The Basics Of Online Craps
The history of craps has been traced back to the Crusades to a dice game called Hazard. However, the game as it is played today was developed by the French and called craupad. This means toad and it refers to the crouching posture taken by players who rolled the craps dice on the streets.
At land casinos craps is perhaps the only game in which players participate by rolling the dice in turns. Though online casino craps has some dice throwing animation, it does not capture the boisterous action of the land casino game because you play alone against the house.
Highlights & Main Points
- Craps is one of the few dice gambling games at online casinos and only one standard variant is on offer.
- There are many different types of bets available in online craps and some important classifications are single roll versus multi-roll and right bets versus wrong bets.
- The bets have average returns varying from less than 90% to over 98% and therefore it is essential that you pick only those with high average returns.
- Some of the bets that have high average return are Pass Line, Come and Place and their corresponding wrong bets.
Top 3 Dutch Online Casinos for 2024
Online Craps variants
Online casinos offer only one variant in craps. This is because only one version is played at land casinos. The variety in online craps comes through the large number of bets on offer. Some of these are explained here. Single roll bets are decided immediately on that roll itself. Multi-roll bets are carried forward over a number of rolls till one of the desired outcomes occurs. Another way of classifying craps bets is right bets and wrong bets. Right bets win when a specified event takes place. Wrong bets win if that event does not take place. Most outcomes in online craps are the total of the two numbers shown on the up face of the dice. Some outcomes are the combination of the numbers.
Many of our featured Dutch online casinos offer another dice based casino game called Sic Bo. This gambling game of Chinese origin is played with three dice. Sic Bo is much simpler than online craps without any multi-roll bets.
How to play online Craps
When you load online craps the screen will display half the layout of the land casino craps table. The other half is a mirror image and therefore not displayed. The layout marks different locations for the different online craps bets and your bets have to be placed at these locations only. After you place your bets the dice are rolled for the first time in the session. This is called a come out roll. All single roll bets are settled depending on the outcome of the come out roll. For the multi-roll bets, the total of the dice numbers of the come out roll is established as the point. The dice are rolled again and again till you get the point or seven. These two outcomes will resolve the multi-roll bets one way or the other.
What makes online craps a somewhat complicated casino game is that after the come out roll you can place fresh single roll and multi-roll bets even before the earlier multi-roll bets are settled. Several sessions will run at the same time, each having its own point. When a point is rolled all bets related to that point will be decided. However, when a seven is rolled all existing bets will be decided.
Online Craps strategy
The outcome of the dice rolled in online craps is totally random. So there is no skill involved in that respect. But there is strategy involved in bet selection, because different bets in online craps offer different average returns. So you have to know the average returns for the different craps bets and avoid bets having low average returns. It is possible to calculate the average returns mathematically, but it is much simpler to read the information from existing craps literature. We explain here two craps bets that are worth playing.
Easily the best bet in online craps is Pass Line. The bet has to be placed before a come out roll. The bet will immediately win if the roll is 7 or 11 and will lose if the roll is 2, 3 or 12. If any other number is rolled then that number is established as a point. Then the Pass Line bet will win if the point is rolled again before a 7 and lose if a 7 is rolled before the point. The bet pays even money and has an average return of 98.6%. The wrong bet corresponding to Pass line is Don’t Pass.
The Place bet is wagered after the come out roll on the point established. If that point is rolled before a 7 then the Place bet wins, but if a 7 is rolled before the point then the Place bet loses. The Place bets for different points have different average returns. The ones you should look at are Place bets on 6 and 8, which have an average return of 98.5%.
Advantages and disadvantages of online Craps
The main advantage of online craps is that there are a few select bets like Pass Line and Place that offer high average returns of about 98.5% without the player having to learn any strategic decision making. The flip side is that these bets have low payouts. Some of the other bets that offer high payouts have very low average returns.
Two other slight disadvantages are that there is only one variant of online craps and the multi-roll bets are complex in structure.