 30 mins. The table was fairly hot, and I found myself ahead about $50 and felt it was probably a good time to quit. The shooter had sevened out, and even though I wanted to roll myself, there were 2 players ahead of me for rolling and I wanted to leave with a decent profit. So I gathered up my chips and prepared to tell the dealer to “color me up” when I noticed that neither of the two players to my right had bets on the passline. The dealer asked the first player if he wanted to roll and he said no. Then he asked the player to my right but he was confused about needing to put a bet on the passline in order to roll. I thought to myself, “oh, here’s my chance to roll!” and I put $10 down on the passline thinking the stickman would give me the dice. But, then, the guy to my right went ahead and put $10 on the passline and the dealer gave him the dice. I thought to myself, “No problem, I can play a little bit longer.” He established a point and I dropped down another $10 in odds…. “Seven out, line away…”. Grr ... There goes $20 of my profits down the drain. Now it was MY turn to roll, so I was excited to keep playing. $10 on the passline and I established a point. $10 more in odds… “Seven out, line away…”. Argh! Another $20 in profits down the drain! The moral of this story is, leave when you tell yourself you should leave! I could have left with $50 in profits but instead only left with $10 because I wanted to roll. A little bit of confusion with the players on my right kept me at the table longer than I told myself I should
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play, and it cost me. Sure, you could say that maybe I could have won more, but remember the longer you swim in the river, the longer the current works against you and this is a prime example of that. There have been a couple of other times I can remember leaving the table with a decent profit, maybe around $50-$70 or so, but my friends kept playing. Sure enough, when I return a half hour later, or I saw them the next morning, the story was "You quit at the right time, it got cold after that, we all lost." Remember what I wrote earlier? It seems that 75% of all players are ahead at some point and 75% of them lose it all back and more! Craps isn’t always glory and profit, however. I’ve had a couple of rough rolls myself. At the Mirage, about 4 of my friends and I decided we would open up a new table where no one was playing. This is yet another craps myth with no basis – never open up a new table, it will be cold! Well it certainly was. We went all the way around the table and not a single one of us made a point or rolled a 6 or 8. By the time the dice got all the way around, my entire $100 buy-in was gone. I also lost my full buy-in of $100 in a matter of 10 mins or so at the Palms just a couple of months after it opened. That time it wasn’t a “new” table being opened, I just simply got spanked. Hmm… kinky. But no, I didn’t enjoy it. Fortunately, these are the only 2 times I’ve lost everything shooting dice. Needless to say, these 2
events prompted me to create my 50% loss rule. I’d be $100 richer today if I had used that rule back then.
should be multiple of $6, so he really should have made a $600 place bet on the 6 or 8.
From the “I’m Gonna Be a Big Shot” f ile : it was my bachelor party and the guys and I decided to head to a casino in Wisconsin for the weekend. My only stipulation was that it, of course, had live craps. This promised to be a great weekend and I was going to play craps, and play craps big at my bachelor party! I was ready to throw down! I was happy to find $5 craps tables which meant I could play my normal $12 6/8 strategy, or $5 in passline + odds. In the back of my mind, though, I wanted to play big, but I still fell back to my old habits of bets around $5 - $15. The first day went well and I was ahead around $70. My friends kept giving me a rough time about how I said I was going to play big but wasn’t! So the 2 nd day I said “screw it” and decided I was going to finally play big and upped my bets to $25 and higher. You guessed it, I quickly lost all my profits and probably $200 more in a matter of minutes. No discipline! Yes, it’s important!
Anyway, what happened? The first roll was a hard 8 and the dealers took a minute to figure out what a $500 place bet on the 8 pays. Turns out, it's $583. The dealer cut out $583 in chips and handed it to him. Next roll - 7 out, everything gone! Our jaws dropped and I felt bad for the guy, but only a little bit, someone that stupid needs to be spanked.
