Yes, sorry, terminology issue again. When I say something like “odds,” I don’t just mean the actual odds of the roll coming up, but also how a winning bet pays out. So I’m not talking about the odds of the roll itself, but the chances of me walking away with as much money as possible. Things get complicated because, as you’ve hinted at here, there are two factors at play: the odds of winning a bet and the payout on the bet itself. For anybody who doesn’t know, the “odds” bet is itself so named because it pays out based on the exact odds of the roll. So, there are bets you can make that, individually, you have a better chance of winning, but what they pay out is set up so that, long-term, you’ll lose more money on the losses than you’ll make back on the wins.
“Playing to minimize the house edge” is definitely the most accurate description of my goal. Thanks for helping me to clarify that.
It’s hard not to respond to this in an insulting way.
I have never been made to feel uncomfortable betting on the darkside. I have joked around with right-side bettors about it, though it’s all in good fun and I wouldn’t raise the joke myself.
I can imagine a socially awkward person running into trouble with darkside betting, and I can imagine writers for a Mensa book thinking there might be a higher proportion of socially awkward readers for their book than in the general population.
I’m not sure that I succeeded in making this reply not-insulting, but I did try.
From my many years of experience working on craps games I can attest to the fact that a very large percentage of Don’t players are distinctly nasty people – there are exceptions, of course.
Speaking of percentages … in an earlier post I stated the difference between Pass and Don’t Pass bets but I did manage to slip a decimal. Here are the correct figures:
So the Vegas trip is imminent, and I’m seriously considering some craps action. Thanks a ton for those various betting strats - if nothing else they provide some interesting thinking.
In particular, do you know of any “low-variance” plays, similar to your $10 Don’t, that are played on the light side? I’m thinking a similar $10 Do strat would have higher variance, but I’m not positive I’m analyzing it correctly.
I’m not sure I’m willing to be a craps newb and be playing against the majority of the players at the table.
I suppose mathematically there’s really no difference when doing it on the lightside, but it’d sure feel different playing it, IMO. It could easily start to feel like you’re only playing for 7/11 on the come-outs and writing off the established passes and comes.
On the plus side, every time the shooter sevens out, you get $20 back – the $10 you have on the come/pass and the $10 it just won.
Part of the fun of the darkside strategy is that you can get big wins back at the expense of little losses. Switching it to lightside means big losses with little wins. But again, they’re mirror images so the expectation is the same.
I don’t see any particular reason not to try it. It’s a very safe play.
I am not sure what you are asking. You’re best bet for little exposure is betting the table minimum on the Pass Line (or the Don’t Pass). If you want to increase your variance, bet the odds to whatever you feel comfortable with.
I said this earlier, if you are staying at high end casino, a $5 crap table at prime time (6 pm - 2 am) will be hard to find, and chances are it will be extremely crowded. A crowded table will also limit your exposure as each roll takes about 30 seconds (or longer). Less people at a table means less bets to pay (or collect) and less down time.
Ten dollar tables will also tend to be crowded at high end casinos at Prime time.
I just realized that when you do the darkside, every time a shooter sevens out you get at least $20 back: the $10 you have on the Don’t Pass plus the $10 it wins. Weird that both systems always return at least $20 on a seven out.
The difference is that the darkside returns $20 per point, meaning a minimum of $20 and a maximum of $120. The lightside always returns exactly $20.
I dunno. Let me pull out the craps felt and see if I can come up with some low-variance lightside strategies that are fun to play and don’t feel too risky.
Yeah, it’s a bit hard to put into words, I guess, but I think Ellis gets at the idea.
I’ve played just the Pass Line, with and without odds, before (read: once, when I was 21 I think). I found that kinda dull, to be honest, especially just the line bet. You bet once and can stand around for awhile to see if you win or lose $10.
Ellis’s description of the $10 Don’t sort of struck me - something you can play for awhile with a $200-300 roll at a $10 table, bet pretty actively, but not be super-likely to lose the wad quickly.
I’m more likely to be in the poker room if it were up to me - but some of the guys going are dice players and I don’t want to be anti-social. Playing dark-side with them at the table is perhaps not something I’d want to do with folks I don’t know really well either.
What kills you here is an immediate out, like say 6, 7. You lose the pass line bet, the odds behind it and the don’t come. If it’s double odds on a $10 table, that’s $40 out the window in two rolls. (By contrast, the $10 Don’t strategy breaks even on an immediate out, as would the lightside version of $10 Do.)
Now that I’m thinking about it, I’d say a $10 Do would be fine. It’s basically just betting a ton of coin flips for $10 each, though you can’t predict which bets will resolve first. And it keeps you on the lightside with the table. Best of all, because you bet the come every roll, it is highly probable that you’ll win money anytime anyone else wins money, making it both safe AND social. Plus the seven out is softened by the come-out winner, which is always nice.
Interestingly, no one point can ever lose the $10 Do more than $50, since you can never have more than $70 on the table at once and a seven out returns $20. Conversely, one hot shooter hitting only numbers could theoretically bust the $10 Don’t on a single point. The rub is that casino tables as a rule usually seem to be cold-to-choppy, rarely hot. heh.
I guess I’m one of your exceptions b/c I almost always play dont’ pass/don’t come. Like Ellis Dee has mentioned, it’s weathering the small losses for those 7-outs that pay off 3 or 4 bets all at once.
