Play Craps Online

What Is Craps?

Craps is a casino dice game in which a shooter throws two dice and everyone at the table bets on the outcome. The heart of the game is a two-phase cycle: a come-out roll that decides some bets immediately and sets a point number, then a run of rolls in which the point either repeats or a 7 ends the hand. Around that cycle sits a layout with more than a dozen side bets, from the near-fair Pass Line to the terrible Any 7.

It also has the widest spread of house edges of any table game: one bet has no edge at all, and another gives the house one chip in six. Learning craps is mostly learning which parts of the layout to ignore.

If you enjoy the tension here, Ship Captain Crew is an older cup-and-dice gambling game with simpler rules, Dice Poker turns five dice into head-to-head hands, and Liar’s Dice adds bluffing. For push-your-luck without a layout, try Pig or Farkle.

A Short History of Craps

Craps descends from Hazard, an English dice game old enough to appear in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the fourteenth century. A medieval tradition attributes its invention to Crusaders at the siege of Hazarth (Azaz) in the twelfth century; historians treat that story with caution. Hazard was a craze in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England (Charles Cotton called it “the most bewitching Game that is plaid on the Dice” in 1674, and Edmond Hoyle codified it in 1790). It was complicated: the caster named a main between 5 and 9, and whether a throw won, lost or set a chance depended on the main. A throw of 2 or 3 was a loss known in London slang as crabs.

Around 1805, Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville, a wealthy young Louisiana landowner, brought Hazard from London to New Orleans. Older accounts say he simplified it by fixing the main at 7, which is the modern game; more recent research suggests Marigny played ordinary Hazard and the simplification happened among the working-class players who took it up. The game spread up the Mississippi under the name Pass (from the French pas), “crabs” was corrupted through “creps” to craps, and Marigny named a street in his New Orleans subdivision Rue de Craps.

Early street craps had a flaw: with only the Pass side available, dice loaded to favor the shooter could not be countered. In about 1907 a Philadelphia dice maker, John H. Winn, introduced a layout with a Don’t Pass space so players could bet against the shooter, and every modern table descends from it. Craps exploded during the Second World War, when American servicemen of every background played it on barracks blankets, and it became the dominant table game of postwar Las Vegas.

Craps Rules

Equipment

• Two six-sided dice.
• A layout marked with the betting areas, and chips to bet with.
• A puck, black on one side (OFF) and white on the other (ON), showing whether a point is set and which number it is.

Object of the Game

There is no “winning” craps as such; there are bets that win or lose on each roll. The basic goal is to bet the Pass Line and have the shooter throw a natural on the come-out or make the point before a 7.

How a Turn Works

1. Come-out roll. The puck is OFF. Bettors place Pass Line or Don’t Pass bets. The shooter rolls. - 7 or 11 (“natural”): Pass wins even money, Don’t Pass loses. - 2, 3 or 12 (“craps”): Pass loses. Don’t Pass wins on 2 and 3 but only pushes on 12 (the “bar 12” rule that gives the house its edge on the Don’t side). - 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 or 10: That number becomes the point. The puck flips to ON and sits on the number.
2. Point phase. The shooter keeps rolling. Pass Line and Don’t Pass bets cannot be added or removed. You may now take odds behind a Pass bet and make place bets on other numbers. - Point repeats: Pass and odds win, Don’t Pass loses, the puck goes OFF and a new come-out begins. - 7 (“seven-out”): Pass, odds and place bets lose, Don’t Pass wins, and in a live game the dice pass to the next shooter. - Anything else: Line bets stay up. A place bet on the number rolled wins. Hardways and one-roll bets are settled as below.
3. One-roll bets (Field, Any 7, Any Craps) are decided by the very next roll, in either phase.

The Bets and Their Payouts

This table is exactly what the game on this page pays. “X to Y” means a winning bet keeps its stake and receives X for every Y wagered. Fractions are rounded down, as a casino does.

