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 craps 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 craps 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 BTUs 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, proselytizes 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