But every time it’s my turn to shoot I “jump the fence” and play pass line and always put out a pass line bet for the dealers, with odds. If craps show on the come-out, I’ll put the dealer’s bet right back up there alongside mine.
I’ve never in my life gotten nasty looks from other players or gotten any guff from a dealer playing the don’t. In fact, some folks at the table see what I’m doing (and some act like they didn’t even know you *could * bet against the dice), and try a few rolls on the dark side.
It’s all in fun and win or lose I try to make nice with the dealers and whomever is beside me. Which, once at the Taj Mahal in AC, was Drew Barrymore. I actually taught her how to play craps!
Ellis, I am not going to delve into your various “strategies,” because if they are fun for you to employ, then great, that’s what you’re there for, to have fun.
But I am going to try to illustrate that your “disdain” for odds bets is irrational.
I’ll take odds to the extreme to try to illustrate their value. (Note: Vegas actually has a 100x odds table, so my example isn’t totally off the wall.)
Let’s say the minimum bet was 5 cents (that IS off the wall, but it will help me illustrate my point), and the table allowed 100x Odds bets.
I would bet 5 cents on pass line, and then back it up with a $5 odds bet. Let’s call this Strategy “MAX ODDS.”
A second strategy would employ betting $5.05 on Pass line. Let’s call this Strategy “NO ODDS.”
Now, all the noise has been removed, i.e., both strategies will result in either losing $5.05 and going home or winning some amount and going home. (Obviously we’re not going home, because we’re gamblers and we love this.)
I ran through all of the payoffs, i.e, taking the conditional probabilities of all potential outcomes, and not surprisingly (at least not to someone who truly understands odds and probabilities) the OVERALL EXPECTED VALUE of the ODDS strategy was a loss of approximately 7/100 of ONE CENT vs. the OVERALL EXPECTED VALUE of the NO ODDS strategy of 7 CENTS. Unsurprising in that we have reduced the casino’s take by about 99% (i.e., they only have a take on 1% of our total bet).
So, even if you’re at a 3/4/5 x odds table you can reduce the casino’s take by approximately 80%. FAIL TO DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!
No, it doesn’t illustrate your point because it is off the wall.
That’s like saying the Martingale can’t lose because you can always double up after the previous loss. In the real world you can’t arbitrarily double up your bet, and it is this fact alone, this real world limitation, that makes the Martingale a losing strategy.
If you’re going to debate craps in good faith, you are only allowed to use real world conditions. If the “pure math” approach can’t be actually played, it is meaningless.
Maybe I should have defined what an illustration actually is. As I noted, there are real tables with 100x odds, so just take my example and use $1 as my pass line bet and $100 as my odds bet vs. your $101 No odds bet, and the difference in percentage “take” is EXACTLY THE SAME. So, my “pure math” approach can actually be played.
Now, if you don’t want to bet $100 on one roll and you cant find the 100x Odds table, you won’t be doing as well as in my example, but it should be obvious to you that you can reduce the casino’s take on a 3/4/5 x odds table, AS I STATED IN MY POST. How can you argue that the mathematics are meaningless and that mine is not a good faith argument? I won’t restate my entire example by reducing the bets to $5 with 3/4/5 x odds because I originally assumed that people on the straight dope would be sharp enough to understand that the house edge would be reduced in a similar manner at that level, just to a lesser extent, but still quite significant. For someone who has spent as much time playing craps as you say you have, you’ve needlessly handed the casino thousands of dollars that I’m trying to save you in the future.
We all understand your point quite well, fjs1fs. Nobody is disagreeing that the house edge is reduced by maximizing the percentage of your bets that are odds bets.
What Ellis (and others) have argued, is that house edge per dollar bet is not the only relevant metric. Things like “time to bust” and “expected loss per hour” are important, and perhaps even more more important to a casual craps player.
As a quick and easy example - if I only have $200 at a $10 table, I can play a lot longer playing a single pass line bet than I can playing a pass line with full odds bet - this should be quite clear since you lose exactly the same amount per roll, on average (the house edge on the pass bet). The house edge on all the bets in play is lower with the second bet, but the variance is way up, and I’m more likely to bust out quickly and have to wander over to penny slots.
Not to mention more “aesthetic” concerns such as - bets made per roll (reduced by a pass+odds strategy), group enjoyment (arguably reduced by making “dark side” rolls).
The real point to take away is this - no betting strategy on craps will allow you to make money playing it. So the real question is how to maximize “fun/dollar lost”, and this obviously involves more than just the magnitude of the house edge.
LOL. Yes I know what variance is, and I think someone wisely stated in one of these craps threads that if your goal is to minimize your variance, don’t go to a casino. I can similarly add that if you don’t understand why should be taking the odds, don’t go to a casino.
JAS09 in a post above reasons that he would be better off taking odds. Perhaps you are referring to an earlier post/page.
Back on the subject of Variance, as a gambler I thought I wanted a higher variance. If Variance around our EV was 0, we would know that we would lose the the casino’s “take” percentage (in your case, about 1.4% of your wager, and in my case about 1/4 of that percentage on a 3/4/5 x odds table) multiplied by the amount wagered. I’ll take the increased Variance on my outcomes (ALONG WITH THE VASTLY IMPROVED EV) EVERY TIME!
Most gamblers know that our true EV is negative, which is how casinos (and lotteries for that matter) exist. We’re really hoping that the Variance pays off in our favor. Of course I’d rather improve my EV while hoping for that positive variance.