The stupidest player I ever saw walked up to a $5 minimum bet table and dropped a wad of $100 bills onto the felt. Everyone was stunned! The boxman counted out 37 of them and then the player asked for 2 of them back! WTF? He didn't even know how much he had! Anyway, they gave him $3500 in chips and he spread $3000 of them "across", meaning $500 buy bets on the 4 and 10, $500 place bets on the 5, 6, 8, and 9. So, why was this extremely stupid in my opinion? Anyone who's played craps more than once knows the place 6 and 8
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But wait, the story doesn't end there. He immediately took out another 25 $100 bills and dropped them onto the felt. The boxman counted them out and gave him 5 more $500 chips. Sure enough, $3000 across was set up for the next roll, the point was a 4. First roll - VERY FIRST ROLL! 7 out! $3000 swept away into the dealer's stack. Wow. The player left the table and punched the nearest chair of an open video poker machine next to the craps pit. He lost $5417 in just 3 rolls. Unreal. Another buddy of mine has a knack for playing the field. No, not with women, on the craps table! One year in Vegas he felt that every casino we passed “owed” him $20. His strategy was walk in, put $5 on the field, win, press the $10, win again, pocket the $20 and leave. I’ll be damned if he didn’t do this at 5 or 6 casinos up and down the strip in one night. On top of this, we got to the Bellagio where the table limits minimum was $10. He puts $10 down, it wins. He presses that $20 bet and a
triple-12 is rolled! There’s another $60! Luckiest SOB I’ve ever seen. His streak finally came to an end at the San Remo (Now the Hooters hotel and casino) following breakfast the next morning. This same guy also went 3 for 3 on “horn high” bets the first year I went to Vegas with him. I had coached these guys what to bet, what not to bet (i.e. the horn bet), but he went off and did it anyway! And won each time! He even made a horn-high-11 bet for the dealers once and it, too, won! Those were some happy dealers! I shook my head in amazement while they laughed it up. Going back to the field bet – my friends and I seem to have a wicked winning streak at one Vegas casino that we call the “No Please”. It was given this name because the dealer didn’t appreciate our politeness in asking to “place the 6 and 8 for $12, please”. Eventually he snapped and yelled “JUST SAY NUMBER! NO PLEASE!” But I digress… I, personally, have never lost money in all my weekends in Las Vegas playing at the “No Please”. I did have to fight to break even once, and quit as soon as I got there, but I’ve never lost there. Anyway, one night at the No Please, there was a guy at our table who bet $5 on the field. A friend of mine rolled a field number and this guy won his bet. He pressed the $10 and it won again. He pressed the $20, it won again. He pressed $40, it won! By now we’re starting to wonder if this guy was clairvoyant or what? He pressed $80, it won! By now we’re practically BEGGING this guy to take his chips off the table! He 66
finally quit at $160. My friend rolled another field number right after that which would have won him $320, and then ANOTHER field winner on the following roll, that time a Triple-12! The guy would have won $1280 if he had stuck it out. We stopped giving him advice after that. In fact, we left the casino shortly after that! Speaking of clairvoyance, I did call one of my own rolls before I threw the dice one time. A young guy and his buddies came up to a nearly empty table and he bought in for about $100. He was only making $5 field bets each roll but the dice weren't going his way and after awhile he was down to his last $30. I was the shooter when I saw him drop his remaining stack onto the field. I said to him, "You probably want me to roll a 12 don't you?" He said, "I'd LOVE it if you threw a 12!" So I set the dice to 6 and 6 were showing at the top and said "Here goes..." and I launched them to the other end of the table. "Craps 12!" This guy jumped for joy and screamed like he had just caught the winning touchdown pass. That $90 win for him got him back above even. He even thanked me and tossed me a $5 chip! Another field story – I was rolling at the Bellagio at a $10 minimum table. I was having a decent roll and was up about $40 and started to increase my bets. Even though the table was full, hardly anyone was playing big money, it was mostly minimum bettors like myself. I almost felt like I was getting “no respect” for having a hot roll and nobody had big money out there! Anyway, while trying to hit a 6 or 8 I threw the dice toward the opposite wall and leaned forward to see if I could see the result. I
heard the stickman call out “Craps 12”. A player standing to my left jumped up and screamed “YES!” I wasn’t sure what he was so excited about until I looked down at the table and he had put $200 on the field. The field paid triple on that table so that was a nice $600 score for him. He should have thanked me but didn’t. Again – “No Respect!” Another time I was playing at the Excalibur while my friends played in a poker tournament. I was by myself at the table except for 3 or 4 other strangers. Things didn’t start out very well and I was quickly down about $40. A new shooter got the dice and things turned around. He made a couple of points and 6’s and 8’s for me, and soon enough I was back to just above even. As a “thank you” I threw out $1 an d said to the stickman “Dollar YO for the shooter”. It was a tip-bet I made for the guy shooting. The dice landed and it was a 6 and a 5! YO-Eleven! The dealer slid $15 towards the shooter and the guy said, looking confused, “What’s this?” The stickman pointed to me and said “This gentleman made that bet for you, sir.” This guy must have been in a giving mood, because he took $5 and said, “$5 YO right back at ya!” Now I felt appreciated too! Nice of him to return the favor, huh? Or a Canadian would say “Nice of him to return the favor, eh?” But what are the odds of him throwing another 11… what are the odds!? Okay a math nerd will tell you it’s 18 to 1, and he’s right. He tossed the bones and they landed right in front of me. Sure enough, 6 and 5 again! Another $15 for him, and now $75 for me! Plus our passline bets! He continued to