Place bets are off on the come-out roll: they are neither won nor lost while the puck is OFF and come back into play when a new point is set. Place bets and hardways stay up after a win, so they keep collecting until they lose or you take them down with Clear bets.

Worked Examples

• Come-out: 25 on the Pass Line, roll 5-6 = 11. Natural. You collect 25 and your stake returns. The next roll is another come-out.
• Come-out: 25 on Pass, 5 on the Field, roll 1-1 = 2. Craps: Pass loses 25. But 2 is a Field number paying 2 to 1, so the Field returns your 5 plus 10. Net for the roll: minus 15.
• Come-out: 25 on Pass, roll 3-3 = 6. The point is 6. You take 75 in odds (3x) and place 30 on the 8. Roll 4-4 = 8: Place 8 pays 7 to 6 on 30, which is 35, and the 30 stays up. Roll 5-1 = 6: point made. Pass pays 25 and the odds pay 6 to 5 on 75, which is 90, so 215 comes back. The Place 8 stays on the table but is off for the next come-out.
• Point 6 with 25 Pass and 75 odds: roll 2-5 = 7. Seven-out. Pass, odds and place bets are all lost. A 5-chip Hard 8 would also be gone; had the roll been 4-4 instead, it would have paid 45 and stayed up.

The Odds: 36 Outcomes and the House Edge

Two dice produce 36 equally likely outcomes (a 7 can be made six ways, a 2 or 12 only one), and every number in craps follows from this table.

On the come-out the Pass Line wins with 8 outcomes (7 and 11) and loses with 4 (2, 3, 12). If a point is set, the chance of repeating it before a 7 is 3/9 for a 4 or 10, 4/10 for a 5 or 9 and 5/11 for a 6 or 8. Combine everything and the Pass Line wins 244 times out of 495 (49.29 percent); the gap is the 1.41 percent house edge. Don’t Pass is the mirror image except that the come-out 12 is a push rather than a win, which leaves the house 1.36 percent.

The odds bet pays the true odds of making each point (2 to 1, 3 to 2, 6 to 5), so its edge is zero. Every other bet pays less than its true odds: Place 6 pays 7 to 6 against true 6 to 5, hardways 9 to 1 or 7 to 1 against 10 to 1 and 8 to 1, Any 7 4 to 1 against 5 to 1. The shortfall is the edge.

To see where a figure comes from, take the Field: it wins on 16 of 36 outcomes and collects 18 units on them (the 2 and 12 pay double) against 20 units lost, an expected loss of 2/36 = 5.56 percent. These edges are per bet settled; bets that stay up for many rolls cost less per roll than one-roll bets with the same headline edge.

Craps Strategy

1. Pass Line plus maximum odds is the whole strategy

Every chip you move from the Pass Line to the odds behind it is played at zero house edge. A 25 Pass bet with 75 in odds is 100 chips of action at about 0.47 percent, against 1.41 percent on a flat 100 Pass bet. Want more action? Raise the odds, not the line bet. Our table caps odds at 3x; many live casinos offer 3-4-5x or more.

2. If you must bet a number, bet the 6 and 8

Place 6 and Place 8 cost 1.52 percent because 7 to 6 is only a little under the true 6 to 5. Place 5 and 9 (4.00 percent) and 4 and 10 (6.67 percent) are far worse. Bet the 6 and 8 in multiples of 6 chips (30 works with our chip sizes) so the payout comes out whole; on 25 the game rounds 29.17 down to 29.

3. Stay out of the center of the table

Any 7, Any Craps and the hardways are proposition bets with edges of 9 to 17 percent, among the worst in any casino. A 5-chip Any 7 every roll costs 0.83 chips per roll on average; a 100-chip Pass bet costs 1.41 chips per decision, which usually takes three or four rolls.

4. Do not hedge

Protecting a Pass Line bet with Any Craps on the come-out, or with Any 7 during the point, is just a second bet with a bigger edge than the one it protects. Hedging always costs more than it saves over time.

