Buffalo Crap: A prop bet on the hardways plus any craps. Call Bet: Verbal bets made without the use of chips. Capping: Illegally adding chips to the top of an original bet after the decision has been made. Choppy: A table that is neither hot nor cold. Cocked dice: A die or dice that end up leaning against a wall, chip or other object on the table.
- How many times have you heard someone at the craps table say 'I zigged when I should have zagged.' I've said it many times myself – especially on a choppy table. It's one of the reasons strategies that incorporate changing sides from the Do's to the Don'ts – or playing both sides at once- are popular with System Sellers.
- Place betting for a choppy table Leave working till the first hit or six rolls. If the first hit is within three rolls, then leave working and restart the count. Repeat as long as your bets are hit within three rolls.
What do Baseball, Football and Craps have in Common???
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I can hear it now, 'Skinny has finally lost it. He has gone off the deep end with this one!'
Let me assure you, that is not the case here. I have just seen an HBO special that gave me the idea for this article. This is a topic that has been mulling through my brain for some time now. Some posts on the private pages of the GTC website have piqued my interest in this subject and I have been trying to figure out how to put it in words. This latest show on football did the trick.
How many of you have seen the movie, Moneyball starring Brad Pitt or read the book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game?
If you have, then you will understand what I am talking about. The main idea is the collective wisdom behind how baseball is played and games are won is severely flawed. It is the story of Billy Beane who as GM of the Oakland Athletics revolutionized the way baseball is played overcoming a century of tradition and ideas burned into the brains of managers, coaches, players and decision makers in America�s Pastime.
Billy Beane decided to use statistics and a mathematical approach known as sabermetrics to build his team. Based on that model he then decided who, how and when to play the different players on that team. His success and genius in innovation ultimately led many other teams in professional baseball to incorporate some of this technique into their strategy in the future. It is believed the Boston Red Sox were able to employ his methods in developing a World Series Championship team that was able to break the 86 year old 'Curse of the Bambino' when the Red Sox came back from a 0-3 best-of-seven deficit to beat the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series and then went on to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals to win the 2004 World Series.
This is not meant to be a commercial for either the book or the movie although both are excellent. The point I am making is, in a game steeped in tradition and yes superstitions such a baseball, it was possible to use mathematics to analyze the best methods to employ to become successful in the game. People argued that there are other factors involved than numbers and statistics. There are things like team spirit, player determination, those who play best under certain situations and a number of other intangible things that go into the game that only experience and gut feel can be used to determine the most favorable outcome. Players are human and emotions come into play, argue the traditionalists. How can numbers take that into account? Well Billy Beane apparently proved those ideas to be false and the numbers can and did give him an edge for a time until others caught on and copied his methods. The New York Mets, New York Yankees, San Diego Padres, St. Louis Cardinals, Boston Red Sox, Washington Nationals, Arizona Diamondbacks, Cleveland Indians, and the Toronto Blue Jays all hired full-time sabermetric analysts.
Enough of baseball, time to get on to FOOTBALL. The HBO special I saw had a small piece in it about a High School football team in Little Rock, Arkansas called Pulaski Academy. What is unusual about this HS team is the head coach of that team, Kevin Kelley, has also disregarded traditional football wisdom in exchange for sports analytics. Kelley has studied the 'math of football' and concluded that punting and kickoffs are the wrong thing to do in football. Since 2007, his team never punts the ball on 4th down and he uses the onside kick every time his team has to kickoff. In fact he has 12 different kickoff plays, all onside kicks. They don�t even have a punter on the team because they never punt the ball on 4th down. This may sound completely crazy except for the fact that Kelley has amassed a record of 79-17-1 going to 3 state championships and winning 1 of them. Furthermore the State Division Rank of his team has been 1,2,3,1 respectively in the last 4 years. This year his team has a record of 14-0-0.
Kelley has looked at the math of the game and come to the conclusion that punting the ball on 4th down is a losing proposition. That sounds like sheer lunacy but here is what he discovered. According to Kelley's statistics, when a team punts from near its end zone, the opponent will take possession inside the 40-yard line and will then score a touchdown 77 percent of the time. If it recovers on downs inside the 10, it will score a touchdown 92 percent of the time. 'So [forsaking] a punt, you give your offense a chance to stay on the field,' he said. 'And if you miss, the odds of the other team scoring only increase 15 percent. It's like someone said, '[Punting] is what you do on fourth down,' and everyone did it without asking why.'
