Crap Game Strategy
Craps is a vivid and fast-paced game that wants concentration and fast reflections amidst the chaos. Play craps only when you feel you are up to the task. Your energy level probably affects your play, and your play will surely affect your mental attitude. Make sure you are on firm ground when you are going to sit down at the craps. Please rotate your device.
Playing a 'Hopping 7Â’s' Progression
By Jerry 'Stickman'
Periodically people ask me about craps betting systems. Almost all of them rely on the premise that certain numbers are due because they havenÂ’t appeared for a while. I normally tell them that in a random you cannot beat the math of the game. The house edge is the house edge. In the long term you will lose the amount of money played times the house edge.
For many that is enough, but every so often someone says they have won a lot of money on a particular system and want me to look further into it. So periodically I will devote an article to exploring some of these systems.
This article will look at a 'Hopping 7Â’s' progression.
Here is the system as it was stated to me.
- Start over with each new shooter.
- Wait seven rolls before starting the progression
- When the bet hits, take the bet down along with the win.
- Start with a $3 bet. Starting with the first bet, the progression is: 3, 3, 6, 9, 15, 24, 39, etc. always adding the previous two bets together to determine the next bet in the progression.
Here is a table that shows the bet, amount invested, win amount (taking the bet down), and profit.
What we have here is a Fibonacci progression. This and the Martingale progression are well known in betting systems. In 'up as you lose' progressions, the thought is that when your number hits you will recoup your losses and garner a little profit. The Fibonacci progression is the less aggressive of the two.
Either of these progressions works as long as two things are true. The first is you must have adequate bankroll to make it through the inevitable losing streaks you will encounter. The amount you require can be very substantial. The last row in the above table represents the 17th roll without a 7. While 17 rolls without a 7 appearing may be somewhat unusual, it is not that uncommon.
If the shooter goes 20 rolls without a 7 appearing, the bankroll required is almost $2,000.
If the shooter rolls just five more numbers without throwing a 7, the total invested is over $20,000.
And what is the shooter is extremely lucky and throws just 5 more numbers without a 7? Our hapless system player will have just over $225,000 invested.
If he should win on the 30th roll, he will win $233,000+, so maybe he thinks it is worth it.
If our lucky shooter goes five more rolls without a 7, however, the investment skyrockets to almost $2.5 million. I donÂ’t know about you, but if I had that kind of money, I wouldnÂ’t risk it on a craps game.
The second consideration before using this system is something called table maximum. Virtually every craps game has a maximum bet ranging from $2,000 and up. Most of them are $10,000 or less. That means in the unusual but very possible case of someone going 25 rolls without a 7, this player is out his entire investment of over $20,000 and he cannot continue.
The math of the hop bet says that a player will lose 11.11 percent of all money wagered on a random shooter. That is what the math says. LetÂ’s see what some simulations say. I ran several simulations specifying a random shooter through an excellent software program called Smart Craps from DeepNet Technologies.
The first simulation did not put any limits on the maximum bet. It assumed an unlimited bankroll and no maximum bet limit at the craps table. It was very interesting watching the running edge percentage as the simulation progressed. For the first several seconds the expectation was a little over 103%. This means that if someone were playing this system and had the same results as the simulation, they would more than double their bets!
This came to an abrupt halt after about 96,000 rounds. At this point the simulation terminated because it couldn’t handle the size of the bet being placed – over 2.2 billion dollars. It may have taken a while, but the long term hit at about 96,000 player rounds.
Next I put some limits on maximum bet size. I started with 1.1 billion dollars. If the simulation hit the limit, it would restart the progression; that is, wait for seven rolls without a 7, then begin betting the progression. After 10 million rounds, the expectation was 59 percent for the house! During the 10 million rounds the $1.1 billion limit was reached 7 times. This was much worse than what the math would indicate, but with such a large limit, the long term had most likely not yet been reached.
Three more simulations were run with limits of $10,000, $3,000 and $2,000. The results more closely matched the mathematical expectations.
As you can see, all of these fell much closer to the calculated expectations.
Crap Game Strategy Calculator
So what does this show? You may be lucky and win for a period of time. You may even win for a long period of time. You could also be very unlucky and lose very big for a while. Eventually, however the math will catch up with you.
In the long run, you cannot beat the math of the game with random shooters. You will lose the house edge of your bets times the amount bet. Accept the fact and bet the low house edge bets. Your bankroll will thank you.
May all your wins be swift and large and all your losses slow and tiny.