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make another 2 or 3 points and soon enough I was up over $150 and quit the game, walked over, shook his hand, said thanks, and headed over to the poker room to tell my friends the crazy story. I touched on this next story in a previous chapter, but it is something that sticks out in my mind so much I have to tell the full story. I was playing at the Flamingo and had lost about $50 playing mini-baccarat. One buddy of mine and I walked over to a craps table that was extremely loud (which is usually a good sign) and I bought in with the other $50 I hadn’t lost playing minibaccarat. Before I could even get my first bet down, the shooter who was standing right next to the stickman (so he had the shortest distance to throw) banged out a winner 6. I was disappointed I had missed it. The table erupted! Finally settled now, I started the Passline + odds and 6/8 strategy. The shooter established an 8, I put down my double odds, and he banged the 8 right back on his first roll. The table erupted. He continued to roll and roll winning numbers, most of them were 6's and 8's. I noticed he was holding the dice the same way, throwing them at nearly the same trajectory, and hitting the exact same spot on the table within about 2 inches every time. The dice would hop once, barely hit the wall, and land softly. I had heard stories about people “controlling” dice throws but never believed it. Now here I was, either witnessing it for myself in person, or he was just simply getting very lucky. One of the dealers even commented “we’ve been waiting all day for a streak like this.” To make a long story short, I made about $150 in
profits at that table before he finally sevened out. He received quite an ovation and a lot of tips from the entire table. He had rolled for 30 mins while I was standing there. I don’t even know how long he had been rolling before I got there. It was magical. Perhaps only a math nerd can appreciate this humorous comment made by a stickman, at the MGM Grand. I had been playing my standard 6/8 strategy and doing fairly well when the dice started heating up. There were a lot of hard 8’s being thrown. Needless to say, many people started pouring money onto the hard 8 proposition bet. Several people also made dealer bets for the hard 8. Now EVERYONE was cheering for the hard 8! Then the 8’s dried up and the rolls came out something like 2, 9, 6, 5, 5, 10, 12, 6, 3, 11, 2, 5, 6, 9, 9, 6, 4… no 8’s! It seemed like it would never end! Between each of these rolls the stickman was BEGGING the shooter to roll a hard 8. Remember, the dealers make money too when you bet for them! Finally the stickman was getting impatient and said, “Roll a hard 8… ANY hard 8!” I lost it. Of course, there is only 1 hard 8. Not funny? Maybe you had to be there. Maybe you have to be a math nerd. Another funny situation I found myself in was at my favorite place, the "No Please". My wife and I walked into the casino and I immediately went for the craps tables. She said she was going to find some video poker and the No Please was small enough that we knew we could easily find each other eventually without too much trouble. So after awhile the dice came to me and I
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started playing the passline, along with 6 and 8, per usual. I rolled an 8 and the dealer slid me $14. Just then someone taps me on the shoulder and says in a very sexy European accent, "Vat vas zat bet you zhoost made?" I look to my right and here are my dreams come true, a gorgeous European blonde woman is asking ME how to play craps? But of course I went into math nerd mode and told her about my $12 on the 8, and what it pays if I roll it, just some very basics about the game. She stood and watched for another minute or so and I explained a little more. I found out she was from Germany and I can speak a little German too, so that was fun. But of course, a moment later I hear my wife say, "Hi Todd!". I turn around with that "I'm just giving this gorgeous German blonde girl some advice on how to play craps, nothing else!" look. Haha... How did my wife know?! HOW DO THEY ALWAYS KNOW!? Why did this never happen to me when I was single! It was all good though, the woman's equally gorgeous boyfriend was also there, so my wife had some eye candy to look at, too. The girl then bought in for $10 and started playing while I figured I'd better go elsewhere with my wife so we found some video poker to play. A half hour later we left the casino, but the German girl was still playing craps and looked to be up about $50. I hope she still plays! You can quickly create a list of your own fun true stories. Get out there and play! But play smartly!