Choppy Table Craps Table
There are a lot more statistics and situations that he has analyzed to come to the conclusions he did. This is just one example of how he used mathematics and statistics to go against the conventional wisdom of football. Based on his results it is hard to argue against the numbers.
So in both baseball and football pioneers using mathematics have found alternatives to what previously was believed to be sacrosanct disciplines in both games. They had their detractors and few disciples in the beginning. But after proving their theories, many are starting to pause and take heed.
Now in craps, it is all about the math in a random game. There are no people, personalities, team spirit, momentum or any of the human elements that both baseball and football can point to saying that those factors can not be measured mathematically. But if Billy Beane and Kevin Kelley were able to use a purely mathematical approach to strategies they applied to produce winners in sports, shouldn�t craps players follow the math diligently in the game of craps that does not have any of the human elements of sports?
In a random game of craps mathematics tells us that the game can not be beaten in the long run. Every wager, except for the odds bet, has a negative expectation. If one continually makes negative expectation wagers in a random game, ultimately the law of large numbers will take effect. In the end they will end up in a negative position with their wagers.
There is no way to combine negative expectation wagers to offset one another to give one a positive expectation on any roll or series of rolls. Those system players who try to use hedge bets or combinations of wagers to offset one another to guarantee a win are all completely and unequivocally wrong. It is a mathematical impossibility.
Then we have those who argue against the long run who say they do not play in the long run. Every time they play a session it is a short run event. They fail to understand that in their lifetime the sum of all those short run events eventually add up to the long term where the law of large numbers takes over. If one were to produce a histogram (bar graph) of every number one has seen rolled over a lifetime while playing a random game of craps, that histogram would look exactly like the normal curve, i.e. the bell shaped curve. The 7 would be directly in the middle and the 2 and 12 would be at both extreme ends of the bell curve. All the other numbers would be dispersed on the curve in direct proportion to their mathematical probabilities.
Others like to point to wagers that have a high House Advantage (HA) such as the Fire Bet which comes in around a 20% - 25% HA for the casino. They regale us with stories of being at a table where a player made 4, 5 or 6 points towards the Fire Bet and how much money was made by the folks playing it. But how could they win that bet unless they bet on every shooter when they are at the tables? If you try to pick and choose which random player is going to hit the bet, you are certain to miss many of them. If you bet on every shooter, the HA will ultimately take its toll and you will lose that percentage of the wagers you make in totality over your lifetime in direct proportion to the HA. Yes, you will win some, but you will lose a lot more than you win.
We also have all the trend bettors and table readers. The trend bettors believe there is a pattern to the random results that come out. They study charts of random rolls and use all kinds of (false) 'scientific' methods to predict what is coming up in the near future. The table readers believe in hot, cold and choppy tables. They look for hot tables or a hot shooter on the theory that they can make their fortune before the table turns. The problem here is that it is impossible to predict the future based on prior results. One can only tell that a table or shooter has been hot, cold or choppy after the fact. After the results are in we can tell what the pattern was for that table or shooter. But it is not possible to predict what will come up next based on what has happened in the past with random events. That is the very definition of random.
Unfortunately human beings want order in their lives. They look for patterns, even in random situations and try to discern a pattern to predict what will happen in the future. This is an exercise in futility and foolishness. It is diametrically opposed to mathematics and the probability theory that dictates the game of craps when being played randomly.
If you are a random player the only thing you can do is to make low house edge wagers, employ the five count to reduce the number of rolls on which you wager and try to minimize your losses so you can avoid losing your bankroll quickly. At least this way you can stay in the game longer, possibly earning some comps that give you some of your losses back and have some fun playing.
The only real way to get ahead in the game of craps is to develop a controlled throw which can turn the math of the game in the favor of the player. Even a respectable controlled shooter still needs to have the discipline to make sound wagers and have a betting strategy that fits within his bankroll. But if one is serious about winning at craps this is the only way to have a chance at overcoming the math of the game. As I said above there are no human elements in the random game of craps. It is purely a game of numbers that will ultimately fall along the statistical lines of the math. If math can be used to develop winning methods in baseball and football, why wouldn�t you believe that the random game of craps works exactly according to the math?
