Casino Odyssey II: One Game Rides Higher Than Ever

6 February 2024

By Frank Scoblete

I’ve been a regular casino player since 1990. Some years I have stayed at casino hotels for 130 days. I’ve enjoyed my career; playing, socializing, and writing about the games and the people who play those games. There really has never been a dull moment.

In that time, I have seen tremendous changes in the casino world, not the least of which is how the games have changed. Most of them, sadly, have gone from good games (or great games) to poor games or awful games.

Given a wager of “Are games better now than ever before?” my vote would be “no, they aren’t.”

But one game, craps, is the best it has ever been – in aggregate.

When I first started playing craps in Atlantic City in 1990 (maybe late 1989), the games were uniformly 2X odds. Casino after casino essentially offered the same craps games.

The casinos back then still had those great World War II veterans who enlivened the tables – old guys who knew it all and often explained their ideas loudly! (I was a young guy back then.) My craps mentor, the Captain, was a WWII vet and he taught me everything about how to play casino games. I’ve shared his ideas in my books and articles and television scripts.

Somewhere in the late 1990s, craps began to change all over the country. In Tunica, Mississippi, 100X odds was installed in casinos. Amazing! Players could buy numbers but only had to pay the commission on winning bets – it had always been paying the commission on all such buy bets. That rule change cut the house edges down by an amazing percentage. (No other major destination has done this.)

Yes, the craps games also started to bring in awful bets to help boost the casinos’ bottom lines as well, but no player had to make those awful bets to enjoy wagering on the good bets. So, we players had the option to add more good wagers to our craps games and not have to bother with the bad additions.

[Please note: No one forces a player to make bad bets at craps, although most craps players happily do so for some reason. We players are free to only bet the best bets at craps and at any other game. We should say this as a litany before we enter a casino: “Only make the best bets!”]

Oh, yes, in all the areas of the casinos in all the land (at the least the many casinos I patronized) from here to there across the country and Canada, craps is now a much better game than ever before.

Unlike blackjack, which has deteriorated immensely, and roulette which has become grotesque, and mini-baccarat which is the gaming equivalent of picking a player’s pockets, craps is a shining example of what casino play can actually be like – if the players do the right thing. Casinos should be congratulated on offering better craps games.

As an aside: Are there still some good blackjack games out there? Good roulette games? Real baccarat games as opposed to the lightning-fast mini-baccarat trap? How about some new games? Any good ones? The answer to these questions is “yes” but you have to look for the best games. Many casinos do not offer any of them. It used to be the reverse; most casinos offered good games and a few offered not-so-good games.

Times have changed.

All the best in and out of the casinos!

Frank Scoblete’s web site is www.frankscoblete.com. His books are available from Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Kindle, e-books, libraries, and bookstores.