MC, you may wish to investigate the issue of card-counting a bit more. Notwithstanding what you have been told, casino personnel don’t look to see how often you win (card counting doesn’t really help you that much in changing the odds of winning). They look for a pattern of bets that show you are betting more when the deck is rich in cards that help the player, and betting less when the deck is poor in such cards. It is through bet variance that card-counters really make money.
To understand how little the use of counting changes the number of wins, make a chart of 100 hands. Have the house win 51 hands, and you win 49. Assuming a one-unit bet, and no black-jacks, you have 98 units at the end, giving the house a 2% advantage. Now, change the result in only 2 hands, giving you 51 wins. Now YOU have the 2% advantage, a swing of 4%. This is significantly higher than the difference in vig between proper play of BJ without and with counting. The chance that the house would be able to detect accurately that a person was winning 51 instead of 49 hands out of 100 on average over time would be very small.
Don’t forget, the house wins by losing, they just hate to lose when they lose!
agisofia, curious what you thought about the strategy of playing both the pass and don’t pass simultaneously. i heard that this is the one true way to win at craps but that some casinos (the ones in AC) won’t let you play it. friend of mine goes to binions in vegas and wins a ton with this system.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is right now.
smarks-
I call playing the pass and don’t pass simultaneously the El Cortez classis. A lot of the skids who play the quarter table at the El Cortez (frequently referred to as the El Commode by dealers who broke in there) play twenty-five cents on the line, twenty-five cents on the don’t, and get all the beer they can drink for about fifty cents every half hour. The cockail waitresses generally go by the quarter table so fast you hear a doppler shift.
Playing this way really doesn’t give you that much of an edge. You just lose your money a lot more slowly, agonizingly slowly, and it annoys the piss out of the dealers.
Think about it this way- if you play both sides and lay your don’t pass bet and the point rolls, you lose money. Next point, you take the opposite strategy and take odds on your line bet. Seven out rolls, you lose your money. Once in a while, you get lucky and get a bunch of point-sevens when your laying your don’t pass bet, or somebody fires up a forty roll hand and rolls a dozen or so points and you’re taking odds on your pass line bet and you can walk away with a fair chunk of change, but in the long run, there’s really no system that will give you any real edge on a craps table. This may be the longest sentence I have ever composed.
I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - Arthur Dent
Oh, forgot to mention. On the don’t pass, the twelve is barred (in a few houses, it’s aces, but most houses it’s twelve.) What this means (for the uninitiated) is, on the come out roll, if twelve rolls, we take your pass line bet, but your don’t pass bet doesn’t get paid. It just sits there. So really, you can’t even break even using the two sided method of playing.
I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - Arthur Dent
The reason casinos have banned playing both sides is because it’s a sneaky way to get lots of comps without risking a lot of money. If you calculate the odds, it comes out to - surprise - the same 1.41% for the house. But let’s say the casino has a comp policy that gives you a free room for playing 4 hours of craps at $25 per roll. If you and a friend bet both sides at $25 per roll, you’ll get two free rooms, worth maybe $200. And you’ll lose about 70 cents a roll, on average, with very little risk. Slow down your play, go to the bathroom frequently, wait out a few ‘cold streaks’, and you might get by playing only 10-20 plays in an hour while looking like a losing gambler. So you give the house $28-$56, and in return you get two free rooms.
If you bet by yourself and just bet one side, then you still lose the same amount of money in the long run, but in the short term your money is at risk, and comp players don’t like risk. Betting $25 per roll, you can easily lose $1000 in four hours if you have some bad luck.
You can do the same thing at Roulette by betting red and black at the same time, although the house has a 5.26% edge, so it costs more. And most casinos won’t let you do that, either.
Dhanson, you’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head as to why Atlantic City casinos won’t let you play both sides of the pass line. Most downtown Vegas casinos will let you do it, though. I don’t know what the policy is for most houses on the Strip, but I know the Strip casinos have a lot stricter policies on a lot of things than downtown joints do.
the way i’ve played it is that i’ll play both sides. if the point is 5,6,8,9 i’ll do nothing and just wait for the next come out. if it’s a 4 or 10, i’ll lay maximum odds on the don’t side and hedge with the hard 4 or hard 10. the only way i lose is with an easy 4 or easy 10 or with 12 on the come out. and no, i haven’t played this way to get comped. your thoughts?
Wait, I’m confused. Seems like half the people are talking dice, the other half are talking cards. I know of the dice game craps, but is there a card game of the same name? And where can I find some rules? (I’m a sucker for a good card game. Anyone for Mus?)
Smarks, what are the chances of hard 4/10? What does the casino pay you for a hard 4/10?
Quick calculation shows you that your strategy loses money, just as ANY betting strategy loses money (OTHER than counting cards at BJ). Yours loses more than if you simply played both sides of the line, because the vigorish is quite high on the proposition hard-way bets.
Let there be no mistake about casino games. You can’t win. You can’t break even. If you play long enough, you can’t even stay in the game.
Getting back to the OP, here is a link to what allege to be the rules for Hazard, the game on which craps is (loosely) based. Ignoring the proposition bets, craps is easier to follow.
I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!
Olentzero-
No card game called craps. I asked if anyone out there knew who invented this godawful convoluted game, and everyone wants to talk about blackjack. I’m going to check out the website that has the rules for Hazard, though. Could provide some valuable insight.
I never could get the hang of Thursdays. - Arthur Dent