I was wonderiing if the more experienced craps players on this forum could lend me their advice? I am heading to Vegas in a couple of weeks, and plan on playing craps only. I always play with a minimum pass line bet (never the dark side) combined with maximum free odds. I hardly ever make a place bet (very rarely), and I dont use come bets (simply a bankroll issue). So basically it is just a single minimum pass line bet with maximum odds until either the point is rolled or the shooter 7's out. Then the I bet the same for the next roll and so on.
Can I get some input as to what my minimum bankroll should be to handle the potential 'swings' if..
..I am playing at a $3 minimum table with 10x odds.
..I am playing at a $5 minimum table with 3x,4x,5x odds.
..I am playing at a $5 minimum table with 20x odds (sure wish MSS downtown offered $3 minimum craps with 20X odds instead of the $5 minimum. Do they ever offer $3? Weekday mornings on occasion perhaps?).
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
I can hear it now, 'Skinny has finally lost it. He has gone off the deep end with this one!'
Let me assure you, that is not the case here. I have just seen an HBO special that gave me the idea for this article. This is a topic that has been mulling through my brain for some time now. Some posts on the private pages of the GTC website have piqued my interest in this subject and I have been trying to figure out how to put it in words. This latest show on football did the trick.
How many of you have seen the movie, Moneyball starring Brad Pitt or read the book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game?
If you have, then you will understand what I am talking about. The main idea is the collective wisdom behind how baseball is played and games are won is severely flawed. It is the story of Billy Beane who as GM of the Oakland Athletics revolutionized the way baseball is played overcoming a century of tradition and ideas burned into the brains of managers, coaches, players and decision makers in America�s Pastime.
Billy Beane decided to use statistics and a mathematical approach known as sabermetrics to build his team. Based on that model he then decided who, how and when to play the different players on that team. His success and genius in innovation ultimately led many other teams in professional baseball to incorporate some of this technique into their strategy in the future. It is believed the Boston Red Sox were able to employ his methods in developing a World Series Championship team that was able to break the 86 year old 'Curse of the Bambino' when the Red Sox came back from a 0-3 best-of-seven deficit to beat the Yankees in the 2004 American League Championship Series and then went on to sweep the St. Louis Cardinals to win the 2004 World Series.
This is not meant to be a commercial for either the book or the movie although both are excellent. The point I am making is, in a game steeped in tradition and yes superstitions such a baseball, it was possible to use mathematics to analyze the best methods to employ to become successful in the game. People argued that there are other factors involved than numbers and statistics. There are things like team spirit, player determination, those who play best under certain situations and a number of other intangible things that go into the game that only experience and gut feel can be used to determine the most favorable outcome. Players are human and emotions come into play, argue the traditionalists. How can numbers take that into account? Well Billy Beane apparently proved those ideas to be false and the numbers can and did give him an edge for a time until others caught on and copied his methods. The New York Mets, New York Yankees, San Diego Padres, St. Louis Cardinals, Boston Red Sox, Washington Nationals, Arizona Diamondbacks, Cleveland Indians, and the Toronto Blue Jays all hired full-time sabermetric analysts.
Enough of baseball, time to get on to FOOTBALL. The HBO special I saw had a small piece in it about a High School football team in Little Rock, Arkansas called Pulaski Academy. What is unusual about this HS team is the head coach of that team, Kevin Kelley, has also disregarded traditional football wisdom in exchange for sports analytics. Kelley has studied the 'math of football' and concluded that punting and kickoffs are the wrong thing to do in football. Since 2007, his team never punts the ball on 4th down and he uses the onside kick every time his team has to kickoff. In fact he has 12 different kickoff plays, all onside kicks. They don�t even have a punter on the team because they never punt the ball on 4th down. This may sound completely crazy except for the fact that Kelley has amassed a record of 79-17-1 going to 3 state championships and winning 1 of them. Furthermore the State Division Rank of his team has been 1,2,3,1 respectively in the last 4 years. This year his team has a record of 14-0-0.
Kelley has looked at the math of the game and come to the conclusion that punting the ball on 4th down is a losing proposition. That sounds like sheer lunacy but here is what he discovered. According to Kelley's statistics, when a team punts from near its end zone, the opponent will take possession inside the 40-yard line and will then score a touchdown 77 percent of the time. If it recovers on downs inside the 10, it will score a touchdown 92 percent of the time. 'So [forsaking] a punt, you give your offense a chance to stay on the field,' he said. 'And if you miss, the odds of the other team scoring only increase 15 percent. It's like someone said, '[Punting] is what you do on fourth down,' and everyone did it without asking why.'
