This is the 1st in a series of craps posts aimed at players who want to start winning more often. I’m including everything you need to know about craps to get the best odds of success. Most of the information in the posts in this series is not aimed at beginners. You should probably already understand the basics of craps before digging too deep into this series. The idea is not to provide how to play craps posts but to provide new information and ideas that might take your existing craps game to the next level.

Craps Is a Negative Expectation Game

Yes, craps is a “negative expectation” game. But what does that mean, exactly? Gamblers and mathematicians like to talk about bets in terms of their “expected value.” The expected value of a bet is a simple formula, too:

(The amount you stand to win X the probability of winning) – (The amount you stand lose X the probability of losing) = Expected value of a bet

You bet $2 on a coin flip, but if you win, you only get $1. You have a 50% chance of winning $1, which amounts to 50 cents in expected value. But you also have a 50% chance of losing $2, which amounts to -$1 in expected value. Subtract one from the other, and you get an expected value of -$0.50.

It should be obvious that if you flip a coin repeatedly long enough under those terms, you might get lucky in the short run, but you’ll go broke in short order in the long run. (“In the long run” just means “eventually.”) All casino games design their odds of winnings and payouts to provide you with a negative expectation, by the way. That’s how the casinos stay in business.

Craps sees you win when a 2, 3, or 12 is rolled, and you lose with any other number combination. These three numbers combine to offer you four out of 36 dice combinations that’ll result in a win, or 8:1 true odds. But the 7:1 payout doesn’t deliver enough to offset the high odds, and you’ll be facing an 11.11% house edge.

Craps' Odds of Winning: Nearly 50 Percent Craps is a table game played with dice. One person is the 'shooter,' who rolls the dice, and the other players make wagers on the results of that roll. On the first roll, called 'coming out,' the shooter wins on a seven or an eleven.
The probability of winning an even money bet in craps is always slightly less than 50%. In this case, the probability of winning the pass line bet is 49.3%, which is close to 50%, but it still gives the casino an edge. The casino will win this bet 50.7% of the time. In the long run, you can’t win with those odds.

In some games, the expectation is the same no matter what. In other games, like craps, you can choose from an entire all-you-can-bet buffet of wagers. Some of these wagers have a bigger negative expectation than others. One of the subjects I’ll cover in this series of posts is which bets are better and which bets are worse.

Why I Love Craps and Why You Should, Too

Blackjack has its fans, and I understand why. But craps is my game, and if you have the right personality, it’s probably your game, too. It’s fun, scary, exciting, suspenseful, and the most entertaining game in any casino which offers it. One of the reasons it’s so great is this buffet of bets I just talked about, by the way.

At most craps tables, you’ll find a huge crowd of players yelling, stuttering, and moaning over the results of any throw of the dice. Some players want to win a lot of money on a small bet. They might bet that the outcome of the next roll will be a 2 (“snake-eyes”). That pays off at 30 to 1, so even a measly $5 bet pays off at $150.

Other players like to play a close to even game with an even-money payoff. Those players will bet on the pass line and take as big an odds bet as they can. If you can find a casino offering you the option of betting 10X odds, the house edge for all the money you have in action on that combination of bets is only 0.184%.

The house edge, by the way, is just another way of expressing the expected value. In this case, it’s the amount of money the casino expects to win from each bet over the long run. If the house edge for a bet is 1%, the casino expects to win $1 on average every time you bet $100. With a house edge of 0.184%, your expected loss on a $100 bet is only 18.4 cents—less than a quarter!

What I Hate about Craps, Though

The large variety of bets is a 2-edged sword. It’s a feature but also a drawback. With such a large number of bets to choose from, it’s easy to choose bad bets—wagers with a high negative expectation. In fact, when it comes to craps, there are far more bad choices you can bet on than good ones.

What does this mean in practical terms? It means if you choose the right bets, you can play for a long time on very little money. You can also get reasonable odds of walking away a winner during any given gambling session. Games of chance are streaky, and with a low house edge, the probability of having a winning streak is better.

But if you choose the wrong bets—the wagers with the highest house edge—you can lose your entire bankroll faster than you ever thought possible. Lots of players make those bets, too, and the casinos even encourage their employees at the craps table to hustle those bets and encourage players to make them.

More about the House Edge and How the Casino Makes Its Money

The best way to think about how the casino makes its money at craps is to realize that one of 2 things is always happening with a craps bet:

The casino wins more often than the player on an even money proposition
The casino gets a cut of our winnings on any bets that you win

These are 2 sides of the same coin. Let me explain how those concepts work to make the casino a fortune:

The most common bets in craps are the pass line bet and the come bet. These are the most basics bets in the game—bets that the shooter will succeed. In the long run, over 495 “rounds,” the casino will win either of those bets on average 251 times. The player will only win an average of 244 of those bets. That’s a difference of 7 bets over the course of 495 rounds of play (7/495 = 1.41%). By taking the odds bet, you can reduce that even further. In a casino where you can take 10X odds, the house edge is reduced to 0.18%, and in a casino where you can take 100X odds, the house edge is reduced to 0.02%.

This means with $100 in action, you’re looking at losing an average of just 20 cents or just 2 cents, respectively. That’s a lot of entertainment, cheap. It’s also a great possibility of winning, because you don’t need standard deviation to fall far the other direction to come out ahead. Of course, a lot of casinos only allow 2X odds. That’s okay, even though it’s not great. It still reduces the house edge to 0.61%. Let’s talk about the casino’s cut of winnings, too. It’s best explained using an example—the worst bet at the craps table.

The Any 7 Bet Is a Great Example

The “any 7” bet is a one-roll bet that the next roll will be a 7. You have 6 ways of making a 7 when rolling 2 dice:

1, 6
2, 5
3, 4
4, 3
5, 2
6, 1

That means the probability of winning this bet is 6 divided by 36. (There are 36 possible outcomes when you roll 2 6-sided dice.) This means you’ll win 1 bet out of 6, which also means that your odds of winning are 5 to 1. If you bet $10 repeatedly on the “any 7” bet, you’ll lose $10 on 5 rolls out of 6, or $50.

If you were playing in a “break-even” game—one where the payout odds and the odds of winning were the same—you’d get 5 to 1 on your money, meaning you’d win $50 on the one roll out of 6 where you won. Since you lose $50 and win $50, you break even. But the casino wouldn’t make any money that way. What the casino does, instead, is take a cut of those winnings. Instead of paying off at 5 to 1, this bet pays off at 4 to 1, which means you’ll win $40 and lose $50, for a net loss of $10 over those 6 dice throws.

The house edge on that bet—the average that you mathematically expect to lose on it—is 16.67%. For every $100 you bet, you’re expected to eventually lose an average of $16.67. That’s a big sum compared to the $1.41 on the pass line bet, or the 61 cents on the pass line bet with 2X odds. This bet is often called “big red.” (I have an ex-girlfriend with the same nickname, but I won’t get into that here.) Since red is the color accountants use for negative numbers on a spreadsheet, this bet is appropriately named. You can analyze any bet in craps this way.

The Field Bet Is another Great Example

Another example is the “field” bet. That’s another one-roll bet, this time that the next number will be one of the following:

You have a total of 16 wa

Odds Of Winning At Craps