Trend betting: real-time edge?

5 May 2015

By Frank Scoblete

[This is excerpted from Frank’s new book “I Am a Dice Controller: Inside the World of Advantage-Play Craps.”]


The newest attempt to repackage the oldest form of betting system has arrived, brought to you by a small cadre of self-proclaimed Internet dice gurus whose gambling beliefs truly belie their expertise. It is a method of reacting to what is happening at the craps table in “real time” and then betting accordingly. This is nothing more than charting or trend betting going by the misnomer “real time” to sound somewhat philosophical.

Here’s how it works: The player watches the game, sees what has happened recently and then decides whether to get into the game. It is not a mechanical device such as the Captain’s 5-Count to cut down on the number of random rolls a player faces; instead, it is a method to figure out what numbers to bet on in the sadly mistaken notion that whatever trends have been seen will continue to be seen.

Added to this foolish assessment is the idea that tables have “energy,” and if you can judge the “energy,” then you can decide whether to play on that table or pass it by. For some reason this “energy” will continue. The dice “gurus” will explain how to plug into the “energy” in order to win against random rollers. It is nonsense of the highest order, but it is nonsense that plugs into the typical gambler’s belief system – the desire to chart tables and find trends on which to bet, thinking this is the path to winning.

By using the coupling of “real” and “time” it sounds as if others are playing in some kind of fake or unreal time. Don’t be shocked now, but there is no “real time” at a craps game. There is what “has happened,” and there is what “will happen.” When a number has hit; that is the past. It is not current time and has no current meaning for what will happen on the next roll.

The human mind is a pattern-finding organ. We wish to look at things in the past in order to project things into the future. For the most part, this way of thinking makes sense. You see your friend walk across the street against a red light and wham! a giant bus nails him. It would not be ridiculous to think to yourself, “I should cross at the green and not cross at a red light.” Certainly that would be an intelligent use of your pattern-finding mind.

But in a random event, there are no predictions that can be made. You can figure out probabilities but you cannot know exactly what is coming. Given a random coin toss, a simple case of probability, you know the probability is 50/50 – in the long run, the expectation is for heads to come up half the time and for tails to come up half the time. But you have no idea which is actually going to come up on the next toss. Heads may have come up 10 times in a row, but on the next random toss, it's still a 50/50 proposition. Charting the tosses is a waste of time.

Make the jump and know that charting craps tables in “real time” (or in any time) is a total waste of time. Still, offering to teach superstitious craps players how to judge the “energy” at a table to make such predictions is a path to making money – for the teachers and casinos, that is.

To top this silly “new” system off, lists of rolls are given from one’s table charting and discussions are engineered to figure out how to bet on those rolls. This is what I call “betting backwards.” If you already know what has happened and you go back to the beginning of the listed rolls, you shouldn’t get anything wrong! Projecting into the unknown future is impossible; correctly betting the past is easy. I’ll bet the Titanic will sink on its maiden voyage. How hard was that to do?

I think smart, experienced craps players realize that a random game is a random game and that all betting systems fail to beat such games. They have probably tried many of the betting systems of the past. Hey, I wish that trend betting were true, but it's not. Trend betting – or as it's now being redressed as, “real time” betting – is one of the ways the casino makes its money.

Trend bettors don't have any effect on the bottom line unless their system causes them not to bet the same number of rolls that a non-trend bettor bets – again I reference the Captain’s 5-Count, which does exactly that. It cuts down the number of random rolls a player faces by 57 percent. Still, even the 5-Count can’t predict what is coming up next.

Finally, are these Internet dice gurus typical scammers looking to milk the players? Maybe. More than likely they are wild-eyed true believers in the nonsensical notions they teach. Perhaps that's worse than being a cynical scammer. Their adherence to silliness might cause others to think such adherence must make the silliness true.

The best advice I can give craps players is to ignore the idea that “real time” charting, trend betting and energy sniffing is a way to turn the game in the player’s favor. Just play the 5-Count, make low-house-edge bets and enjoy yourself. Let the silly Internet dice gurus talk to each other, but you should leave their ideas alone.