Going To Vegas ?
Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2009 1:18 pm
In good times or bad, craps cannot be beaten. Never forget, the dice are law, two nasty little lumps of mathematical certainty. Still the best bet in Vegas is on a craps table, the odds bet where — when the bet is maxed — the house edge is reduced to as little as 0.3 percent. Always make the odds bet. Max it out when possible. Simply put, it's a second wager, placed after the come-out roll, in a weirdly unlabeled area just behind the pass line. Casinos hate it because it pays true odds, and it's the only bet in Vegas that does. If the point is 10, the maximum odds bet is usually an additional wager of three times the original bet (paying 2 to 1 for a roll of 10). When the world is flush and the Strip is packed, downtown hotels and casinos routinely entice low-rolling bettors by offering higher limits on the odds bet, sometimes as high as a hundred times the pass-line bet. But when things get tight, even the Strip casinos are known to reach out to gamblers by creating more favorable returns on this classic bet. Hence the axiomatic paradox: Casino gambling is more fun when times are bad, as table minimums are nudged downward and limits creep up on the odds bet. Bet them. Max them.
Tom Chiarella
Tom Chiarella