Craps – What are the odds ?

• Author: Ed
• Filed under: Craps
• Date: Jul 17,2008

We’ve been through the basics, the rules and had a little bit of practice at this very addictive game.  So – how did your practice go?  I bet I can guess.  You found yourself winning a-lot of the time, and you now thing craps is a very easy way to make money online?

Sorry.  This just isn’t the case.  Craps is a game of chance.  When computers and chance get involved – you get problems.  However, I’m not telling you to stop.

To take our playing to the next level, we need to learn about the house-edge.  More importantly we need to find out a way to eliminate the house-edge.

So far we’ve learned about all the various bets we can place.  We now need to learn about the house-edge so we can minimize the chips the house takes from us.

Forget about place bets / lay bets / field bets / craps bets / hard way bets.  Forget about all those bets because the house edge is far too high.  What we’re going to focus on is the pass line, and the come bet.

House edge on the Pass / Come bet: 1.41%
House edge on the Don’t Pass / Don’t Come: 1.40%

Compare this to roulette European: 2.7% American: 5.2% I think I’ll stay with craps.  Craps is a game that is both more fun, and has lower house-edge.  But on a computer we really do need to be careful.   This is where good money management comes into play.

But, you probably witnessed in your test play-run that you were winning an awful lot.  If you model this into a chart you’ll find out that over the short-term – yes you do win.  But long-term you eventually succumb to the house edge and eventually start to hit the red.  So we need to limit the house-edge even more so that we can make more money.
What we’re going to do next – is look at a special betting technique.  Taking odds, Taking odds is a way in which you can reduce the house-edge to 0.6% and it is one of those "secret" blackjack strategies many people won’t tell you.  We will, but let’s save it for another day!