fling93 loves fishies

How to Play Craps

Last night the wife and I had a great time “gambling” at Casino Bowl 2004, a fundraiser to benefit the Emergency Housing Consortium. It was $50 a head, and you get $200 in play money chips as well as a free drink and raffle ticket. Yeah, you don’t actually win money, but the highest winners of the night got to win some neat prizes. We both had a blast! It was called “Casino Bowl” because of the upcoming Super Bowl Sunday, and all the people working there wore various football jerseys. Plus among the prizes was a Jeff Garcia autographed football — a SJSU alum as my wife always points out — and a nice suede 49ers jacket (yeah, there was also a Raider jacket, but who’d want that?).

Of course, I headed straight for the craps table. My wife started out at the slots, but didn’t have much luck so she joined me. She’s never played craps before, but since it wasn’t real money, she found it less intimidating to try it out. As for me, back in one of my earlier jobs, our Director of Software had a fondness for gambling, so for a few of our Software Group offsite outings, we did a day trip to Vegas, and before we went, one of the managers gave us a crash course on craps (and being engineers, it involved flow charts). And I was quickly hooked.

How the Game Works

Quick primer — well okay, maybe not so quick after all. You’ve got a pair of dice. The first roll (the come out roll) is treated differently than the other rolls. If you roll a 7 or 11 on the first roll, you win (pass), but if you roll a 2, 3, or 12 on the first roll, you lose (don’t pass). If you roll any other number, the game’s not over yet, and that number you rolled becomes the point. The guy running the table will put a large round marker on the number to mark it as the point. Now, if you roll the number again, you win/pass, but if you roll a 7, you lose/don’t pass (called a 7 out, and the dice pass to the next person). Any other number and you just keep rolling again until you hit the point or a 7 (and this whole bit is what the flowchart illustrated, in case you were wondering). Given that 7 is the most likely number to roll, hitting the point is considered somewhat of an achievement, especially if it’s a tough number to roll, like a 4 or 10.

You can find more info here. The basic bet is to bet on pass (putting your chips in the outermost strip), which pays 1:1. You usually need to put this bet down before you can do any other bet (you could also do don’t pass instead, but that’s generally bad form), and remember to check what the table minimum bet is, usually posted on the inside of the table. If you don’t have any chips, wait till in between rolls, throw your bills on the table, and then they’ll give you the chips. When you place your bets, remember to put the chips with the highest denomination on the bottom (e.g. $5 chips below $1 chips).

The Odds Bet

A twist on the pass bet is when a point is established. When that happens, most casinos let you add another bet to your original bet, called an odds bet, placed just outside the pass line, right behind your original bet. This additional bet is actually paid back at the true odds (i.e. with no house advantage), and thus is sometimes called the best bet in Vegas (of course, the casino already has an edge on your original pass bet, which you cannot remove). Most casinos let you put down an odds bet double or even triple your original pass bet. But at Casino Bowl, you could do five times (since this bet has no casino edge but the original pass bet does, the more you put down on odds, the smaller the casino edge on the entire bet), although since the minimum bet was already $10, I saw very few people doing that.

The Place Bet

There are a myriad of additional bets you can place, which is why the table is so busy (and why many people are intimidated by craps). Another popular bet is the place bet, which are the big numbers near the top of the table. Basically, once a point is established, you are betting that the shooter (the person rolling the dice) will roll the number you picked before a 7. These are paid at a rate not quite as good as the odds bet, but I’ve found them to be the funnest bets of the game, especially when the shooter gets hot and it feels like you’re “earning” a regular income off of your place bets (okay, I’m an engineer, so I know that nobody technically ever really gets hot, it’s just a statistical illusion, but thinking of it that way just ruins the fun of it all).

You typically can’t reach the numbers, so you just put your chips down on the table and tell them the number(s) you want them on (you don’t have to say “place”, since that’s obvious). The numbers have a large square, and they’ll put your chips on the border of the square corresponding to where you’re standing at the table. Make a mental note of where that spot is so that you can see at a glance what numbers you have bets on.

Although the place bets don’t do anything (can’t win or lose) on the come out roll, typically the bets are just left there with the assumption that you would probably just replace the bet after a point is established. And after a place bet wins, they typically give you the payout but leave your original bet on the table. However, you can take these bets off the table at any time (say, “take down my X” where X is the number), but that’s generally considered bad luck for the table. If the roller is hot, you might want to add your place bet payout to your original place bet. To do this, tell them to “press my X” where X is the place bet that just won (and you’ll really look like you know what you’re doing). Typically, the winnings won’t be the exact right amount to bet, so they’ll give you some change. Which brings us to…

Putting Down the Right Number of Chips

The tricky thing about the odds and place bets is to put down the correct amount of money so that your winnings comes out to be a whole number. Get that right if you really want to look like you know what you’re doing. Here are the payouts:

The number to remember is the second one in the payout, since your bet needs to be a multiple of that number to get a payout that isn’t rounded down. For example, if the shooter’s first roll is a 6 or 8, then your odds bet will pay you $6 for each $5 you put down, so you need to put down a multiple of 5, otherwise they’ll just pay you 1:1 and you get screwed. Often, casinos will let you round up your odds bet past the odds limit to make it even. For example, if they allow double odds, your pass bet is $2, and the point is a 6, you are usually allowed to put $5 down for your odds bet even though this is more than double your pass bet.