Chapter 26 : Etiquette There are some etiquette and procedures you should follow while playing craps. If you’re new to the game, these will be important so you don’t embarrass yourself, someone else, or slow the game down. Buy – in : When you are ready to step up and start playing, wait until the dice have already been thrown and the stickman has collected them. You don’t want to stick your hands or arms out onto the table and have the dice hit them. The boxman may even call a “no roll” which will certainly upset a few people. Once the coast is clear, put your cash onto the table. Do not hand money directly to the dealer, they cannot take money directly from you. Put your cash on the table and the dealer will give you chips by sliding them to you on the felt. Again, there can be no hand-to-hand exchange of either cash or chips. Betting : The dealers often work in one direction, left to right, or right to left, as they make payouts, make new bets for players. Before you buy in, watch what direction the dealer is working and wait until it’s your “turn” to either take your winnings or make a new bet. Few things are as embarrassing is taking someone else’s chips. I did it once and apologized profusely to the player next to me. Of course, speak clearly to the dealers so they know exactly what you want your bet to be. “$12 dollar 6 and 8” is better than throwing chips onto the table, pointing and saying “Those 2 numbers”. Also, the
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player is only allowed to place chips directly into the betting boxes on the felt for the passline, don't passline, passline odds, don't passline odds, come, and field. Any place bets, lay bets, buy bets, and all of the proposition bets you need to put the chips onto the felt on or near the field or come boxes, and tell the dealer what you want for your bet. Players are not allowed to touch chips in the proposition bet area, or the 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, or 10 boxes. Rolling : When it is your turn to be the shooter, you must make either a passline or don’t passline bet. You do not HAVE to roll if you do not want to. The stickman will likely ask if you want to roll if you have not placed a bet. You can decline and he will give the dice to the next shooter. But when you DO want to roll, the stickman will push several dice to you, perhaps 5 or 6 of them. Pick 2 of them and he will take the rest back and put them in the bowl in front of him. Only use 1 hand to touch the dice and never take the dice outside of the table. Do not use two hands to “shake” the dice or they might scold you because, in theory, you COULD be hiding a 2nd pair of cheater dice in the other hand. Some strict boxmen might also scold you if you take the hand you roll with and bring it outside of the table. I had this happen to me once when I reached under the table for my drink with the hand I was using to roll. The boxman asked me to open up my hand when I brought it back to the table before I could touch the dice. I learned my lesson… Also, and this is more of a personal gripe of mine, but don’t take a long time to roll. When the stickman gives you the dice, that means the dealers are ready for
you to throw. A lot of shooters like to set the dice a certain way, maybe having the two 3’s face up, sometimes the 6’s face up. Some (like myself) won’t throw the dice if they are showing a 7. But, I witnessed one guy at Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall do something that was so idiotic, I probably had time to use the restroom between each throw. Thankfully, at least he had a reasonably hot roll. But anyway, he would take each individual die, and turn it 6 times so that each number was face-up exactly once. If he made a mistake and one of the numbers showed face up more than once, he would throw the dice backwards toward the wall directly in front of him to, I guess, “reset” the dice??? Seriously, it was ridiculous! So many players think they can control the dice to roll certain numbers, but honestly, you’re throwing the dice probably 10 or 12 feet each time, there’s simply no controlling a dice throw over a distance that far. Oh… and the worst part was, he would throw the dice so high that about every other throw would go off the table, and he would always ask for the “same dice” to be returned, so we had to wait for the pit boss to examine the dice each time. It really slowed down play and made an otherwise good roll memorable, but for a bad reason. It also bothers me when players call for the “same dice” after throwing them off the table. I understand some people think they’ve picked the “lucky” dice and want to keep them, but honestly, they’re all identical, it makes no difference which ones you use. If you throw them and one flies outside the table, just take another one and don’t slow down the game, please!.
