| A TYPICAL GAME »
MONEY MANAGEMENT
The idea is simple: You need to walk away if you’ve lost five decisions in a row or have lost ten units altogether. Simply find another table or another game. If you find yourself winning, and hopefully have won twenty units, you should be prepared to leave.
Of course, you don’t want to leave while you’re still winning, but if you end up losing half your profits, it’s time to take a break. Enjoy your winnings. Buy something nice with it, even if it’s only enough to pay for lunch. At least you can say you’ve walked away a roulette winner, which is more than 99 percent of players can say.
In a nutshell, craps is merely about rolling a certain number. The shooter, the person throwing the dice, is trying to either repeat a previously rolled number, called the point, or roll a seven, depending on how he bets. That’s it. Of course, the casino will let you make all kinds of other crazy bets in the mean¬time, but we’ll get to those in a minute. Play craps online in our recommended casino and enjoy safe gambling.
The Dice
The dice are key to craps, so you need to know a bit about them to distinguish the bad bets from the not-as-bad bets.
Craps is played with two standard, six-sided dice similar to the ones that come in a children’s board game, except they’re machine-manufactured to perfection. When a shooter throws the dice, the important number is the sum of the amounts face up on each die. For example, if the shooter rolls a 4 on one die and a 3 on the other, the number is 7, and the bets are paid or removed based on that number.
There are only 11 possible numbers (2 through 12) and only 36 ways of making them.
Seven Is Key
Notice that there are more ways to roll a 7 than any other number (followed very closely by 6 and 8). Craps is built around the number 7, for better and worse. For every 36 rolls, 7 should show up an average of 6 times. The true odds listed above will show you the probability of hitting any number; out of 36 rolls, for example, the number 12 should show up only once.
Notice also that the true odds are for all the different combinations. This is what a bet should pay - and when you compare what it should pay to what it does pay, you’ll start to understand why many of the casino’s offerings are bad bets. Now that you know a bit about the dice, let’s play a round.
