How a round works
- The come-out roll. Bet the pass line, then two dice are rolled. A 7 or 11 wins even money on the spot; a 2, 3 or 12 loses; anything else (4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10) becomes “the point”.
- Chasing the point. The shooter keeps rolling. If the point repeats before a 7 lands, pass bets win even money; if the 7 arrives first, they lose. That is the entire core game.
- Don’t pass is the mirror. You win when the 7 beats the point, betting with the house and marginally cheaper at 1.36% to the pass line’s 1.41%. Online, nobody minds.
The odds bet: the casino’s only fair price
Once a point is set, you can back your pass or don’t-pass bet with an additional wager called the odds. It pays at the true probability of the point repeating (2:1 on a 4 or 10, 3:2 on a 5 or 9, 6:5 on a 6 or 8) with zero house edge. No other wager in a casino pays its honest price. The catch is that it only attaches to a line bet you have already paid the 1.4% on; the combination still costs money overall, just less per dollar the more odds you take. Online tables typically allow 3x–5x; take what the bankroll comfortably supports.
The middle of the table
Everything shouted at a craps table lives in the centre felt, and nearly all of it is expensive: Any 7 costs 16.67%, Any Craps 11.1%, hardways 9–11%, the field around 5.6% (2.8% where 12 pays triple). The rule of thumb is geographic: the closer a bet sits to the middle of the layout, the worse its price. Pass, don’t pass, come, don’t come and the odds live on the edges, and they are the whole game worth playing.
What players get wrong
Dice setting and “hot shooters”. Online RNG craps has no dice to set, and live-studio dice land how they land; a shooter who has hit five points is not “rolling well”, they are lucky, and the next roll is the same 36-combination table it always was. The honest version of craps strategy fits in one line: line bet, maximum comfortable odds, nothing in the middle.
Questions players ask
What is the best bet in craps?
Don’t pass backed with maximum odds, by a whisker over pass with maximum odds: 1.36% vs 1.41% on the line portion, with the odds portion costing nothing on either. In practice both are excellent; the real skill is refusing everything in the centre of the layout.
Is the craps odds bet really zero house edge?
Yes. It pays the true mathematical probability of the point repeating, the only wager in the casino that does. The asterisk is that you can only place it behind a pass or don’t-pass bet that already paid roughly 1.4%, so the combined wager still favours the house slightly; more odds means a lower blended price.
Do I need to learn the whole craps table?
No. Four bets (pass, don’t pass, come, don’t come) plus the odds behind them are the entire defensible game. The dozens of other spaces on the layout charge 5% to 17% for extra noise, and no online table requires you to touch any of them.
Edges quoted are the standard published figures for the stated rules; where a paytable varies the range is given rather than a single invented decimal. The full game-by-game comparison lives on the house edge board.