Well, you’re handing it over whatever bet you make, in the long run. The don’t pass line has a house edge, just like the pass line.
In regular craps, a 6/6 on a come out roll is a “push” when you bet the “Don’t Pass” That one roll in 36 opportunities is enough to give the house an advantage.
The House edge on a Pass vs a Don’t Pass bet is virtually identical.
My facetious answer: Because anyone who is going to sweat the very tiny expectation difference gained by playing the wrong way isn’t going to go near a craps table in the first place.
Seriously, if giving the house a .01% expectation advantage bothers you, what are you doing at a craps table? Craps has pretty good house odds if you bet the pass line and take odds, but it’s still a losing game, and always will be. So the only reason to play is to have fun while losing a bit of money. That’s why players don’t like playing against the others.
The low house odds of craps are a bit of an illusion, because how much you lose at the table is a function of not just the odds but how fast the game is. For example, with basic strategy in blackjack (no counting), the house has an advantage of somewhere between 0.5% and 0.7% per hand depending on the rules. At a full blackjack table, you’ll get roughly 40 hands per hour. So the cost to gamble at a $5 table is about $1-$2 per hour. (slightly more than just number of hands times the action, because players sometimes split and double). At a fast table with just three or four players you might get 60-70 hands.
On the other hand, craps ranges from betwwen 100 and 180 rolls per hour, depending on the players. And the passline/come bet has odds of about 1.4%. If you bet $5 per roll, the game is going to cost you $7-$12 per hour. Note that the odds bets do not change this - they don’t change your expectation per hour, only your variance.
Also note that there are some real sucker bets on a craps table, and if you play them you will pay dearly. For example, a hard 8 has a 9% house advantage, and ‘any 7’ has about a 17% advantage for the house - one of the worst bets in the casino outside of Keno and the big six wheel.
If you like playing craps, there’s a simple rule - bet pass/don’t pass as small as you can so that you can take maximum odds without exceeding your comfort zone. Max odds increases variance, which makes it more likely that you will come out a winner after a session. Stay away from all the other bets, which are a trap that allows the casino to extract maximum cash from the least educated gamblers.
And never, ever listen to anyone who claims to have a system to beat craps. Accept that the likely outcome is that you will lose, calculate how much money you wish to lose per hour for the enjoyment you get, and recognize that you could win or lose as much as 20 times that much in a given hour- more if you are taking 10x odds.
Except russian heel (#18) above.
FWIW, the only Craps table at my local Casino is a Crap-less Crap Table. The Don’t Pass is not available.
Let’s get precise.
House advantage on Pass: 1.414%
House advantage on Don’t: 1.402%
Difference between Pass and Don’t: 0.012%
Now let’s see what this means in dollars. We’ll change percentage to decimal and use a player betting $10 per hand for 100 hands for a total of $1000 in action.
$1000 x 0.00012 = $0.12
For each $1000 the Don’t player puts into action he loses 12 cents less than the Pass player.
Don’t players are generally disliked by Pass players (because they are rooting against them) and by craps dealers (because Don’t players don’t tip), but it appears Don’t players don’t care.
I’ll tell you a story about the most confimed Don’t player I came across in my years working in casinos.
A guy came to the owner of a small casino I was working at and proposed that he would put up $60,000 cash and play his system for at least 8 hours a day if the casino owner would give him free RF&B (Room, Food, and Beverage). He would play until he either doubled the $60k or lost it all. The casino owner agreed as soon as he heard Craps System; he didn’t even ask what the system was.
It was a Don’t Pass / Don’t Come system with prop bets and increasing bets when he fell behind. It took about six weeks for the sequence of rolls to happen that took the entire $60,000. There was much rejoicing.
So, he paid 10k a week for free room, board and beverages?
How was the food?
You should have gone across the street to the Silver Spur where they had 10 cent craps all the time. (The big problem there was break in dealers buying all of their chips to practice with.) I walked in on a hand there once where a player had parlayed his 10 cent hardways to ten dollars (the maximum I believe) each and won over $300 on a buyin of 5 bucks. Fun times. The Cal-Neva used to have a 10 cent single zero roulette wheel upstairs in those days. That game had some pretty amazing play as well.