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What is Craps? A Plain English Overview
If you have ever walked through a casino and heard a sudden roar erupt from one corner of the floor, odds are good you were hearing a craps table. It is not slots. Slots do not yell. It is not blackjack either. Blackjack players are too busy counting in their heads to make that kind of noise.
Craps is the loud one. It is the game with people stacked three deep around an oversized table, slapping the padded rail and shouting at each other like they are at a football game. From across the floor it looks like a riot. From up close it looks even more confusing. The table itself is covered in dozens of betting boxes with strange labels. Dealers are moving chips around at impossible speeds. Someone is yelling about a yo. Someone else is calling out hardways. There is a stickman with what appears to be a bent walking stick pushing dice around.
The first time I walked up to a craps table I stood about 20 feet away pretending to look at my phone, trying to crack the code from a safe distance. Took me close to half an hour to work up the nerve to actually buy in. And I did not really know what I was doing for the first three or four sessions after that. I was just standing there making the bet I knew about, the pass line, and trying to figure out what everyone else was doing.
Looking back, I wish someone had just sat me down and told me how simple the game really is. The chaos at a craps table is mostly noise. The actual game underneath it can be explained in about three minutes. So let me do that for you now.
The basic idea Of Craps
Craps is a dice game. Two dice. Six sides each. That is it. There is no deck of cards, no spinning wheel, no slot machine, no algorithm working against you in the background. Just two pieces of red plastic with white dots on them.
One person at the table is what is called the shooter. The shooter is the one who throws the dice. Everyone else around the table, including the shooter, bets on what is going to happen when those dice land. That is the entire game in one sentence. People bet, dice get thrown, bets win or lose, dice get thrown again.
This is worth pausing on for a second because it makes craps fundamentally different from a lot of other casino games. The casino is not really playing against you the way a blackjack dealer is. There is no opponent sitting across the table trying to beat you. The dice do whatever the dice do. The casino just sets the payouts on each bet so that, over time, it makes a small profit on most of those bets. That is the whole business model. You against the dice, and the dice against the math.
Other players at the table are not your enemies either. In most other casino games you are either playing alone against the house, like at slots or video poker, or you are playing alongside strangers who have nothing to do with your hand. Craps is different. The big bet that almost everyone makes, the pass line, wins or loses based on what the shooter does. So when the shooter wins, the whole table usually wins together. When the shooter loses, the whole table usually loses together. That is why the noise is what it is. That is why strangers are high-fiving each other and groaning together. They are all in the same boat.
Where the game of craps came from
You do not need any history to play craps. Skip this section if you do not care. But a quick origin story helps explain why the game has so much weird slang.
The short version is that craps descends from an older English game called hazard, which has been around since at least the 1700s and probably earlier than that. Hazard came across the Atlantic with British colonists, got picked up and simplified by gamblers in New Orleans in the 1800s, and over the next century it slowly turned into the version we play today. The name craps itself most likely comes from a French word for the lowest possible roll in hazard, crapaud, which means toad. Players would say they crapped out and the name eventually stuck to the whole game.
Soldiers in both World Wars spread craps everywhere because it was easy to play on a blanket on the ground with two dice and a pocketful of nickels. You did not need a table or a deck of cards or anything else. Two dice would do. By the time Las Vegas got going in the 1950s and 1960s, craps was already one of the most popular gambling games in the country.
That is why the language of the game sounds so old. Boxcars. Snake eyes. Yo. Hardways. A lot of these terms have been around for over a century. People who learned the game at military bases in the 1940s passed the slang to their kids and grandkids and it never really got updated. When you hear the stickman call out little Joe from Kokomo for a roll of 4, that is not new. That phrase is older than your grandparents.
What you are actually betting on in craps
Here is where it gets a little more involved, but stick with me. The bones of the game are not complicated.
When the shooter throws the dice for the first time in a round, that throw is called the come out roll. A few things can happen.
If the shooter throws a 7 or 11, that is called a natural. Most bettors win immediately and a brand new come out roll happens.
If the shooter throws a 2, 3 or 12, that is called craps. Most bettors lose immediately and, again, a brand new come out roll happens. The shooter does not give up the dice though, they just keep going.
