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Craps – The House Edge




Author: Neha Agrawal


If the game of Craps, or casinos, for that matter, did not have the house edge, they would not be doing half as well as you might think they would.

While it is true that the money they rake in from the house edge in Craps is miniscule in comparison to that which they win from bad gamblers, it is still a significant source of income for the casinos. In order to see what the house edge does for casinos who offer Craps, we must first see what the house edge is.

A house edge is a small advantage in favour of a casino. One example of a type of bet where there is no house edge would be flipping a coin. If you flip a coin, you have a fifty-fifty chance of guessing heads or tails don’t you? But what if, because they are the ones permitting you to gamble, the casino said they’d take 2.5% of your winnings on that bet for them hosting the Craps game. That means that you would no longer pick up 100% of your winnings, but 97.5% instead. The house edge is due to the odds that the casino is offering you, which are of course not the odds that you would generally have if you played the same game at your home for free.

In the game of Craps, the house edge is quite simple to remember, although it does vary from bet to bet. It might seem unfair, but this is the way with the casino world, regardless of whether you play online or offline in a land-based, brick and mortar casino. And let’s be fair here, online casinos generally have less of a house edge than real to life ones.

As we’ve mentioned, in Craps the house edge depends on the type of bet you are placing. For a Pass Line bet, the house edge is generally around 1.41%. With a Field bet, that house edge goes up to 2.77%, although the money amounts in both of these examples are so miniscule you’d hardly notice the difference.

On Placed bets in Craps however, the house edge soars depending on what numbers you have chosen to bet on. If you decide to wager on a six or an eight, the house edge stays a comfortably low 1.5%. If you wager on a five or a nine, it rises to 4%, and if you wager on a four or a ten, it goes up to a massive 6.7%. This is due to the probability of you obtaining those numbers.

On Hardways bets, betting on a six or eight can see the house edge rise to 9.09%, while at its most extreme, it is 11.1% when you wager on a four or a ten via a Hardways bet.

The house edge is there for a reason, and there is nothing you can do about it to change it. All you can do is understand it, and wager around it with whatever works to your advantage when playing Craps.