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Don’t play odds bets? That is good advice if you want to be drained of your money slowly. I almost exclusively play odds bets and if you get on a good shooter you can win a lot iin a short amount of time. Of course you can lose a lot quickly too, but the math is undeniable, the odds bets are the best bets in the whole casino.\Casin Royal used to have $3 minimum with 100x odds.
Due to high variance, playing odds is good advice to lose all your money very quickly.
You can also get hot without playing odds, so the “lucky shooter” argument doesn’t favor either side in this debate.
They still do to my knowledge.
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but… The odds bets absolutely have an impact on your bottom line: they’re the only purely chance-based bet you can make in the entire casino that pays out to you and to the house exactly evenly. Any other bet you can make will, long term, result in you paying more money to the house than they pay back to you. Whereas you will, long term, get exactly as much money back from the house on odds bets as they win from you.
The fact that you’re advising players against what is literally the *sole *fair chance-based bet in the house makes me go :dubious::rolleyes:.
I think I understand the point being made. Betting the odds does improve your EV (makes it slightly less negative). But it also increases your variance (by putting more money at stake, even if for fair odds).
One could imagine a $5 Blackjack table with an even-money $500 coin-flip side bet (or even one of the cheesy standard BJ side-bets, but with fair odds). I’d have to think that a gambler with a $500 bankroll for a weekend will not be taking that side bet, even though it pretty much gets the house edge to zero.
Always the balance with gambling - maximizing the fun while minimizing the potential carnage. 
But that’s just the thing–there’s nothing that says you have to be making large bets. I mean, let’s say you have $10 on the pass line with $30 on odds. That’s a $40 bet. And **Ellis Dee **is saying, “No, no, put your money over here, on this thing that will long-term end up with 20% of your money in the casino’s pocket.”
No, they don’t.
That’s why. The EV of all true-odds bets is zero. That’s how math works.
You do realize that all the other bets on the table have EV that are negative, right?
Yes, of course. They impact the bottom line.
The only way odds bets can have an impact is by short-term variance. To put it another way, the only way they matter is if you get some hot shooters or the table goes really cold. But a hot table can easily win you big money without playing odds, so there is no reason you have to play odds to take advantage of it.
Another reason I avoid odds is because the most favorable position in the casino is the come-out roll on a pass or come bet. Betting odds minimizes this position. I’d much rather put my money on the line for the come-out than I would leaving it behind the line with an expected value of nothing.
Forgive me, but that sounds like terrible woo. A “hot table”* can “easily win you big money,” but in the long term, **you will lose more money than you win. Every. Single. Bet. On the craps table other than the odds bet will, long-term, lose you more money than it wins you. *Only *the odds bet will win you exactly as much money as it loses. The only reason to encourage anyone away from the odds bet is if you want to give them more excitement, and it will be the excitement of beating the odds, because if they keep playing long enough, they’ll run out of money before the casino does.
“Going skydiving? Oh, no, you don’t want *that *parachute. Take this one. There’s a 1% chance that it won’t open! Trust me, you don’t want one of those boring parachutes that open every time. This one will *really *get your heart pumping!”
*Streaks indicate nothing. Unless the dice are loaded or otherwise manipulated, there is nothing controlling when streaks start or end other than pure chance. Your odds of winning on a “hot” table or a “cold” table are exactly the same.
Betting odds changes the odds in your favor. Or if you like the more odds you bet the closer your EV gets to zero away from a negative EV. The come and or pass both have negative EV of approximately 1.4%, but every odds bets redueces that negative EV. So I don’t understand what you are saying.
The odds bet doesn’t change the EV of your pass line bet – it’s a separate bet, with 0 EV. Tacking on additional 0 EV bets doesn’t affect your bottom line at all. It’s somewhat confusing since the odds bet is attached to your pass line bet, but it really is a separate thing.
Consider the following game: whenever a point is set in your craps game, I will offer you a one-time side bet for $100 that pays out even odds based on a fair coin that I’m going to flip. Would you take that bet? Would you claim that my offering you that bet makes the EV of your pass line craps bet better? If I change the value of the coin flip from $100 to $10,000, would that make you reconsider taking the bet? Why should the odds bet be treated any differently?