Jerry 'Stickman' is an expert in craps, blackjack and video poker and advantage slot machine play. He is a regular contributor to top gaming magazines. The 'Stickman' is also a certified instructor for Golden Touch Craps and Golden Touch Blackjack. For more information visit www.goldentouchcraps.com or www.goldentouchblackjack.com or call 1-886-738-3423. You can contact Jerry 'Stickman' at stickmanGTC@aol.com
Related
It sounds like a homework problem out of a high school math book: What is the probability of rolling a pair of dice 154 times continuously at a craps table, without throwing a seven?
The answer is roughly 1 in 1.56 trillion, and on May 23, Patricia Demauro, a New Jersey grandmother, beat those odds at Atlantic City's Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa. Demauro's 154-roll lucky streak, which lasted four hours and 18 minutes, broke the world records for the longest craps roll and the most successive dice rolls without 'sevening out.' According to Stanford University statistics professor Thomas Cover, the chances of that happening are smaller than getting struck by lightning (one in a million), being hit by an errant ball at a baseball game (one in 1.5 million) or winning the lottery (one in 100 million, depending on the game). (Read 'When Gambling Becomes Obsessive.')
So, how did it happen? On Saturday, Denville native Demauro and her friend John Capra decided to indulge their yen to bet. Their Atlantic City jaunt began innocuously enough, with Demauro, only a casual casinogoer, planting herself in front of a penny slot machine on the Borgata floor and Capra going off to try his hand at three-card poker. (See an interview with the new king of poker.)
By 8 p.m., a few hours later, Demauro had grown tired of the slots. She ventured into the poker room to collect her friend, who was losing money. He offered to show her how to play craps. Of the 14 available craps tables, they sidled up to the nearest one and waited for the three other players to finish rolling. Capra shot next, but sevened out quickly. Then, he handed Demauro the dice.
Crap Game Strategy Game
Craps is known as the world's most common dice game and it is played, with varying rules and sizes of table, in virtually every casino on the planet. Craps is a game of chance rather than skill, and with a low house advantage — around 1.4%, which makes it harder to beat than blackjack but easier than roulette — even novices can win. That is, if they're lucky.
According to the casino, Demauro started her roll at 8:13 p.m. She bought into the game with $100 and when the orange-colored dice came around to her, she rubbed her hands together and let them fly. Demauro says she had played craps only once before, and being an inexperienced better, followed Capra's advice when placing bets.
Crap Game Strategy Pdf
A craps turn begins with an initial or 'come out' roll, in which the player tries to establish a 'point number' — that is, when the dice add up to four, five, six, eight, nine or 10. Once that happens, the player must roll the point again before throwing a seven, which is statistically the most likely outcome on a pair of dice. If the player rolls a seven before the point, the turn ends.
As soon as Demauro hit her point number (eight), people started betting. She says the game moved so fast after that, she couldn't really keep up. 'There are all these terms I didn't know,' Demauro says. 'People were yelling out 'Yo.' I said to John, 'What's 'yo?' I think that's an 11.'
The table filled up and a throng of spectators gathered. Demauro rolled double sixes, hard fours, snake eyes, every possible combination of the dice. Some people called out requests and Demauro managed to fulfill them. Players from the nearby blackjack table came over to watch, and then came the casino executives, or as she describes them, 'men in dark suits.' Demauro and her audience knew they would never witness anything like this again. 'There was a woman there, and we happened to catch each other's eyes,' Demauro says, 'She smiled at me, and I smiled and said, 'I don't know how to play the game.'
Although there is no official organization that keeps track of gambling world records, a number of clubs record significant dice rolls. Before Demauro's, the longest craps roll lasted three hours and six minutes — accomplished at a Las Vegas casino in 1989, with 118 rolls. And according to gambling expert and author of Beat the Craps Out of the Casinos, Frank Scoblete, the highest number of successive dice rolls was 147, thrown by a man operating under the pseudonym the 'Captain' in 2005. The average number of dice rolls before sevening out? Eight.
Crap Game Strategy Guide
Given the rules of the game, there are any number of ways to achieve 154 consecutive rolls without crapping out, though all of them are highly unlikely. Unlikely but not impossible. Stanford's Cover explains: 'Let's say we have a million gamblers trying a thousand events at any one time. That's a billion different rolls of craps.' Out of a billion different games, the probability of getting an event that special is reduced to one in 1,000. 'It's not out of the realm of possibility,' he says.
Demauro declined to reveal how much money she won, but gambling experts estimate that if she made good bets, her winnings were probably in the hundreds of thousands; expert bets would have put them in the millions. Demauro and Capra spent the rest of their holiday weekend in Atlantic City, and even returned to the same craps table two nights later — but only as spectators. 'The expectations were too high,' she says. 'I wasn't ready to be the shooter again.'
Once the shock of her good fortune wears off, however, she says she'll try throwing the dice again. After all, sometimes lightning strikes twice.