Note that for place bets, the payoffs are slightly lower than for the odds bets, and the further the number is from 7, the bigger the house edge (personally, I like to stick with just 6 and 8 unless the shooter gets really hot). If you forget these payoffs, you can just ask, and they’ll be glad to tell you. Some of the better places will even correct you when you don’t bet correctly and remind you if you forget your odds bet.

The Come Bet

The other popular bet is the come bet, which is basically treats the next roll as if it’s the first roll even though a point has already been established. Note this means that if the shooter immediately hits a 7, you win while the rest of the table loses. Just put your chips down in the area on the table that says “come”, being sure that the dealer sees you do this so they know whose bet it is. The weird thing here is that if you don’t win or lose with the first roll, they’ll move your chips to the number that is your point, almost as if it were a place bet. This is cuz they only have one marker for the point, so they just use your chips to mark your point (and if they aren’t sure whose bet it is, this is the point where they’ll ask, so pay attention). You can (and should) still add an odds bet to this, but you usually need to specify the number when you put it down (e.g. if your point is a 6, you say “odds on my 6” when you put your chips on the table).

This bet is useful for who want to stick to pass and odds bets because of the larger casino edge for the other bets, including place. It can get boring waiting for the shooter to hit their point, so the come bet lets you have several pass and odds bets going at once in kind of a parallel pipeline (okay, I’m a geek!). Just be sure to keep track of where all of your bets are, in case they forget to pay you!

Rolling the Dice

When the shooter 7 outs, the dice move clockwise to the next person at the table with a bet down (and only for a 7 out — rolling a 2, 3, or 12 on the first roll still loses the bet, but you keep the dice). One thing to keep in mind is that the dice have to hit the wall at the far end of the table to be a valid roll. This can make you unpopular if the roll would have been the point. Since hitting chips can slow down the dice (and make a mess), you ideally want to throw the dice so that it sails over all the chips, lands just short of the wall, and bounces off of it back into the table. It’s not a valid roll if a die goes off the table either, but people don’t mind this as much (mostly because they can’t see what the roll would have been). And if you’ve been a hot shooter, some people think it’s good luck to insist on the same dice (just shout, “Same dice!”). This generally takes a good deal more time because the pit boss will inspect the die carefully to make sure nobody tried to switch it, but generally people won’t mind.

How We Fared

Anyway, my wife quickly got the hang of it, although she kept having to ask me what amounts she was supposed to bet. She even started doing place bets and some of the more exotic ones, like a hard 10 (betting that the next 10 is a double 5, and not a 6 and 4). In fact, when the dice came around to her, she quickly became, by far, the hottest roller of the night (indeed, perhaps the hottest I’ve ever seen!). She hit at least 5 or 6 points, but two of them were hard 10s, and she hit a ton of numbers, winning me (and the rest of the table) plenty of money in place bets — so much so that a couple of people ran over to hug her after she hit the point (well okay, one of them was her friend, Fil, who organized the event, and the other was a friend of his).

I’d been down to a little over $100 left when she started rolling, and quickly quadrupled my “money.” When it was all over, I’d turned $200 into $607, and she ended up with $585. There were prizes for the highest totals of the night, but we weren’t anywhere near that level (someone ended up with over $4,000, and the last prize was won by someone over $1,200 or so), and we didn’t win any of the raffle prizes, but it was still a better day than I ever had at Vegas or Reno.

And one final caveat. Craps is certainly an exciting game, but the drawback of that is that you win and lose money very quickly. Whenever you gamble (and especially with craps), be sure to decide upon a strict limit for your gambling money which you do not exceed with any exception. Remember, the casino always has the advantage, so in the long run, you should expect to lose money. Treat your losses as the cost for the fun you’re having, not as something you can win back. Also note, even with tables with a $3 minimum, I’ve lost $100 in the space of 5 minutes, so if you have a weekend trip to Vegas, you actually might want to hold off on the craps table until your last day, so that you don’t burn through your gambling money right away and ruin your whole weekend!

Oh yeah, the EHC

All that fun, and the proceeds went towards helping the homeless in the Silicon Valley! From EHC’s about page:

Recognizing that a solution to homelessness and poverty requires immediate needs assistance plus effective, self-sufficiency strategies, EHC offers an array of supportive services known as the Continuum of Care. These services include food, clothing, and transportation assistance; housing search assistance; adult education and literacy programs; on-site medical services; legal aid; computer training; job training and employment assistance; life-skills workshops; children’s education and mentoring programs; mental health outreach; and drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs. Additionally, EHC offers After Shelter Care, case management for up to one year after a client moves to stable housing.

So we’ll definitely be back again next year…