How to play craps
Craps is played with two dice and a betting layout that looks, to a first-time visitor, like it needs a manual just to stand at. The core of the game is much smaller than the table suggests, and everything else on the felt is optional.
A round begins with the come-out roll. If it lands on 7 or 11, pass line bets win outright and a new come-out roll follows. If it lands on 2, 3 or 12 (“craps”), pass line bets lose and a new come-out roll follows. Any other number (4, 5, 6, 8, 9 or 10) becomes “the point”, and the shooter keeps rolling until either that same number comes up again (pass line wins) or a 7 comes up first (pass line loses, and the dice pass to the next shooter).
You do not need to be the shooter to play; anyone at the table can bet on the outcome of someone else’s roll, which is most of what happens at a busy table. The shooter rolls, but the betting layout is shared by everyone standing there.
Once a point is set, a second kind of bet becomes available: the odds bet, placed behind your pass or don’t pass wager, which pays true mathematical odds with no house edge attached at all. It is the single best bet available anywhere in a casino, and it exists only as a top-up to a bet you have already made.
Come and don’t come bets work identically to pass and don’t pass, except they can be placed at any point during a shooter’s turn rather than only on the come-out roll. A come bet placed mid-roll treats the very next roll as its own personal come-out: 7 or 11 wins immediately, 2, 3 or 12 loses immediately, and anything else becomes that bet’s own point, tracked separately on the layout with its own odds available behind it. A single shooter can leave you with several come bets running against several different point numbers at once.
The layout and every bet on the table
Craps has more bet types than any other game covered on this site, and the spread between the best and worst of them is enormous.
| Bet | Payout | House edge |
|---|---|---|
| Pass line | 1:1 | 1.41% |
| Don’t pass | 1:1 | 1.36% |
| Pass/don’t pass + odds (3-4-5x) | True odds (no edge) | 0.37% combined |
| Come / don’t come | 1:1 | 1.41% / 1.36% |
| Place 6 or 8 | 7:6 | 1.52% |
| Place 5 or 9 | 7:5 | 4.00% |
| Place 4 or 10 | 9:5 | 6.67% |
| Field | 1:1 (2:1 on 2 and 12) | 5.56% |
| Any seven | 4:1 | 16.67% |
| Any craps (2, 3, 12) | 7:1 | 11.11% |
| Hardways (4, 6, 8, 10) | 7:1 to 9:1 | 9.09% to 11.11% |
The pattern is consistent across the whole table: the closer a bet’s payout matches its true probability, the lower its house edge. Odds bets pay exactly true odds and carry none at all. Everything crammed into the middle of the layout, the proposition bets a stickman calls out between rolls, pays noticeably less than true odds and carries the worst edges on the table.
Best bets for craps
Craps does not have a decision chart the way blackjack or video poker does, because most of the game is a single choice made once per shooter: pass or don’t pass, then how much odds to add behind it. The chart above sets out where each bet sits by house edge, and the shape of it is the whole strategy: everything you need is clustered at the low-edge end, and everything to avoid is clustered at the high-edge end with brighter markings and better stickman patter.
The practical version of “strategy” here is sequencing: place a pass or don’t pass bet before the come-out roll, wait for a point to be established, then add the maximum odds the table allows. A table offering 3-4-5x odds (3x on 4/10, 4x on 5/9, 5x on 6/8) lets you put considerably more money behind the free-odds bet than the flat pass-line bet itself, which is deliberate: it is the mechanism by which the blended house edge on the whole wager drops from 1.41% down toward 0.37%.
Place bets on 6 and 8 are a reasonable secondary option if you want more numbers working without waiting for a new point, since 6 and 8 come up more often than any number except 7. Everything else on the layout, the field, the proposition bets, the hardways, trades a bigger number on the payout for a house edge several times worse, and is best treated as entertainment rather than value.
The mistakes that cost the most
Skipping the odds bet is the single most expensive mistake in craps, because it is the only bet in the building with zero house edge and it is easy to miss entirely if nobody at the table mentions it. A pass-line bet alone costs 1.41%; the same bet backed with maximum odds can fall below 0.5% combined, for no change in the bet you were already going to make.
Betting the field because it looks generous, seven numbers win and only four lose, is the second. The four losing numbers (5, 6, 7, 8) are the four most commonly rolled totals on two dice, which is exactly why the bet’s 5.56% house edge is worse than pass line despite the apparent coverage.
