Play the Money, Not the Numbers

Unless you are playing Craps for entertainment only, your purpose is probably to win money. Becoming a serious gambler is serious business and is not for fools. But even serious gamblers are human and can become distracted. Using a variety of techniques, the casino does its best to distract you from focusing upon money. Craps has its own distractor: the wild, mesmerizing, improbable antics of the numbers.

How often have you seen the dice show amazing sequences of numbers? Their short-term ability to defy long-term probability continues to astound me, and after all my years I should have become immune to astonishment. I still must fight myself to avoid betting in response to numbers.

Money should be bet according to money flows, not numbers. When the money comes in from bets won, then more money may be bet. When money goes out due to bets lost, then less money should be bet. This precept is simple to understand, but when the numbers sing their siren songs it becomes easy to forget. How alluring Place bets become when the dice show several consecutive inside numbers! How tantalizing even the Proposition bets become when Yo appears five times in a row!

But the foundation of your game must be flat bets on Come and Pass, which have low volatility. Only after they have provided some money profit can additional volatility be added via Odds bets, which are made at least in part with new money. Only after still more money has been won from Odds bets should Place bets be added to the attack. Your attack must build within the context of a good shoot using money won during that shoot.

Enticing sequences of numbers can lure you into betting too aggressively using rail money rather than new money. Such is the doorway to eventual doom.



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