Welcome to Las Vegas! My name is Victor H. Royer, but everyone just calls me Vegas Vic. I was named after that famous neon sign in Downtown Las Vegas, that cowboy with the hat on top of the Pioneer Club, always waving his hand and beckoning to his long love, Sassy Sally, on the other side of the street. I will be writing a few articles for AccessVegas.com, so I hope you enjoy them.
Craps Made Easy
I have written 18 books on casino games and gaming, and over the past 20 years have written hundreds of various magazine articles. I often receive questions from my readers about the grand old casino game of Craps. What most people like to know is: Why does the game look so complicated? Well, it only looks that way. In reality, Craps is not only among the better casino games, but is also not nearly as difficult to play and understand as it may first seem.
While the game of Blackjack came into the USA with the veterans of WW I, the game of Craps was already around the USA for quite some time before the returning veterans of WW II made it so widely popular, especially in the legal casinos of Nevada from about 1946 and onto the present day. But the game is actually far older than that. Dating back about 5,000 years, the early Egyptians played a game very similar to Craps, and they also used numbered dice that looked very much like the dice we use today. Many of the undisturbed tombs of the Pharaohs, and of the workers who built the tombs and pyramids, included dice carved out of bone, or ivory. These had the same sides as our modern dice, and also numbered spots (although some also had hieroglyphs instead of spots).
The modern game of Craps - as we know it now - was mostly played in the back alleys of American cities, and in the illegal casinos of the early 20th century. These game rarely used anything like the layout we can now see in the casinos, but the range of bets and propositions was mostly the same.
The modern game of Craps is played on a large table that looks like a big bathtub. On the sides are padded ridges made of rubber, or foam, and these look like little pyramids. They are there to assure the randomness of the roll, since the shooters are required to bounce the dice off these eggshell-carton-like sides. The dice have four sides, and on each side are numbered spots, from 1 to 6. Two dice are used, and the combination rolled by these two dice is what decides the winners and losers.
Players can bet on a variety of possible outcomes. There are 36 possible combinations of numbers that the two dice can roll. The easier it is to roll the number, the less it will pay. Conversely, the harder the number is to roll, the more it will pay. For example, the number 6 can be rolled five ways, while the number 12 can be rolled only one way. Therefore, a winner on number 6 will pay 7:6 as a place bet (good bet), and 1:1 as a Big 6 (bad bet). The number 12 will pay 30:1 (reasonable pay), or 30-for-1 (not a good pay), while facing the true odds of 35:1, making this a house edge of 14%.
Although all this may look and sound complicated, the basics of Craps are as simple as an "either-or" proposition. You can bet that, either, the shooter (the person rolling the dice) will make winning rolls, or that he or she won't. To bet that the shooter will make winning rolls, you put your bet on what's called the "pass line", also called the "front line". To bet that the shooter will not roll winning rolls, you put your bet in the area marked "don't pass". Ask the dealers about these areas, and they will tell you where to put your bet. This is about as simple as the game can get. If you bet with the shooter, meaning you bet that he or she will roll winners, you win on the come out roll if the shooter rolls 7 or 11, and lose on 2, 3 and 12. If neither of these numbers is rolled, this can only mean that one of the box numbers was rolled. These are the 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10. Now to win your bet, the shooter must roll that number again before rolling a 7. And that's the simplest way to start playing Craps.
Overall, the best way to play Craps is to make a pass line bet, place double odds behind this on the point, and then two come best with odds, or two place bets on the 6 and/or 8. If you don't know what this means, you can always ask the dealers and they will explain it, as long as you ask them directly. For example, say this: How do I make a pass line bet? How do I place double odds? How do I make a Come Bet? How do I place odds on my Come? How do I place the 6 and 8 and for how much?. As long as you can ask these questions, you will get the right answers and can make your bets properly.
That's it for now. Good luck!
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