Craps

About Craps

Craps is a very popular dice game in casinos especially at US soil. In Europe it is not that popular. Online craps is available on all major online casino softwares.

Craps Rules and Gameplay

After placing your bets on certain area of the table, two dice are rolled and depending on the sum of the dice, your bet either wins, loses or remains unsolved.

Pass bet: To make this bet you place the bet at the “pass line”–area of the table. If you roll 7 or 11, the bet wins and pays 1:1. If 2,3 or 12 is rolled, the bet loses. If anything else (4,5,6,8,9,10) is rolled, this number becomes “active” and it is called the point. For example if 8 is rolled, then the point is 8. After this the dice is rolled until either 7 or the point is rolled. This bet wins if the point is rolled before 7 and loses if 7 is rolled before the point.

Pass Odds bet: This is a no-house edge additional bet that the player should always take to reduce the total house edge of the game. After the point is made in previous bet, the player may stake additional bet, which will win if the point is rolled before 7. This bet pays out true odds, and has no house edge. You can usually bet only maximum 3 times the pass bet. If you take the maximum Pass Odds bet (results in lowest house edge), the combined house edge is only 0.47%.

Don’t Pass bet: If you are familiar with the Pass bet this bet it the opposite of that bet. You place the bet at Don’t pass area of the table. The bet wins if 2 or 3 is rolled, loses if 7 or 11 is rolled and the bet is returned if 12 is rolled. If anything else (4,5,6,8,9,10) is rolled, this number becomes the point and the bet wins if 7 is rolled before the point is rolled again, and loses if the point is rolled before 7.

Don’t Pass Odds bet: Like Pass Odds bet you can usually stake maximum 3 times Don’t pass bet on this bet. The bet pays true odds without house edge if 7 is rolled before the point. The combined house edge with Don’t pass bet + maximum Odds bet is 0.45%.

House Edge and Optimal Strategy

The lowest house edge bets are the bets mentioned above. The difference in house edge is small, but Pass bets + odds have higher variance than Don’t pass bets + odds so the choice depends on your target. The optimal strategy is to make the maximum Odds bet every time because it makes the combined house edge as small as possible.

Rule Variations

Casino softwares have some differences with the maximum Odds bet you can make resulting in slight different house edges between different softwares.

Variance

The standard deviation of Pass bet & Don’t pass bet is 1.00 which is equal to a coin flip. With maximum 3x Odds bet the standard deviation for the combined bet is 3.84 for the Pass + Odds bet and 2.90 for the Don’t pass + Odds bet. It is important to not make too large Pass/Don’t pass bets so that you can always take the maximum Odds bet.