by hedging it with
a $5 Any Craps, here’s what happens. On the
Come-Out roll, the 7 or 11 will win the $25 Pass
Line player $25, but he will lose $5 on the Any
Craps. How often will he win on the Pass Line? Eight
times in 36 rolls for a win of $200 minus $40 for
the losses on Any Craps. Now, he is up $160.
However, what if he hits the Any Craps? He wins
seven times his $5 bet for a win of $35! He’ll
do this four times every 36 Come-Out rolls for a
total of $140. But he lost $25 on each of those
four rolls, so his net profit was only $40. Still,
he’s ahead of the game at this point because
he won $160 on the Come-Out 7s and 11s, and he won
$40 on the Any Craps. He’s ahead an impressive
$200.
What if he had not protected his bet? Why he would
have won $200 but lost $100 when the 2, 3, and 12
rolled. He’d have only been up $100. But by
hedging, he is up $200, not $100. Great!
If the game stopped there, it would be great indeed.
But craps doesn’t stop there. You see, every
time the shooter establishes his point -- the numbers
4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 -- our hedger loses his $5. And
the shooter will establish his point 24 times. That’s
a loss of $120 for the point numbers. Our player
who hedges on the Come-Out roll -- where he has
a two-to-one edge over the house, and where he would
be up $100 after the 36 Come-Out rolls on average
-- is now up only $80. And that is $20 less than
he would have won had he not “protected”
his Pass Line bet and just let it stand out there
alone.
So hedging on the “Do” side of the board
is a don’t, and you can use the same kind of
analysis for all possible hedges at craps, and the
result will be the same -- you’ll actually
lose more by trying to protect otherwise good bets
with otherwise bad bets.
The Any Craps is a
bad bet because it has a house edge of 11.11 percent,
whereas the Pass Line bet only faces a small 1.41
percent house edge. A bad bet cannot protect a good
bet.
Good
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