Is Betting Good
I’m writing a series of blog posts about casino games and the good and bad strategies for playing those games.
Craps is one of my favorite casino games, so I’ve been looking forward to writing this one.
Betting odds allow you to calculate how much money you will win if you make a bet. Let’s use the same examples as before, with the same replacement of numbers for letters, i.e. 4/1 becomes A/B. Quite simply, for every value of B that you bet, you will win A, plus the return of your stake.
Frank Schwab joins Minty Bets to give three long shot picks to win the National Title in the upcoming NCAA Tournament. KSHB Kansas City, MO Like us on Facebook to see similar stories Please give. There is no an absolute answer for it. It could be good. If you can be responsible and treat it as a hoppy or entertainment to enjoy. But it could also be bad, if you addict to it and treat it as your only job for living. Gambling most definitely is focused on the love of money and undeniably tempts people with the promise of quick and easy riches. WITH THE boom in betting comes the corrupting consequences: deep indebtedness, despair, criminal behavior, and many other tragic repercussions that affect individuals, their families and society. Good sports bettors can do this sort of math in their head or very quickly on paper. From that bit of information comes a new betting theory—look for game situations that mirror the above example and bet on them. That means he’ll only bet games where the home.
And the beautiful thing about craps is that it’s a game of pure chance. The best strategy is just to choose the bets with the lowest edge for the house and have fun.
But I’ll have some things to say about some of the strategies and systems that other writers promote, too.
They’re mostly bad craps strategies.
Here’s the Only Craps Strategy You Need
When you’re dealing with an entirely random game – like craps – the only strategy that matters is choosing the bets with the lowest house edge and having fun.
I’ll have something to say about shooters and whether they have control over the outcomes later in this post, but for now, let’s just agree that games like craps are purely chance.
In other games that are entirely random, like slot machines, you don’t even really need to decide which bet to place. It’s chosen for you before you sit down.
When playing craps for real money, you have a handful of good bets you can make, but most of the bets on the table are bad. Just skip the bad bets, and you’re all set.
The Bests Bets at the Craps Table
The best bets at the craps table are the pass line bet and the don’t pass bet.
The come and don’t come bets are also great wagers.
I always advise casino gamblers to try to limit their gambling to games where the house edge is lower than 2% — preferably 1.5% or lower.
The house edge for the pass and come bets is the same, 1.41%, which means they qualify.
The house edge for the don’t pass and don’t come bets is even lower, 1.36%, but the 0.05% isn’t worth worrying about. Most people prefer to root for the shooter to succeed.
The other bet to think about at the craps table is the odds bet. This is a bet you can only place after making one of the 4 bets I already mentioned and when the shooter has set a point.
This is one of the only bets in the casino that has no house edge. It’s a break-even bet, but it can be expensive.
It can also drive the effective house edge on the money you have in action down to almost nothing.
Here’s how that works.
How the Odds Bet Changes the House Edge for the Better
If you’re betting on the pass line and the shooter sets a point, you can expect to lose $1.41 for every $100 you bet. That’s on average and in the long run.
If you’re playing at a casino that only allows you to place an odds bet at 1X the size of your pass line bet, you can put another $100 into action.
Your expected loss remains $1.41, though, which effectively cuts the house edge in half, from 1.41% to 0.71%.
If you’re able to bet 2X your original bet on the odds bet, you can lower that even further to 0.36%. (You have $300 in action, but your expected loss is still only $1.41.)
The more you’re able to bet on the odds bet, the lower the house edge for all the money you have in action becomes.
It’s clear why betting on the pass line and taking the most odds that you can is an effective strategy. With the odds bet, you can get the house edge in craps lower than 0.5% at least some of the time at the table, making it an even better game than blackjack.
And what’s more, you don’t have to memorize basic strategy to get the low house edge at craps.
You just need a big enough casino bankroll to make the right bets, and you need enough sense to avoid the bad bets at the table – of which there are many.
Any Strategy that Involves Placing ANY Other Bets at the Craps Table Is a BAD Craps Strategy
There’s a reason gambling experts measure bets according to their house edge. That’s because it’s the single best indicator of how good or bad a bet is.
The house edge is a statistical estimate of how much money you’ll lose as a percentage of your original bet over the long run.
If the house edge is 1.41%, the casino expects to win an average of $1.41 every time you bet $100.
If the house edge is 16.66%, the casino expects to win an average of $16.66 every time you bet $100.
Which bet looks like the better bet for the casino?
And which one looks like the better bet for the gambler?
It shouldn’t be hard to make the distinction.