Now, that isn’t to say that you shouldn’t bet the odds. But all betting the odds is doing is changing your variance. The absolute EV of your bet (i.e., the dollar value you should expect to win/lose) is the same.
I think we’re running into terminology problems here–at least that’s my issue. When I’m looking at betting on craps, I’m considering my pass and odds bets together, simply because the pass bet is required in order to make the odds bet. So, how bad the house’s edge is will be determined by what percentage of that bet is the odds bet versus the pass line. Anywhere on the table other than the odds bet I put my chips will ultimately, long-term, result in a greater net loss of money than putting those chips on the odds bet. If I put the money toward a higher-risk bet, I will win more if I win, but I will lose more often than I win, and the payout on the wins won’t be enough to equal out the losses. What that means for “EV” and “bottom line,” I can’t say. But splitting a $40 bet with $10 on the pass line and $30 on odds will cause you to lose less money long-term than putting that same $40 on anything else (short of getting a greater proportion of it on the odds). And that’s what *I *mean when I talk about the “bottom line.” Which may be completely wrong based on the technical definition of the term.
The odds bet is not a separate bet, since a pass line bet is needed to make an odds bet. The two are correlated in the sense that they both payout on the same roll. You shouldn’t look at the bets separately but as the result of what is the EV o. If the point is 5 adn you put down odds then you are changing the odds on every single possible iteration there on out. There is no roll that would pay off the pass line and not the odds and vice versa, therefore you cannot think of them as separate bets, it is the same bet with improving odds.
Shot From Guns: The proper comparison isn’t between putting $40 on a $10 pass line bet plus a $30 odds bet and putting $40 on a pass line bet. It’s between laying the odds and not laying the odds (i.e., betting $10 with no odds, and betting $40 with odds). In expectation, you’ll lose your money exactly as fast both ways, and get to play the same number of rolls both ways (although in reality, you’ll probably play fewer rolls playing the odds because your bankroll has a lower bound, but not an upper bound). And that’s the point: your bank roll gets whittled down just as fast.
Now, you get to push more money through the table while your bank roll gets whittled down, and that’s exciting to a lot of people. But it doesn’t actually change the outcome of the game.
Alternate take on the same point: suppose two players, say myself and Gangster Octopus are both playing craps, laying $10 on the pass line. He always takes odds when a point is set, I never take odds. It’s pretty clear that our expected values for each round are exactly the same, right? And, discounting effects on the boundaries, I think the expected number of rounds either of us would get to play before busting is exactly the same, too.
Again, playing the odds only messes with your variance. So Gangster Octopus is more likely to be able to walk away having doubled his stake. But he’s also more likely to bust before I am.
Not playing odds is stupid advice to a craps player. If you really want to avoid “losing all your money very quickly” here is a better tip: “Don’t Play Craps.” It’s a fact of life that it is a fast money game, but the bigger fact of life, as has been pointed out several times upthread is that if you want to maximize your chances of winning at craps, you have to play the odds for the maximum amount. From a budgeting perspective, you should buy in with at least 20x the table minimum. So if you are at a $5 table, it will cost you $5 for pass and between $15-$25 for your odd bets. Your $100 will last you approximately 4 consecutive “bad rolls” (i.e no 7/11 on first roll, and you seven out without a winning roll), which is a really bad run, and you should walk away anyway. As I said earlier, I also like to play the 6 and 8 place bets, so my average “bad roll” may cost approximately $37. That said, I need $200 to play at this table, and 5 consecutive bad rolls would send me packing.
My advice to anyone setting out to play craps is that if the minimum bet plus the maximum odds bet is more than you are comforable betting, then you should try to find a game with a lower minimum or not play at all. If your only objective is to maximize your playing time and minimizing your exposure, and slurp up free drinks the whole time, then I guess I can understand why you might not want to make odds bets, but that is not my style of gambling. I want to maximize my odds of winning (or more accurately minimize my odds of losing). The other variable you can use to control your risk is how many come/odds bets you make for a given point.
If you want to play it really conservative, I have a book that espouses a system where you bet “right” and “wrong” at the same time. I don’t buy that it works, but I suppose you could make up the house advantage in free drinks and comps when they track your bets.