Stalking the Willy Craps
Vipers
25 August 2003
By Mark Pilarski
Dear Mark,
I have been told the Stratosphere, in Las Vegas,
has a crapless craps game. So if the button is
OFF and a 2, 3 or 12 are rolled, these numbers
do not lose, but they are established as points.
Is this correct? This seems too good to be true.
How does the casino offset this to its
advantage? Should I stay away from this game?
Ryan D.
Sentence number 4 above-dead on, Ryan. Sentence
number 6 -- yeah, big time. Crapless Craps, or
Ruse Craps, is exceptionally good for the
shareholders of any casino that can sell it to
their customers.
Also known as Never Ever Craps, Crapless Craps
is another example of a casino offering designed
to cost you dearly when you belly up to the
crapless crap table, deciding how many Jaguars
you'll buy with your sure-shot winnings.
In this modified variation of a regular crap
game, you do not lose on the come-out roll when
the shooter tosses a 2, 3 or 12. Instead, it
automatically becomes the point, just as 4, 5,
6, 8, 9 and 10 do on a standard game. You also
do not win if the shooter throws a natural 11.
It too becomes the point. With these additional
frowzy rules, the house holds a 5.4% edge on
your pass line bet versus the 1.4% edge in a
typical crap game. Prudent readers of this
column, consider Crapless Craps as also Playless
Craps.
Dear Mark,
When playing craps, I pretty much stick to your
recommended pass line wager with odds, or
placing the 6 and 8. But on my last outing
before I started playing, I saw two players
making a killing betting both an "any craps" and
the "horn" bet. Please describe the differences
between an "any craps" bet and a "horn" bet,
and, which, if any, of those two bets should I
have played alongside those lucky players? Brian
K.
Just because the dice were sizzling in the short
term with 2s, 3s, 11s and 12s before you jumped
in, doesn't mean they will still radiate BTU's
when you decide to tackle wagers with a house
edge over 11%. Your dice-game timeline - - the
period you are on the game-will always be
different from that of the earlier (and, in this
case lucky) players. When you join a game in
progress, you initiate your own personal
sequence of rolls, the randomness of nature
likely returning it to a more normal pattern. (A
flipped fair coin can come down the same face up
many, many times. But would you bet that all
your buddy's pocket change, dumped on your
kitchen table, would all show heads on the first
try? Well...)
This column, Brian, proselitizes for making
wagers with a reduced casino advantage, and an
"any craps" or "horn" wager ain't one of them.
An "any craps" bet is wagering that 2, 3, or 12
will be the result of the next roll. With a
payoff of 7 to 1, the house edge is 11.1%.
A "craps-eleven," or "horn" bet as it's
typically called, is a bet that on the next roll
will turn a 2, 3, 11, or 12. If any other number
rolls, you lose. Though the payoff varies from
casino to casino, the house edge on a "horn" bet
is always more than 12%. Bucking, Brian, for the
top 10 sucker bets list, both of 'em.
Gambling quote of the week: "Whenever you switch
from Deuces Wild to Jacks or Better, the first
four of a kind will be Deuces." -Skip Hughes
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