Even the best of the bad bets on the craps table are inferior to the 1.41% or 1.36% you can get from the pass, don’t pass, come, and don’t come bets.
And trust me on this:
You can have PLENTY of fun sticking with the basic bets at the craps table.
Betting Systems Where You Raise and Lower the Size of Your Bets Are Bad Strategies
The classic example of this kind of betting system is the Martingale System, where you double the size of your bets after each loss. When you do this repeatedly, you eventually win back the money you’ve lost along with a profit of one unit.
The problem with a system like the Martingale is that you’ll eventually run into a big enough losing streak that it will wipe out all those small profits and then some.
Most people underestimate how quickly a bet’s size gets when doubling after every loss.
They also overestimate how likely they are to avoid long losing streaks.
If you double a $5 bet once, that’s $10.
But if you run into a losing streak of 8 bets in a row, you’re looking at having to bet $640 to make up for your losses.
Also, every roll of the dice is an independent event. The odds don’t change based on how many times you’ve won or lost in a row.
You might think the probability of losing that 8th bet is lower than the likelihood of losing the first one, but the truth is that the dice have no memory. They have the same 6 sides, no matter how many times you’ve lost in a row.
Each bet in craps is an independent event, and any betting system will assume that the odds are changing based on how many times in a row you’ve won or lost.
Money Management Strategies Don’t Hurt Anything, but They Won’t Improve Your Odds of Winning, Either
Is Betting Good Or Bad
Money management strategies involve having strict gambling discipline about how much of your bankroll you’re willing to risk before quitting the game. They also require you to stop when you’ve won an arbitrary amount of money.
Money management techniques are often used in conjunction with betting systems.
Here’s an example of a money management strategy in craps:
You decide your bankroll for the session is $250, and you’re playing for $5 per roll of the dice.
Your stop-loss limit is $100, so, if your bankroll drops to $150, you must quit the craps session and go do something else.
Your win goal is $250, so once your bankroll gets up to $500, you must quit the game and go do something else.
This kind of strategy might increase your chances of walking away from the game a winner.
But that’s only because a lot of gamblers will just keep playing until they’ve lost their entire stake. They just don’t generally have a lot of sense about that sort of thing.
The Jury’s Out on Dice Setting or Dice Control
I’ve seen multiple reputable gambling writers express interest and some belief that some craps shooters can influence the probability of specific outcomes. I’m skeptical – in the extreme – but I’ll give it an appropriate amount of credence.
The idea is that you hold the dice a specific way – “setting” the dice – then throw with a minimum amount of force – just enough to hit the back wall and eliminate most of the rolling action.
A controlled shooting expert doesn’t have to be perfect. Instead, they’re trying to be like someone who’s playing darts. They improve the probability enough to change the negative expectation on a bet to a positive expectation.
You can buy books and videos explaining how to get an edge at craps this way, but I can’t imagine the amount of practice and record-keeping required to have any confidence in your ability to change the odds.
Imagine if you spent 1000 hours trying to learn how to control the dice and coming up short. Maybe you just don’t have the knack for it.
That doesn’t sound like a good deal to me.
I’d rather learn to count cards in blackjack.
Conclusion
Those are the best and the worst of the strategies I know of for playing craps in the casino. I know plenty of people who would disagree with every recommendation I’ve made, but the math behind the game doesn’t lie.
The best strategy is to stick with the bets with the lowest house edge and have as much fun as you can.
The way bettors process information is important to their success. What is binary bias? What can YouTube and the Baltimore Ravens tell us about betting psychology? What is a good bet? Read on to find out.
What is binary thinking?
Binary thinking involves sorting information into mutually exclusive options, not unlike the way a computer thinks in binary code. Something is either a 1 or a 0 and those are the only two options. There is no grey area.
Many argue that humans instinctively sort information in this kind of way, naturally jumping into this kind of binary method of thinking.
For primitive humans this made sense. The kind of judgements that needed to be made to survive lent themselves well to such a way of thinking, especially when it came to quick decision-making. Decisions such as whether a rustle heard in the bush is a predator or non-predator were life-or-death ones.
The reward offered by spending valuable time weighing up the information available about the sound (whilst a predator could be preparing to strike) is not worth the risk of being eaten. Simply categorising the rustle in the bush as a predator and fleeing makes much more sense from a risk vs reward perspective.
Richard Dawkins claims such a desire for straight yes-or-no solutions to neatly categorise information is “The tyranny of the discontinuous mind”. He suggests that people seek the reassurance of an either-or classification because it’s much easier for the brain to think in binary, as our distant ancestors did, rather than consider the shades of grey between two conclusions.