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Also make sure that when you do throw the dice, that they travel the full length of the table and hit the back wall of the table. The wall has some egg-carton-like material on it which cause the dice to bounce at odd angles, hopefully ensuring a “random” roll. If you do not hit the back wall, the dealers will ask you to try and hit the back wall. Dealers : These guys never cease to amaze me. They are often dealing to 6, 7, 8 or more people at once. They have to keep track of different amounts of bets belonging to different people. Occasionally they do make mistakes so be careful to keep track of what you’re betting on. If you’re at a busy table, there are more chips visible than felt so things can get mixed up easily… especially if the dice hit the chips. Know what you’re betting on, and how much you should get paid if you win. I’ve only had to remind a dealer 1 time when I didn’t get paid for a winning bet so they do an extremely good job. Wait until your turn to tell the dealer what to do and don’t bet out of turn. Also don’t throw chips out onto the table just before, or as the dice are being thrown. It’s distracting to the dealers who have enough to remember and think about. Be polite to them and tip them when you are done. Either a direct tip or make a bet for them. Walking away : When you’re ready to leave, hopefully with winnings, ask the dealer to “color you up”. He’ll tell you when it’s okay to put all of your chips on the felt. They might want you to wait for the next roll to complete first. Separate your chips into stacks of like colors so it’s easier for them to count rather than a
haphazard mix of various colored chips. If you’ve used my trick to use different colored chips as separators, make sure to always undo the color scheme when coloring up. When the dealer motions for you to put your chips down, set them down and he’ll take them and give them to the boxman to count up and the dealer will give you that amount in chips back which you can take to the cashier. And don’t forget to leave a tip or make a bet for the dealers when you leave!
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Chapter 27 : Electronic Games Recently, there have been some electronic craps games showing up in casinos. I have seen some where the players sit in a circle around a center “hopper” containing two oversized dice. Each player has a touch screen computer terminal in front of them where they make their bets. The “shooter” has a button that activates the hopper which starts vibrating and then pops the dice up in the air and when they land, that’s what the roll is. There is a countdown timer of about 30 seconds for players to make their bets before the shooter “rolls” the dice. There is no dealer for this game, all bets are paid electronically and a ticket is printed out when the player wants to quit much like any other slot machine. Another variety is a normal looking craps table with a stickman who collects your cash and hands you chips when you cash out. The stickman also collects the dice and passes them to the shooter like a regular live game. But, each player has a touch screen terminal in front of them like the previous example where the player makes his/her bets. The shooter rolls the dice just like a regular game and the stickman punches the roll result into the computer and all bets are paid electronically. A third type of electronic game is an online casino, like what my lab partner and I first played craps on during our college days. I would shy away from these with real
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money as there are a multitude of legal, banking, and security concerns. If you find an electronic game to use for practice only with fake money, however, a math nerd is all for it! But for the electronic games found in casinos, here are my opinions: Pros : For someone who is a little shy about stepping up to a craps table because of the intimidation factor some people perceive, this type of game is more personal and private. Also, because there are no chips involved and all payouts are done electronically, there’s virtually no risk of making an invalid bet or having an incorrect payout. And it’s more secure because there is a small risk of theft of chips at a craps table. Also, remember back to the odds bet for the point being a 5 or 9? I said that you should make a $6 odds bet in this case instead of $5 (or $16 instead of $15) due to the 3:2 payout. Well, at the electronic games, the computer will actually pay fractions of a dollar for these types of bets. So a winning $5 odds bet on a point of 5 or 9, you will actually get paid $7.50 unlike in a live game where you would only be paid $7.00. This is definitely advantageous to the player. It is also extremely easy to keep track of your bankroll on an electronic machine because your balance is displayed on the screen. At a live table, it can be difficult to keep track of how much money in chips you have in your tray and how much you have on the table. I gave you a trick of using the different colored chips as separators to help you quickly figure out how much you