5. Don’t Pass is fine, but only slightly better

Don’t Pass (1.36 percent) edges out Pass (1.41 percent). Don’t bettors win slowly, since the come-out is 8 to 3 against them, and in a live casino they win when the whole table groans. Here there is no social cost, so play whichever side you like; the difference over a session is a few chips.

6. Size bets to the bankroll

With 1,000 chips a 25-chip Pass bet gives you 40 units, enough to ride out a cold streak. A 100 line bet with 300 in odds is a 400-chip decision, and two seven-outs remove most of the bankroll. Keep each line-plus-odds decision under 10 percent of what you have.

7. Ignore streaks

Dice have no memory. A shooter who has made four points in a row is exactly as likely to seven-out on the next roll (6 in 36) as one who has just picked up the dice. Pressing bets after wins changes your variance, not your expectation.

Common Mistakes

• Betting the Field because “most numbers win.” Seven totals win but they are the rare ones; the four losers (5, 6, 7, 8) cover 20 of 36 outcomes.
• Leaving the odds off. It is the only free bet in the casino. Take it whenever you can afford it.
• Placing the 4 and 10. 9 to 5 is a long way below the true 2 to 1. If you love the 4, take odds on it as a point instead.
• Assuming hardways are off on the come-out. In our game they always work; in most casinos they are off on the come-out unless you call them on.

Variants and House Rules

• Field paying 3 to 1 on the 12 (or the 2) cuts the Field edge from 5.56 to 2.78 percent. Our game pays 2 to 1 on both, the version most often printed on layouts.
• Odds limits of 2x, 3-4-5x, 10x or even 100x; the higher the limit, the lower the combined edge (3-4-5x brings Pass plus full odds to 0.37 percent). We use a flat 3x.
• Come and Don’t Come are Pass and Don’t Pass bets made after a point is set, mathematically identical to the line bets; they are not on our layout.
• Big 6 and Big 8 are place bets paying only even money (9.09 percent edge) and have vanished from many layouts.
• Crapless craps turns 2, 3, 11 and 12 into points and raises the Pass Line edge to about 5.4 percent.
• Street craps is played without a layout, players covering each other’s bets, often with the shooter obliged to bet the Pass side.

If you like the table but want something faster, Ship Captain Crew and Shut the Box are classic cup-and-dice pub games, and Left Center Right is the party version of betting on how dice fall.

Glossary

• Shooter: The player rolling the dice.
• Come-out roll: The first roll of a hand, made with the puck OFF.
• Natural / Craps: A come-out roll of 7 or 11 / of 2, 3 or 12.
• Point: The number (4, 5, 6, 8, 9 or 10) set by the come-out roll.
• Puck: The marker showing OFF (come-out) or ON with the point number.
• Seven-out: Rolling a 7 while a point is on, ending the hand.
• Odds / free odds: A bet behind the Pass Line paid at true odds with no house edge.
• Place bet: A bet that a specific number will roll before a 7.
• Hardway: A 4, 6, 8 or 10 rolled as a pair (2-2, 3-3, 4-4, 5-5); the “easy way” is the same total with different dice.
• Breakage: The fraction of a chip a casino rounds off when paying odd amounts.

Play Craps Online on Dice.now

The game at the top of this page is free play with virtual chips only. You start with a 1,000-chip bankroll, there is no real money, no account and no download, and your best bankroll is saved only on your device. Pick a chip size (5, 25 or 100) and click a bet to add chips to it; Clear bets takes back everything that is not a line contract. The puck shows OFF or ON with the point. Pass and Don’t Pass open only on the come-out; Pass Odds (up to 3x) and place bets open once a point is set; the Field, Any 7, Any Craps and the four hardways are always available. Every bet settles on every roll exactly as in the payout table above, the roll history shows recent totals color-coded by result, and the payout log explains each settlement. If your bankroll runs out, Play Again resets it to 1,000. Ready to shoot? Roll the dice.