I think most successful athletes, scholars, writers, doctors, actors, chefs and, yes, casino gamblers often need a mentor; someone who can jog the unthinking fog that often settles in our brains when we perform an activity. I know I needed such a mentor or I would have been one of those lost, misty-eyed players you often see shambling about in the halls of Lady Luck.
There are times craps shooters are cold, times they're hot, and times they're on fire. It's for those time shooters are burning through the points that the craps fire bet was devised.
Win the fire bet, and you could walk away with a 999-1 payoff, turning a $1 side bet into a cool $1,000. That's the kind of payoff not available on standard craps, where the pass line pays even money and long shots such as bets on 2 or 12 reach only 30-1.
There are a wide variety of bets when you're playing craps. Some of these bets have low house edges; a few with under 2% and these tend to pay one-to-one. Other bets have somewhat larger payouts with house edges hitting about 6% (give or take) and then we have what my mentor the Captain of craps called the Crazy Crapper proposition bets which can pay out large sums on relatively small bets but the Crazy Crapper bets come with very high house edges, often hitting over 10 percent.
So many people want to learn how to play craps, yet the layout looks too complicated and before even making an attempt to learn the game these people flee for the safety of what they consider simpler games such as blackjack, roulette, slots and baccarat. But craps is actually an easy game to play, and it does not take a load of study to learn the proper way to bet.
When craps players put together combination bets, there are two key things to keep in mind:
The house edge is a weighted average of the house edges on all bets in the combination.
The overall house edge can never be lower than the best individual bet in the combination.
Casino players have the rare opportunity to play craps with a house edge of less than 1 percent. Unfortunately for low rollers, may require wagers too large for their comfort zone.
What’s a player on a budget to do? We’ll do some comparison shopping right after we look at what’s needed to get the lowest house edge.
To get that less than 1 percent deal, players either back pass and come bets with free odds or lay the odds behind don’t pass and don’t come bets.