Chasing proposition bets for the big single-roll payout is the third. Any seven at 4:1 sounds tempting next to a 1:1 pass-line bet, but seven is rolled more often than any other number, and the 16.67% house edge reflects that mismatch between payout and probability directly.
Betting place 4 or place 10 instead of using odds on the same numbers is the fourth. Both bets let you wager that 4 or 10 will repeat before a 7, but the place bet’s payout (9:5) is worse than the odds bet’s true payout (2:1) on the identical proposition, purely because the casino sets place-bet payouts a notch below fair value.
Not knowing the table minimum for odds bets before sitting down is the fifth, and a purely practical one. Some tables require odds bets in fixed increments that do not divide evenly into a small pass-line bet: a €5 pass line bet at 3-4-5x odds on a point of 5 calls for a €20 odds bet (4x), a real jump in money on the table for a player working with a modest bankroll. Know the multiplier and the minimum unit before deciding your pass-line stake, not after the point is already set.
Variants and rule differences to watch for
Standard, or “Vegas”, craps with 3-4-5x odds available is the version referenced throughout this page and the one to look for by name in a casino’s game list; the odds multiplier is usually stated directly in the game title or rules screen.
Some tables cap odds at a flat multiple, commonly 1x, 2x or 3x regardless of the point number, which raises the blended house edge compared with 3-4-5x tables. A table offering only 1x odds still beats no odds at all, but nowhere near as much as the higher multiples do.
Bank craps and crapless craps are less common variants; crapless craps removes the come-out losses on 2, 3 and 12 by turning them into points instead, which sounds player-friendly but actually raises the house edge because 2 and 12 are much harder points to make than the standard 6, 7 or 8. Treat any variant with an unfamiliar name as one to check the house edge on before betting seriously.
High Point Craps and Simplified Craps, occasionally seen on smaller online catalogues, cut the number of bet types down to pass line and not much else, which is a reasonable way to learn the come-out and point mechanic but usually carries a slightly higher edge than standard craps with full odds available. If a version is described as “simplified” or “quick”, check whether it offers odds bets at all before assuming it is a shortcut to the same game.
Playing craps online in Ireland
Craps appears far less often online than blackjack or roulette, and where it does, it is almost always an RNG table rather than live-dealer, since a physical craps table’s dice, stickman and rail of players are difficult to replicate over a video stream. The rules and payouts on an RNG craps table match a physical table exactly.
Among the partner casinos on this site, LeoVegas and 888casino both list RNG craps in their table-games sections, and Betway carries a smaller selection; check each casino’s table-games lobby directly, since craps titles are often filed under a general “dice” or “specialty” category rather than alongside blackjack and roulette. Slotbox is reviewed on this site without a partner link.
Since the Gambling Regulation Act 2024, a €10 maximum stake and €3,000 maximum win apply to certain casino-style games once an operator holds an Irish gambling licence; those licences are expected from 2027, so today’s table limits on MGA- and UKGC-licensed sites are set by the operator rather than by Irish law.
What an hour of craps actually costs
At the pass line’s 1.41% house edge, a €10 bet rolled roughly 40 times an hour (the typical pace of a lively physical or streamed table) costs, on average, about €5.64 an hour. Add maximum 3-4-5x odds and the blended edge on the whole wager falls to around 0.37%, cutting the same session’s average cost to roughly €1.48 an hour for a larger total amount at risk on the table.
Compare that with a field-bet-heavy session at the same €10 stake and pace: a 5.56% edge works out to about €22.24 an hour, four times worse than a plain pass-line bet and more than fifteen times worse than pass line backed with full odds. The bet you choose within craps changes the outcome far more than in most other casino games, because the spread between best and worst bets is so wide. Model your own numbers on the house edge calculator before setting a stake for a session.
None of this guarantees anything about a single evening at the table, since a hot shooter can run a point for what feels like forever and a cold one can seven-out immediately, but the odds bet’s zero edge is the closest thing to a mathematical certainty a craps table offers.
A practical bankroll rule for craps follows directly from the odds structure: size the flat pass-line bet to what you can comfortably back with maximum odds, not to the biggest number you can afford on its own. A player with €100 to spend on a session is usually better placing €5 on the pass line with €20 behind it in odds (a total of €25 at risk per point, at a blended edge near 0.37%) than putting the full €25 on the pass line alone at 1.41% with no odds to back it, since the odds portion carries none of the house’s cut at all.