have, but having your balance displayed on the screen is obviously superior. Table minimums at electronic games also seem to be lower than at live tables. I couldn’t count the number of times I’ve passed by a $25 minimum table, or even $10 tables looking for an open $5 table. I’ve seen electronic games with $3 minimums, and I’ve heard of others with minimums as low as $1! Cons : As I’ve described throughout this book, craps is a very social game. It’s very fun and exciting to cheer for the shooter, watch his wife or girlfriend “blow on the dice” for good luck. It’s fun to high-five a complete stranger who had a hot roll and just made you a nice profit or have someone come up to you and thank you for your own hot roll. These electronic games are much quieter than a live game. There’s very little camaraderie amongst the players who are just watching the screen in front of them. Sure, there’s some excitement when the shooter makes his/her point, but generally speaking from what I’ve witnessed, the electronic game doesn’t seem to be as “fun” as the live game. Unknown : I’ve seen some debate about the speed of play at electronic games. Some say it’s faster, some say it’s slower. The betting and payout speeds must certainly be faster as there is no dealer who has to tend to as many as 8 players, or more. Many dealers are extremely efficient and accurate, but they can’t compare to the speed of a computer. However, the electronic games all seem to have a countdown timer for players to get their bets in. So that can actually slow the game 73
down, as not every roll results in a payouts, losses, or new bets being made by players. In this case, the live game is faster. But is faster always better? This is gambling, and the game is set up for you to lose. The longer you play, the more rolls you see, the longer you are in that river current and the harder it is to come out ahead. So, you could say a slower game is better! Especially if you’re still waiting for Tiffany to come back with your White Russian! But as you read in my true stories chapter, that shooter who was taking forever, nearly always throwing the dice off the table and demanding the same dice for another shot really slowed down the game to the point where it wasn’t enjoyable, even though I was winning! So it’s really up to each individual player how fast or slow they prefer the game to go. Without having any dealers to tip, you could say the electronic game is better financially. But the dealers are also there to help you, to explain the game or bets to you, and they generally are up for some small talk and can provide other assistance aside from the game. Dealers often give great tips for where to have a good dinner, opinions on shows to see, or directions to the nearest restroom! So, while the electronic game may speed things up and eliminate betting/payout errors, I’m not sure you can say it’s actually better. Try out an electronic game for yourself and see what you think!
Chapter 28 : Build Your Own System I’ve given you several of my favorite systems. By no means is this a complete list. Hopefully, you have learned about the good bets in the game: passline/come, odds, and the place bets. Mathematically there’s really no difference between some of my “strict” systems like place 6/8 with $12/$6/off, and something more random like “wait 9 rolls, then bet $12, wait for a win, take all your chips off, wait another 9 rolls, bet $6, wait for a win, and take your chips off.” Statistically it’s the same since every dice roll is independent of the previous rolls. You don’t even have to bet the “pairs” of numbers like I have suggested in this entire book. You could do “Bet $12 on the 6, wait for a hit and take those chips down and bet $6 on only the 8, wait for a hit and come completely off.” Again, statistically, it’s the same strategy, and this one requires a smaller initial bet out of your chip tray, too. You’re only losing half as much as I am when that shooter 7’s out before winning for you. But you only have half the chance of hitting the 8 versus hitting either the 6 OR the 8. Remember earlier in this book when I rolled the dice 36 times and got very few 6s but a lot of 8s? That’s why I like to bet pairs of numbers even if you are risking more money on each roll. So you can see there is really a lot of freedom here, especially with the place bets because you can increase or decrease them anytime you want. You also have that same freedom with your odds bets. You can
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get creative with how you play them. A strict math nerd will always say, “leave them on the table, and bet as much as you can because they reduce the overall house edge of your game.” I’m a little more conser vative, however, and like to guarantee profits when I get wins. You are free to do as you choose with how you play. Sometimes bad bets will win you money, as in my story about betting $1 on the 11 for the shooter, him winning and making the same bet for me and rolling another 11. That was simply pure dumb luck. You may get lucky with some hardways bets at times, too. Just please do not play these very often. Only if you are already ahead, have locked in some profit, and feel like the $1 you throw out there might make for a good story worth more than the money you’ll probably lose because it’s a bad bet for a math nerd. In building your own system, I hope you will adhere to some common principles, however. First and foremost, if you’re losing, quit. Live to play another day. Second of all, pocket some profit, even if you make that profit from bad bets. This game is set up for you to lose so when you do win, don’t give it back! Third, use good bets with low house edges. These will give you the most return on your bet and give you the best chance at making money. Fourth, you cannot control the dice. They will do whatever they do. You ARE gambling and the longer you play, the greater the chances that you will lose. Every strategy and bet I have talked about in this book will lose in the long run, so don’t stand there for hours and hours expecting to crawl your way back to
