US Players and Credit Card Deposits Accepted!Craps Betting Strategy
Learning the basic craps strategy can have great benefits in your betting game. Some of them minimize the house edge to almost nothing. There are no casino games other that craps that can offer better odds except for blackjack with card counting strategy. There really isn't any way to improve your edge over the house edge, but you can make it nearly zero. The dice control concept is theoretically a way to actually cheat at craps, but it's extremely hard to do and it's advanced. Dice control strategy will be discussed in another craps article.
Tips and Strategies
When beginning a game of craps, it's essential to know the game and all the basic rules first so that you understand the bets. When playing at the local casino, you'll usually find everyone using unfamiliar terminology as well. So the best things to do are read about the game and learn a little bit about different bets that can be played and the table layout. A great way to practice this game is to play at an online casino with less distractions first. This way you can learn the game before you end up losing your money to bad betting strategies.
Best Craps Bets
I should tell you right away that the best craps bet is the "don't pass" bet with the free odds bet. This combination can ultimately lower the house edge to 0.01%, which is ridiculously low at a casino. You can use this strategy and make a ton of money, or at least keep playing for a very long time without losing your bankroll. Because of this fact, this is why craps is such a wild and spectacular experience.
Another good craps bet is the pass line bet. This bet is the second best bet on the craps table and the house has a slightly greater edge. People like to bet for the shooter, usually due to peer pressure in a casino and will take this bet rather than the "don't pass" bet, which is actually a better wager. This is where online casinos have a huge advantage over land based casinos because there is no peer pressure or anyone pressuring you to make a slightly worse bet.
These two bets are the best ones to take before the come out roll. After a point number has been made, then these two bets go into a second phase and the strategy gets a little more interesting. During the second phase of these bets, you can make an odds bet. You are essentially betting that a point number will be rolled before a seven, and we all know that the seven is the most probable roll out of any other number.
Once the point has been determined after the come out roll, you can make your free odds bet. Usually this is a multiple of your original bet such as 2x, 3x and even as high up as 100x at Las Vegas craps. This multiple is usually limited, but the craps strategy says that the higher multiple that you choose, the lower the house edge gets overall. Free odds always pay true odds and the house has no edge. Your total odds is an average of this free odds bet and the pass line or don't pass bet, so your absolute odds are not exactly zero, but almost.
Worst Craps Bets
There are also some bad bets out there as well. These are sometimes known as proposition bets and these have a huge house edge. Normally the people who fall for these bad bets are uneducated about the craps strategy or they don't really know the mathematics behind the bets. Other players may not even know about the free odds bet to begin with because the bet itself isn't displayed on the craps table! This is why the odds bets are sometimes known as the secret craps bets because many people easily pass them up, even if they are intelligent and understand the game.
Some of these bad proposition bets are the big six bet or the big eight bet. You win when a 6 or 8 is rolled and you are paid even money. This is a very bad bet because as you can see from our odds and probabilities page, this is less likely to be rolled than a 7. When you get down to it, the house has a 9.1% edge, which is a huge disadvantage for you because the casino makes lots of money from this bet and you lose lots of money. This is bad craps strategy.
These aren't even the worst craps bets. There are far worse ones than that. Hard 4 and hard 10 are both bets that have a house edge of more than 11%. If you want a good craps tip, stay away from these. The casino is robbing you here!
Even worse are the proposition bets. These are displayed on the craps tables as images of dice in a smaller box in the middle. Also, these kinds of bets only last for one roll at a time unlike most of the bets that stay until the end of the round when a seven is rolled. This means if you are betting on snake eyes or box cards (2 or 12), you have a 1 in 36 chance that they will be rolled, but the dealer pays you 30 to 1 odds, which is a terrible craps bet. The house edge is almost 15% and is one of the worst in the casino. This is just proof that if you don't know the craps strategy or don't follow the tips, you could end up losing a lot of money really quick.
Advice on Craps Bets
My advice is to just stick with the good bets mentioned above and don't play the bad ones unless you have money to burn, just want to entertain the people at the table, or just have a gut instinct that a lucky roll is about to come out. For another tip, don't get intimidated by how complicated the craps table is. The casino only wants people to lose concentration and make bad bets this way, but the basic betting concept is actually quite simple if you stick to just the few good bets.
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