If the shooter throws any other number, meaning a 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 or 10, that number becomes what is called the point. This is where the round actually starts. A puck on the table flips to the on side and gets placed on top of whatever number was rolled. So if the shooter rolls an 8 on the come out, 8 is now the point and the puck sits on the 8.
Now the shooter keeps rolling, but the game has changed. The goal is no longer to roll a 7 or 11. The goal is to roll that point number again, an 8 in our example, before rolling a 7. If the shooter rolls the 8 first, the round wins. The puck flips back to off and a new come out roll happens. If a 7 comes first, the round loses, the dice get passed to the next player at the table, and a new come out starts with a new shooter.
That is the rhythm of craps. Come out roll. Establish a point. Try to make the point before sevening out. Then do it all again. Once you see that pattern, the rest of the game starts making sense.
The bet you start with in craps
The basic bet, the one almost everyone at the table is making, is called the pass line bet. You put your chips on the pass line on the layout and you are betting that the shooter is going to win the round. So if the come out is a 7 or 11, you win. If it is craps, you lose. If a point gets established, you are now rooting for the shooter to hit that point before rolling a 7.
The pass line bet pays even money, meaning if you bet $10 and you win, you get $10 back plus your original $10, for $20 total. The math behind it is some of the friendliest in the entire casino. The house edge on a pass line bet is around 1.4 percent, which means for every $100 you put through it, the casino expects to take about $1.40 over the long run. Compare that to slots, where the edge is often 5 to 10 percent or worse, and you can see why craps has a reputation for being a smart gambler's game.
There are dozens of other bets you can make in craps, and we cover the ones worth knowing in their own articles. The big two to learn after the pass line are the free odds bet, which is the only bet in the casino with zero house edge, and the come bet, which is basically a pass line bet you can make on any roll. There are also bets to avoid, like most of the propositions in the middle of the table, which we will get into.
Why craps feels different from other casino games
A few reasons. The pace is one. Craps moves slower than most people expect. There can be a minute or more between rolls while dealers pay out winners and players make new bets. That sounds slow but it gives you plenty of time to think and talk and watch what is happening, which is why the social vibe is so strong.
The other reason is that you are not making one bet and then waiting to find out if you won. You can have multiple bets going at once, on different numbers, and they all live or die on the same dice. So a single roll can make you a winner on one bet and a loser on another bet at the exact same time. That is part of what makes the game feel so alive. Every roll matters in five different ways.
And then there is the fact that, on a hot table, when a shooter is making point after point, you can win a lot of money in a hurry. Long rolls are rare. Most rolls last three or four throws and end on a 7. But when somebody catches fire and rolls for 20 minutes without sevening out, the cheering gets loud. That is the magic of craps and that is the moment everyone is waiting for. It does not happen often. When it does, you remember it.
Should you actually play craps
If you like dice, like a social atmosphere and want a game with some of the best odds in the casino, yes. Craps is one of the few casino games where a basic strategy gives you a fair shot at coming out ahead in any given session. Over the long run the house still wins, that is true of every casino game, but the gap is small enough that you can have a real night.
If you hate the noise, hate crowds and want to play at your own pace, you might prefer the online version. We cover the differences in our article on online vs live craps. The online game has the same rules and the same odds, just without the shouting.
If you have never played, the best move is to learn the basic rules first, then learn the few bets that matter, then go play for small money and let the rest of the game come to you. Nobody learns craps in one sitting. Nobody. Even people who have been playing for years still learn new things or see weird situations they have not seen before. Treat the first few sessions as tuition. Bet small. Watch. Ask the dealers questions during slow moments, they are almost always happy to explain things to a new player who is being polite about it.
The next article in this guide covers the basic rules of craps in more detail, including all the things that can happen on a roll and what the dealers actually do with all those chips. After that, we get into the table layout and the bets themselves.
One last thing before you go any further. Set a budget before you play. Stick to it. Craps is fun and it can be a great night out, but the dice do not care about your rent. We talk a lot more about this in the article on bankroll management. Read that one before you put any real money on the table.
Read next: Basic Craps Rules Explained
Gamble responsibly. Must be 21 or older. If you or someone you know has a gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER.