How To Make A Craps Table

For those of you who didn’t already know this, check out the craps table Phil and I put together last year. Anyway, I was looking at the website Woodworking.com and ran across an amazing book. First of all, when I was looking at their plans, I noticed that they had a section for caskets! DiscountCasinoGear.com sells professional craps supplies to casino rental companies AND home gamers who LOVE to gamble. We have everything you need for playing REAL craps. In fact, you are guaranteed to feel like you’re in Las Vegas when you utilize our high quality craps supplies! I get asked quite often buy my customers “how do I get the same bounce as the casino craps table”. Depending on the bounce you want I recommend vinyl for a smaller bounce of dice and for a trampoline bounce 1/8″ closed cell volara foam. Both need to get sprayed down to the plywood with no air underneath. Then stable your layout above.

For decades, craps was the most popular table game in any casino. Its popularity was usurped by blackjack in the 1960s with the rise of both basic strategy and card counting, but craps remains one of the big 3 table games in any casino:

Blackjack
Craps
Roulette

But in Oklahoma, casinos aren’t allowed to use dice to power games of chance. The laws restrict table games to the use of playing cards to generate random results. Someone somewhere figured out how to create a craps game that uses cards instead of dice and maintains the same bets and probability.

The playing cards determine the results, which are then displayed using animated dice on a television monitor above the craps table. It would be easy to think that a random number generator computer program is creating those results, like it would with an online casino, but if you pay attention, you can watch the dealers actually drawing and manipulating the cards.

They use a scanner to read the cards, and that scanner converts those cards into the corresponding dice totals.

The purpose of this post is to explain how to play craps with playing cards in Oklahoma.

The Basics of Craps in General

Whether you’re playing street craps or casino craps, the basics of the game are the same. You start with a “shooter,” someone who rolls the dice. The game is played in “rounds,” and each round begins with a roll of the dice called the “come-out roll.”

Most people bet “with the shooter” or “with the dice.” This is an even-money bet called the “pass line bet.” It wins if the dice succeed, and it loses if the dice lose. Winning and losing are defined as follows:

On the come-out roll, if the shooter rolls a 7 or an 11, the dice immediately succeed, and the pass line bet pays off at even money.

But if the shooter rolls a 2, 3, or 12, the dice immediately fail, and the pass line bet loses. A new shooter starts a new round after this.

If the shooter rolls any other possible total, a “point” is “set”. The possible points are:

The shooter’s goal on subsequent rolls is to roll the point number again before rolling a 7. If he achieves this goal, the pass line bet pays off at even money. If he rolls a 7 first, he fails, and the pass line bet loses.

That’s the basic game in a nutshell. I know it seems more complicated than that when you’re watching, but that’s because there are so many possible bets you can make. Most of the bets at the craps table are awful for the player, though. You should just skip them.

One of the bets, though—the odds bet—is special. It deserves its own section:

The Odds Bet in Craps

The house has a mathematical advantage on every bet in the casino. The pass line in craps is no different. In fact, we know the exact mathematical edge the casino enjoys on this bet—it’s 1.41%.

When a point is set during a round of craps, though, another bet becomes available that has no house edge. This bet pays off at the same odds as of winning. It’s called the odds bet.

The odds bet is placed behind your original pass line bet. The amount is a multiple of your original bet. Casinos place a maximum amount on this bet as a multiple of your initial bet.

2X is as common a max as you’ll see, which means if you bet $5 on the pass line, you can make up to a $10 bet on the odds bet. If you placed a $10 pass line bet, you can bet $20 on the odds, and so on.

In casinos with higher maximum odds, you might be able to bet 10X or even 100X the size of your pass line bet. So if you bet $5 on pass at a 10X max table, you could bet $50 on the odds bet.

The payoff on this bet is based on the point that’s been set. And the payoff odds are the same as the odds of winning the bet.

If the point is 4 or 10, the payoff is 2 to 1. The odds of winning are also 2 to 1.
If the point is 5 or 9, the payoff is 3 to 2. The odds of winning are also 3 to 2.
If the point is 6 or 8, the payoff is 6 to 5. The odds of winning are also 6 to 5.

Of course, the net effect of having a pass line bet and an odds bet in play at the same time is to reduce your overall house edge on the 2 bets. Here’s what the house edge looks like on the combined bet at various multiples:

2X Odds – 0.85%
3X Odds – 0.47%
5X Odds – 0.33%
10X Odds – 0.18%
100X Odds – 0.02%

Keep in mind, this is the house edge for the 2 bets combined. No matter how much you bet on the odds, you can never reduce the house edge to 0 or less in craps. The initial pass line bet always gives the casino an edge.

Also keep in mind that at least 1/3 of the time, the pass line bet will be resolved on the come out roll anyway. You’ll be able to take an odds bet most (2/3) of the time. But that’s not the same as being able to take the odds bet every time.

But How Do You Play a Dice Game with Playing Cards?

If I were designing a card game based version of craps, I’d just use 2 tiny decks of cards with an ace through 6 in each deck. You’d draw one card from each stack. This would give you the same potential combinations that you have in a regular craps game. There are 36 possible combinations, even though there are only 11 possible totals:

2 – One possible combination: 1, 1
3 – 2 possible combinations: 1, 2 or 2, 1
4 – 3 possible combinations: 1, 3 or 2, 2, or 3, 1
5 – 4 possible combinations: 1, 4 or 2, 3 or 3, 2 or 4, 1
6 – 5 possible combinations: 1, 5 or 2, 4 or 3,3 or 4, 2 or 5, 1
7 – 6 possible combinations: 1, 6 or 2, 5 or 3, 4 or 4, 3 or 5, 2 or 6, 1
8 – 5 possible combinations: 2, 6, or 3, 5 or 4, 4 or 5, 3 or 6, 2
9 – 4 possible combinations: 3, 6 or 4, 5 or 5, 4, or 6, 3
10 – 3 possible combinations: 4, 6 or 5, 5 or 6, 4
11 – 2 possible combinations: 5, 6 or 6, 5
12 – One possible combination: 6, 6

The problem with using my solution of 2 decks of 6 cards is that such a deck would be hard to shuffle. You’d also need to keep the 2 tiny decks separate from each other. That wouldn’t be impossible, but both of these challenges would require more finesse than you might be expected to need.

The casino’s solution is to use a deck of cards with 36 cards in it. Each of those cards corresponds to a specific combination of dice. This duplicates the probability you’d have with a standard craps game.

The cards used for this purpose are the ace through 9 of each of the 4 suits. The table has a card reader with a camera in it. This device recognizes the card and compares it to see which combination that card corresponds to. The boxman is the person at the craps table who handles the cards and the card reader.

The cards are dealt using a shuffling machine. Once the cards are shuffled, the boxman spreads them out across the table and uses the middle card as the determining card. Once it’s been scanned, the television screen above the table displays the animation and the result. The stickman also announces the result at the table.

All the other rules for the game are the same as for a standard craps game. I’ll cover the rest of the basics below, but if you already know how to play craps with dice, you can just skip that section and go play.

The Only Other Craps Bets Worth Making

The only craps bets I’ve covered until this point were the pass line bet and the odds bet.

But you have another good bet you can make before the come out roll. It’s called the “don’t pass” bet.

This is a bet that the shooter will fail.

It wins even money on the come out roll if the shooter fails, although a roll of 12 on the come out roll is treated as a tie (or a

How Do You Make A Craps Table