Choppy Table Craps Table
There are a lot more statistics and situations that he has analyzed to come to the conclusions he did. This is just one example of how he used mathematics and statistics to go against the conventional wisdom of football. Based on his results it is hard to argue against the numbers.
So in both baseball and football pioneers using mathematics have found alternatives to what previously was believed to be sacrosanct disciplines in both games. They had their detractors and few disciples in the beginning. But after proving their theories, many are starting to pause and take heed.
Now in craps, it is all about the math in a random game. There are no people, personalities, team spirit, momentum or any of the human elements that both baseball and football can point to saying that those factors can not be measured mathematically. But if Billy Beane and Kevin Kelley were able to use a purely mathematical approach to strategies they applied to produce winners in sports, shouldn�t craps players follow the math diligently in the game of craps that does not have any of the human elements of sports?
In a random game of craps mathematics tells us that the game can not be beaten in the long run. Every wager, except for the odds bet, has a negative expectation. If one continually makes negative expectation wagers in a random game, ultimately the law of large numbers will take effect. In the end they will end up in a negative position with their wagers.
There is no way to combine negative expectation wagers to offset one another to give one a positive expectation on any roll or series of rolls. Those system players who try to use hedge bets or combinations of wagers to offset one another to guarantee a win are all completely and unequivocally wrong. It is a mathematical impossibility.
Then we have those who argue against the long run who say they do not play in the long run. Every time they play a session it is a short run event. They fail to understand that in their lifetime the sum of all those short run events eventually add up to the long term where the law of large numbers takes over. If one were to produce a histogram (bar graph) of every number one has seen rolled over a lifetime while playing a random game of craps, that histogram would look exactly like the normal curve, i.e. the bell shaped curve. The 7 would be directly in the middle and the 2 and 12 would be at both extreme ends of the bell curve. All the other numbers would be dispersed on the curve in direct proportion to their mathematical probabilities.
Others like to point to wagers that have a high House Advantage (HA) such as the Fire Bet which comes in around a 20% - 25% HA for the casino. They regale us with stories of being at a table where a player made 4, 5 or 6 points towards the Fire Bet and how much money was made by the folks playing it. But how could they win that bet unless they bet on every shooter when they are at the tables? If you try to pick and choose which random player is going to hit the bet, you are certain to miss many of them. If you bet on every shooter, the HA will ultimately take its toll and you will lose that percentage of the wagers you make in totality over your lifetime in direct proportion to the HA. Yes, you will win some, but you will lose a lot more than you win.
We also have all the trend bettors and table readers. The trend bettors believe there is a pattern to the random results that come out. They study charts of random rolls and use all kinds of (false) 'scientific' methods to predict what is coming up in the near future. The table readers believe in hot, cold and choppy tables. They look for hot tables or a hot shooter on the theory that they can make their fortune before the table turns. The problem here is that it is impossible to predict the future based on prior results. One can only tell that a table or shooter has been hot, cold or choppy after the fact. After the results are in we can tell what the pattern was for that table or shooter. But it is not possible to predict what will come up next based on what has happened in the past with random events. That is the very definition of random.
Unfortunately human beings want order in their lives. They look for patterns, even in random situations and try to discern a pattern to predict what will happen in the future. This is an exercise in futility and foolishness. It is diametrically opposed to mathematics and the probability theory that dictates the game of craps when being played randomly.
If you are a random player the only thing you can do is to make low house edge wagers, employ the five count to reduce the number of rolls on which you wager and try to minimize your losses so you can avoid losing your bankroll quickly. At least this way you can stay in the game longer, possibly earning some comps that give you some of your losses back and have some fun playing.
The only real way to get ahead in the game of craps is to develop a controlled throw which can turn the math of the game in the favor of the player. Even a respectable controlled shooter still needs to have the discipline to make sound wagers and have a betting strategy that fits within his bankroll. But if one is serious about winning at craps this is the only way to have a chance at overcoming the math of the game. As I said above there are no human elements in the random game of craps. It is purely a game of numbers that will ultimately fall along the statistical lines of the math. If math can be used to develop winning methods in baseball and football, why wouldn�t you believe that the random game of craps works exactly according to the math?
I was wonderiing if the more experienced craps players on this forum could lend me their advice? I am heading to Vegas in a couple of weeks, and plan on playing craps only. I always play with a minimum pass line bet (never the dark side) combined with maximum free odds. I hardly ever make a place bet (very rarely), and I dont use come bets (simply a bankroll issue). So basically it is just a single minimum pass line bet with maximum odds until either the point is rolled or the shooter 7's out. Then the I bet the same for the next roll and so on.
Can I get some input as to what my minimum bankroll should be to handle the potential 'swings' if..
..I am playing at a $3 minimum table with 10x odds.
..I am playing at a $5 minimum table with 3x,4x,5x odds.
..I am playing at a $5 minimum table with 20x odds (sure wish MSS downtown offered $3 minimum craps with 20X odds instead of the $5 minimum. Do they ever offer $3? Weekday mornings on occasion perhaps?).
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
Tom
Your session money should be 10x your initial bet. If you lose 50% of your buy in, leave that table. If you win 20-30% of your buy in, pocket your buy in and 50% of your winnings, then play with the other 50% of your winnings. Every $50, pocket 1/2 and play with the excess. Simple advice to leave a winner or keep losses to a minimum.
Tom
Choppy Table Craps Game
I don't get it. Why buy in for 10x if you're going to leave the table after losing 5x? Why not just buy in for 5x and leave if you lose all your chips?
If you want to play smart, you need to leave a particular table after 3 consecutive losses, or up to 50% of your buy in. It can be 40% or 30% or whatever your loss trigger(comfort level) is to leave that session. The same goes if you are winning. Only continue to play if you've reached a predetermined goal (win 20-30%), then play with 1/2 of your winnings, rat hole (pocket) the rest. If you feel that you're going to play underfunded with (scared money) and expect to lose all of your chips, why play at all?
You should always leave a table with at least half of your buy in so you don't feel like a total loser (I'm not being offensive here)...You should also have enough bankroll to play a predetermined amount of sessions. If you're playing 3 sessions, have enough bankroll for each individual session. Don't use money from 1 session to fund another one (unless you want to lose it all)
Craps is a negative expectation game with a small house edge on certain bets. Knowledge of how to bet, and when to leave the table (winning or losing) is a must. The longer you play, the house edge will eat at your winnings.
Another good indicator when to leave a table and find another game is a choppy table. If you find yourself winning a few hands, and losing a few on a continuous basis, find another table. You won't keep any profit on that table.
If you're going to play craps for the 'fun' of it, then by all means buy in underfunded and expect to give it to the casino.
Just my opinion
Tom
I don't have a 'win' limit at all--I do move the 'floor' up as we go--if I am up to $500, the floor becomes $400 and on up. While it is nice to stop with a 25% profit sometimes, it is also fun to hit a good roll at that point and play it out. I get a bit more aggressive in pressing as the chips add up and it usually turns out pretty well--a win is locked in, and now I am shooting for a big win. I may not be the most aggressive at the table at that point but I am far from the least aggressive.
You should always leave a table with at least half of your buy in so you don't feel like a total loser
I pretty much subscribe to this too. And to have a bankroll that is 20x your approximate average bet, in any case certainly no less than 10x plus a cushion so you leave with something if the luck is bad.
Choppy Table Craps Tables
Choppy Table Craps Games
For pass line plus odds:..I am playing at a $3 minimum table with 10x odds. >>>> $600
..I am playing at a $5 minimum table with 3x,4x,5x odds.>>> $500 [average bet of $25 being an estimate]
..I am playing at a $5 minimum table with 20x odds >>>> $2100 !
My last outing was a $10 table with 3x4x5x and my bankroll of $1000 seemed sufficient, but after a losing session I broke my own rule with another session and regretted it. It is as if the dice smell blood when your bankroll is insufficient!
Choppy Table Craps Strategy
On a $5 table with 3-4-5x odds, your bankroll should be $300 for that session.
$5 pass line bet plus $25 odds(5x) on the 6&8 = $30
$5 pass line bet plus $20 odds(4x) on the 5&9 = $25
$5 pass line bet plus $15 odds(3x) on the 4&10 = $20
your buy in should be 10x the most expensive bet you will make - $30 (6 or 8)
adjust your buy in if you feel you need to play a game with higher odds bets (foolish) unless pass line bets are consistently winning.
I believe Casino Royale on the strip still offers a $3 table. The tables there are very 'bouncy' and good for don't bettors. Also there should be some $3 tables downtown (Fremont Street)
Just my opinion
Tom