Craps is generally accepted as having the most even odds for the player (about a 51% house advantage overall). Of course that relies on the player making the right plays at all times based on solid knowledge of the game and utilization of the various bets that allow them to have nearly even odds with the house. Blackjack is a close second but also relies on expert play in order to achieve good odds. Poker is definitely not in the same category as these games against the house. There is no fixed ratio of wins to losses in poker as there is in casino games. You certainly do need luck to win at poker but a big part of poker “skill” is knowing how to survive through periods without luck and how to capitalize on those times luck comes your way. Therefore a good poker player not only can survive the long haul against bad luck, bad beats, etc. they actually rely on longevity to make a profit. As stated in the OP, games of sheer luck against the house will always eventually result in a loss with enough time to allow the odds to play themselves out. The hope is to get in, get lucky, and get out with a profit. Roulette actually has some of the worst odds overall for the player. Even betting black or red is not a 50/50 chance, they add a green 0 to the wheel and in the US add another green 00 to the wheel but still pay only even money on the bet.
No. Given a double-zero wheel, the chances are 18 in 38 that your color will come up. This gives you about a 47.4% chance but pays 2-1.
Blackjack is a good one; you can make small bets and stay a while. Beware of **variance{/b]. That is, you may have a house edge of 1.2% playing perfect basic strategy on a typical casino game, but your variance may be huge.
As someone said up-thread, low-stakes Limit Hold’em is probably a good bet. You have the small blind/big blind every 10 hands, and you really don’t have to play the rest of the hands (unless you get an awesome starting hand). And if you do play a hand, the limiits mean that you won’t lose too much.
Another choice if you can find it is Baccarat (no, not the guy who wrote all the songs). It is another slow game, but the stake is usually a little higher.
You can piss it away a penny at a time if you play the penny slots, one line, minimum bet. Or what Silenus said.
Quite so. When I’m getting creamed I usually head over to Pai Gow to stop the bleeeding. Just make sure the Casino you’re in doesn’t claim a rake or charge a flat fee per hand - in California they do. (Those in Vegas do not).
Once upon a time, Binions had a table with a $1 minimum with 10X odds. I haven’t been there in 10 years so I don’t know if it still exists or not.
Remember, craps players… We’re talknig about minimizing hourly cost, not finding the lowest odds. Craps is not only a faster game than blackjack, but to get the house advantage down to the same range as blackjack you have to take the odds bets, which puts more money into play. At the very least, this raises the variance for our risk-averse recreational gambler. Taking 10X odds on a $5 pass line bet can result in dramatic swings in your bankroll. In comparison, flat-betting $2 minimums in blackjack is much, much safer, and costs less per hour to boot.
(Bolding mine)
To minimize the loss rate in craps, you really need to know a very minimal amount. Put money on the pass line, wait for the dealer to take your money or give you more, repeat. Watch the game, join the party that every craps table is, enjoy free drinks.
If you’re trying to make your money last as long as possible, there’s no need to even bother with odds bets; they just increase the variance without changing your expected (average) win/loss amount.
Sam, I haven’t ever timed the payout of craps vs. blackjack, but is it that different? If you’re just betting the pass line, your bet will only be settled once every three rolls or so, and after each roll there’s a lot of activity while the dealers handle the bets.
About halfway down the page on this cite you can see the averages for hand speed in blackjack vs craps.
Blackjack with 7 people at the table will get around 50 hands per hour, with some variance for dealer and player speeds. With 7 people, a craps table can do about 130-140 rolls per hour. If you get 11 people at the table, it goes down to about 100.
Which brings up a good point - if you’re trying to minimize your loss rate, play at full tables. You’ll lose your money twice as fast at a craps table with three players as you will at one with 11. The same goes for blackjack.
Note that IF. Its a rather huge IF. You have to play exactly right to get the % down there, knowing exactly when to hit and exactly when to double-down, ect.
But it takes no skill to put a bet on the Pass line.
Now, sure, if you know how to give or take the Odds, you can lower the House % down, but as CurtC pointed out, it requires larger bets.
I think for your average unskilled player, the kind that can and will make mistakes, the House % in craps is lower than at Blackjack.
T Bills.
Are you the second Sam Stone? :dubious:
To clarify on this: Taking odds in craps does not affect your expected loss rate per hour. You must make a bet that has a house edge in craps to be allowed to take the odds. If we say that bet has a 1% house edge, if you bet $5 you’ll be losing a nickel every bet. If you take 10x odds ($50 odds bet, $5 pass bet) you’ll now be betting $55 per bet, but you’re still only paying a nickel per bet, because the extra $50 has a neutral expected value.
If your desire is to gamble (in this example) $55 per bet, then a craps table with 10x odds would probably give you the lowest expected loss rate for that bet. The house edge decreases as a fraction of the total bet, but the actual expected loss per bet doesn’t change at all. You still lose the same amount on average, but you dramatically increase your swings - desirable if you want to gamble a lot of money with a low house edge, but bad for a gambler who wants a reasonable expectation of losing as slowly as possible.
130 rolls per hour is slower than 50 hands per hour, if all you do is bet on the (Don’t) Pass line, without odds. Betting on the Don’t Pass is a slightly better house edge than the Pass.
I think I’d go with buying the $5 pack of cards for a Bingo session, that would last 1.5-2 hours.
Or maybe a bet in the Sports Book which would last the length of the game.
I have never understood why anyone would want to bet the Don’t Pass line. You give the house a slight advantage over a similar Pass line and you’re the one guy at the table that is hoping the rest of the table loses.
But most of those rolls don’t affect the pass line bet. Let’s say it’s 135 rolls an hour. 29.6% of those are come-out rolls. There is one roll that determines your bet for every come-out roll. That’s because for there to be a come-out roll, there must have been a previous roll that determined whether the pass line bet won or lost. This is true whether that previous roll was itself a come-out roll or not. So we take the 29.6% of those 135 hands to get 40 bets an hour, significantly better than blackjack.
That matches my own experience. I rarely deviate from the pass line bet in craps and I have always found it to be slower than blackjack.
Waiting for the table to get hot makes no sense, you can’t time the table. But as a trick for wasting time, that’s pretty clever.
The odds on the pass bet would cancel out the odds on the don’t pass bet.
Yeah it really changes the atmosphere of the table when there’s someone hoping everyone else loses. Although it’s more fun when there’s a don’t pass guy losing, because that means everyone else is winning and there’s an extra schadenfreude effect.
Just betting the pass line with no odds on craps would probably last a while, but I can’t help myself from betting odds and come bets so craps is actually where I lose money the quickest sometimes (loading up two come bets then getting a 7).
I prefer Pai Gow for playing a while without losing much (if any) and geting a lot of free drinks. Most hands you will push which costs nothing. Plus there’s sometimes cute chinese girls at the table.
Don’t Pass is a better bet than Pass, that’s why. Don’t Pass has a 1.36% house edge, the Pass line has a 1.41% edge. Cite 1 and Cite 2
As others have pointed out, if you just play the pass line, then your bet is settled on average only once every three rolls or so. I tried to do this calculation and I get somewhere around three rolls on average to settle a pass line bet.
So that would mean that a craps pass line bet settles at the rate of 45 times per hour, somewhat slower than blackjack.
ETA: Plus, as I mentioned earlier, if the goal is to maximize the fun per dollar lost, a craps table is way more fun than a blackjack table.