Best Craps Strategy – Play Craps Like A Pro

Best Bets In Craps

The best bets to place in craps are the pass/don’t pass and the come/don’t come bets. These particular bets are the most popular ones and if you choose to stick to them, the house will only have an advantage of approximately 1.40%. Not bad really, but you can reduce the house edge even further by laying or taking odds.

Other good bets to place are the place 6 and place 8 bets as well as field 2 or field 12. Most of the other wagers you can make offer worse conditions and some could even be considered to be bad. We have already written a page giving you more details of the various wagers but why not give a brief recap for quick reference. Pop on over to out bets page for more details on how to bet on craps.

Bets you really should consider avoiding

There are bets that really should be avoided. Those with attractive payouts will have a very high house edge, which means any success will be a bit hit and miss. With the times that you miss working out to be very costly.

Big 6 and Big 8 bets are the most obvious ones to avoid as the house edge is almost 10%, with a payout of 1:1. Place 6 and place 8 bets are much better options as the house edge is only 1.52% and the payout is 7 to 6.

Other bets to avoid are hard ways 4, 6, 8 and 10 as the house edge can be as much as 10%, depending on the casino. Proposition bets are also something to be ignored because while they may look very attractive you have to be willing to take a big risk on the roll of one dice. Payouts can be as high as 30 to 1 but the house edge will be equally as high.

We’ve mentioned the house edge on a number of occasions now so let’s explain what we mean.

What is the house edge and should you be worried about it?

There are a number of different bets you can make when playing craps and knowing what these are will help you learn how to play and win. Almost all of the bets you can place will be resolved in one roll, but there are some that require more than one.

Every bet that can be placed has a different house edge. In craps they vary from 1.40% to more than 10%. However, there are certain bets with no house edge at all. We have covered these on other pages so take a look at our bets and rules pages when you’ve finished here. The official definition of the house edge is the ratio of the average loss to the initial bet. Contrary to what many players think, it is not the ratio of money lost to total money wagered.

In answer to the question, should you be worried about it, the answer is, of course, you should. It can be a good indicator when trying to decide what game to play and also what are the best bets to make.

Best Craps Casinos for 2020

Craps strategy tips for beginners

You may have found yourself on this page because you’re wondering about the best way to win playing craps. We can help you enjoy the game more and increase your chances of winning. But there is, unfortunately, no foolproof way to win or indeed the best casino craps strategy to adopt. One of the best strategies’s to use is to manage your bets and your bankroll. But we’ll get on to that in a moment. First let’s introduce some strategies we found when doing our research. You might want to try them and you might be lucky enough to find they work. But don’t count on it.

Martingale system

This involves doubling a bet after a loss. It tends to be played on even money games such as red/black roulette or pass/don’t pass bets in craps. The idea behind this system is that by doubling your bet after a loss you will always win enough to cover previous losses plus one unit.

Let’s give an example. Say you start your bets with $1 and then go on to lose four bets in a row, before winning on the fifth. All together you will have lost $15 on the four losing bet and won $15 on the fifth bet. Thereby making a profit of $1. However, there is a flaw in this system because it’s actually much harder to lose several times in a row than you think. Which then means you run out of betting money before you’ve doubled it all away.

So the Martingale system may be an interesting strategy to use but it does have its problems and is definitely not the best way to win in craps.

Parity hedge system

This is a system that took the gambling world by storm in the early 1970s. We’ve included it here because we found it very interesting and think you might too.

It flourished for a few short weeks and then disappeared without a trace. We’re not sure we can go into too much detail because it is based on another very complicated system called the Doey-Don’t Syndrome that appeared in a classic craps book called ‘Beat the Craps Out of the Casinos and Play Craps and Win’. You need to understand this system in order to make sense of the parity hedge system. Nobody knows who developed it but it’s believed they were nuclear physicists and theoretical mathematicians working at the Nevada Test Range, just north of Las Vegas. After working hard all day it’s thought they put their statistical knowledge to good use on the Las Vegas blackjack and craps tables.

If you’ve got some time on your hands and want to know more about this system then take a look online and read what happened. It’s really interesting and shows that the casinos can be beaten every now and again but such success never lasts.

Don’t be suckered into believing the gambler’s fallacy

If you play craps long enough you are bound to hear players talk about certain numbers or rolls being overdue. It could be that six hasn’t been rolled for a while so they begin playing any bet on the table that will pay off if the shooter rolls a six. Or a player might choose to bet on the field bet because the numbers haven’t been hit in a long time. Many players believe that if a number hasn’t been rolled in a while then it will come up soon. As in it’s overdue. This thinking is called the gamblers fallacy, but is also sometimes called the law of averages.

This kind of thinking when playing craps can be very dangerous and lead to some very costly decisions being made. The game of craps is completely random and each roll of the dice is independent of any that have gone before or after. The dice used, and also the software used for online craps games, does not have a memory and there is no record made of the number of times in a row a certain number has been rolled. Each roll that is made will have no effect on the ones that come after and isn’t influenced by those that came before. And there is no change in the odds from roll to roll.

Managing your money

When you decide you want to gamble one important thing to learn is how to manage your funds. Bank roll management is a vital skill to learn and we’ve got some important tips to share.

Good bankroll management is vital if you want to keep your head above water and not get carried away playing craps. It’s a term used for limiting how much you take to a casino, whether land-based or online, and how much you place in bets to reduce the likelihood of going broke too soon. Another good guide to use is to limit each bet to 1% of your bankroll. This is considered to be the optimum bet size because it is maximizing the amount you can win.

There’s no way you’ll ever lose 100 pass line bets one after another for example. Using a betting system such as the Martingale system can potentially break your bankroll very quickly, so is going to cut your gambling session short before you’ve started enjoying it. It might seem like a reasonable strategy when you start but 5 50/50 losses in a row will eat away all of your bankroll. The 1% rule is a much better option that will allow you to enjoy your winning streaks and hopefully leave up on profit, without losing a huge amount of your bankroll.

If you want to test any strategies you are considering it is possible to buy a craps strategy simulator. But we’re pretty certain that it will just confirm what we’ve already said. There is no foolproof way to win more so why not just sit back and enjoy the games without getting too hung up on being a winner.