This kind of binary decision making is perfectly fine for basic snap decision making, but we now live in a world of nuance. Nowhere is this reflected more acutely than in the world of betting.
Binary bias: caffeine and YouTube ratings
How does binary decision making affect the way we process information?
Fisher and Keil set out to ascertain this in a series of studies on what they called “binary bias”. For these studies, participants were given evidence about a topic, before being asked to summarise the evidence and give a rating that best captured their overall impression of the strength of the argument.
Overall they found that: “Across a wide variety of contexts, we show that when summarizing evidence, people exhibit a binary bias: a tendency to impose categorical distinctions on continuous data. Evidence is compressed into discrete bins, and the difference between categories forms the summary judgment.”
Odds movement, new lines, competitions and more
In other words the participants tended to ignore the relative strength of the evidence presented to them, instead favouring categorising them into discrete categories and looking at the sum total of evidence within those categories.
This stripped out all the continuous data. As a result, a conclusion with a 25% likelihood in one direction was simply bucketed with all the conclusions that leaned in that direction regardless of their strength. This made the data easier to process for the test subjects but meant that the value of the information diminished.
YouTube discovered this whilst trying to refine their rating system for videos. Their star ratings proved to be ineffective since the vast majority of votes were either for one star or five star.
This was a consequence of binary decision making. If the user likes the video they categorise it as a five, whilst if they didn’t like the video then they categorised it as a one. All of the information in the middle of these two discrete categories was lost. This resulted in YouTube switching to a simpler thumbs up/down system.
Outcome bias
As shown above, humans prefer to sort information into two distinct categories where possible. This is also the case within betting.
To an inexperienced bettor, a good bet is simply one that wins. A bad bet is one that loses. Those two buckets are easy to grasp and make intuitive sense to somebody without a good grasp of the nuances behind betting.
This however, is completely false. A winning bet can be a terrible bet whilst the best bet ever placed may have turned out to be a loser. By categorising bets in such a simple way, all of the useful information gets stripped away.
This desire to attribute a data point into a “good” or “bad” category due to the outcome of an event was shown during the debate around the Baltimore Ravens’ failed two point conversion attempt from the 2019 NFL season.
Mathematically, the decision to go for the two point conversion was the correct one by the Ravens. However, because the attempt failed, some pundits categorised the call into the “bad decision” bucket.
The extra information given by the analytics behind such a play was removed for these pundits due to a mixture of outcome bias (a failed attempt must have been caused by a poor decision) and binary bias (the need to place the play into a distinct category). Had the play proved succesful their opinions would, in all likelihood, have been different.
What is a good bet? Thinking like a bettor
In order to get into a successful betting mind-set the bettor must learn to avoid such biases. The grey area between win and lose is what distinguishes a good bet from a bad one.
Bettors work in percentages. If the bettor’s percentage is more accurate than that of the bookmaker’s he will win in the long run. But is it even possible to ascertain whether the bettor’s percentages are even accurate?
Without a large sample size it is almost impossible to answer that question definitively.
Good Bet Ideas
Take one famous percentage figure as an example. Statistics website FiveThirtyEight gave Donald Trump a 30% chance of winning the 2016 US presidential election. Of course, Trump went on to become president.
- Read: How to test the credibility of a tipster's record
The reaction to this prediction from some quarters was to label it as “wrong”. Given the binary approach people take to such things, you can see why it would be tempting to do so. As the work on binary bias done by Fisher and Keil showed, people removed the weakened strength of the prediction (Trump being awarded 30% chance instead of 0% chance) to place the prediction in the “wrong” category they are comfortable with.
But this is obviously nonsense. According to the prediction, Trump should win three times in ten. The fact the scenario played out to become one in which Trump won shows us nothing new about the accuracy of the prediction.
The sample size would need to be extended to a meaningful level by running the same election repeatedly (which is of course impossible). Only then could we see how close FiveThirtyEight’s prediction of 30% Trump wins was to reality.
Controlling the chaos
This is understandably disconcerting. It goes against our instincts to say that we actually don’t know and may never know whether an individual prediction was a good one.
There have certainly been bets I have placed where I intuitively felt the percentages were in my favour, but outside of a model run across a large sample of similar events, there is no way to definitively say that I was correct.
Best Bets Today
As bettors we are operating in that grey area between the “good” and “bad” bet buckets. To be successful you have to step away from easy classifications and embrace the percentages on an individual bet for what they are. Simply attempts to create a “good” bet with the knowledge that we may never truly know whether we can ever classifiy them as such.