Craps - My First Time

Boy do I love the game of craps. I thought I'd share my first time as a virgin shooter getting broken in. Fortunately I'm not broke yet despite this negative odded vice. My first time was in Las Vegas at the Golden Nugget. I was relaxing with a friend roaming around Vegas for my first time. THey have this beautiful mega nugget on display. Worth a pretty penny at least =D There was a craps table by the bar area and my friend went to have a drink. I decided to give craps a try before we were to leave Vegas. It was a $5 table, completely packed except for spot 2 left from the croupier. I bought in for $50 never having played a single roll before. My hands were sweaty and the excitement of the table was mixed. Across from my area I could see another packed table, with people shouting and cheering. My table was a bit more mellow at first with shooters unable to hit their points. When I was ready, I made the simplest of bets. Passline for $5, no odds. At first, the rolls were bit of a grind up and down and even until the dice came to me. I chose a pair that seemed lucky enough to me. Proceeding to roll, I twirled the dice in my hands feeling the sharp edges and worn out sides. I threw them as hard as I could to the end of the table. YOOOO-ELEVEN!!! Pay the line!!! Eyes remained sleepy as players casually collected their winnings. I of course, thought nice! Great way to start off this table game. Not knowing what I was doing as the dice were shoved to me, I threw them at the backboard as hard as I could. The dice bounced off of chips and finally landed......SEVEN!!! Winner! Take the Don'ts and Pay the line!! Heart racing, palms sweating, I was thinking I might actually get use to this. Crap check, field bets, get'em in dices out! I picked the dice up and tossed them again so violently that one of the cubes bounced off a patron and back on the table for a SEVEN!!! Winner Seven!!! The crowd cheered "shooter's hot shooter's hot". Reactions from the pit were nothing more than passively stoic. I followed up and made a 6 or 8 point before sevening out on the next point.

All in all, I was up about $25 by the time I left the table. Oh craps how I love thee so.

Satan definitely works it out so you have beginner's luck, to suck you in. In all these games. [g]

My first time playing craps was a little less exciting. I don't remember when it was, but it was quite a long time ago. A buddy of mine were in Las Vegas. I can't remember which hotel we were staying in. We were walking around in the middle of the day in the casino and passed by a craps table. It was empty. My friend asked if I knew how to play, and I responded that I didn't. The dealers overheard us, and one of them invited us over, stating he would teach us how to play. We figured, why not, we weren't doing anything anyway.

They proceeded to explain things, and eventually got us to bet what I now know is the "iron cross". The dealer explained this was the best and easiest way to play craps since every number was covered. My pal and I played for a little over an hour maybe, and we were both up about $50 each. Fun game!

Later that night, the same craps table was about half full of people. We decided to join in, played our great new craps system, and promptly loss a few hundred each. Man did we hate this game!

I stayed away from craps for years after that. Until I discovered this site and learned more about the game.

I remember my first craps game...after watching and reading up on for months i decided to jump in and won $136 placing the 6,8 and pass line with single odds. Little did i know I would have made a ton of money if i would have know more about come bets and taking maximum odds! I thought thought that I had found an ATM....but that soon changed. I don't think its possible to recover all the money i have lost at craps over the years....short of winning the lottery!

The first time I played craps, it was a $1 game, with 2x odds...I actually played that game for a couple years before moving on to $5 games...
Truthfully, I had one of my best hands on a $2 game...freakin 2 hours long, and I was only playing $2 with 3/4/5x odds! (JUST the PL bet!!)
Imagine my suprise when I only made ~$300 when everyone else on the table made in the THOUSANDS. (Table max was $100)

My first experience with craps was at the imperial palace I had read books about the game and knew the basics. Anyways, back when the table limits were $2 i arrived at the table and a woman was rolling lets just say my two-dollar pass line with two dollar odds soon turned into $20 pass line with $40 odds so when she sevened out the dice were passed to a guy next to me and he proceeded to wave them by and i decided to follow suit and that gal proceeded to have another good roll before sevening out. And guess what both that gentlemen and i passed the dice again but she waved her hand begging not to throw again. I proceeded to cash out and i didn't leave a tip for the dealers and the pit boss shouted out to me "don't come back here again".

My sister and brother-in-law met me at Caesars where I was a SLOTS player. Not even video poker. Just SLOTS.

And they said "let's go play craps."

There were two tables open. Both at $10. (this was a long time ago.) But one table had no players, and my brother-in-law said to the boxman (yes, this was a long time ago) "can you make it $5??" "Sure," said the boxman as he passed new "minimum bet cards" to the base dealers. (remember this was a long time ago.)

I bought in for $20 and got four red chips.

My brother in law says, Alan, you throw the dice first. I got my lesson -- one hand, hit the back wall. And that's what I did with $5 on the passline.

About 20 minutes later I am still throwing the dice. I still have my $5 on passline, but I also have about $30 more in the rail from passes, and the table is now full and my sister and brother in law have a full rack of red chips.

So I am stick right and say to the stickman, "why does everyone have so much money and I only have this?" (About $50.)
"Because they are betting the numbers."
"What's the numbers?" I asked.

I kept shooting for another half hour, cashed out with $350. My borther in law and sister cashed out nearly two grand.

That's how you get hooked.

Played my first time at the Aladdin in Las Vegas for my 21st birthday trip in 2004. My 2 friends and I were basically walking the strip, drinking, and playing every different game we could. We walked up to a pretty empty table and watched for about 5 minutes. I decide to buy in for $20. $5 passline. I established a point and hit it the very next roll. I come out again and establish a new point. Dealer suggests taking $10 odds. Had no idea what that meant but I did it and hit my point. Sweet! come out again and this time dealer tells me to take $20 odds. What do you know I hit it. Established another point and then hit a 7. But I made about $30 bucks and had a great time. It took a few more trips for me to really understand the rules but now it's my favorite game.

I first played craps at Turning Stone Casino in Verona, NY. They had just opened, and we would make the 1.5 hour drive to get up there every 6 months or so. Back then BJ was all I played, but I was getting bored with the game, and I wanted to know why all those people were yelling and high fiving all the time. Man they were having a good time, and I wanted in on it. I'm also pretty quick with math and all these odd payout amounts intrigued me.

So, I grabbed the craps pamphlet, studied it, and then proceeded to plays craps. Wow ! The game was SO FAST. I could barely track my passline bet, but I noticed the guy next to me was getting paid more than he bet when a 6 or 8 rolled. Hmmmm, that seems to be a better bet than what I am doing. So I did what he was doing. Threw money on the table and said 6 and 8. Played for about an hour, felt lost the whole time, and lost my meager buy-in. But the exhilaration I felt for that hour was intoxicating. I WAS ALIVE. But, I realized I needed to learn more about this game if I wanted to play it.

I sat down with pen and paper, and wrote down all of the dice combinations. That was when I noticed there were 6 ways to throw a SEVEN. Then I noticed there were 5 ways to throw a SIX and an EIGHT. Hey, I recognize those numbers! 6:5 is what I got paid on the passline odds when that was the point. Oh, so that's where the odds payouts are derived.
Now how about those pesky place numbers? Why in the world do I have to bet $6 on the 6 or 8, and why is that payout not the same as the odds bet? So 6:5 is the ratio they should be paying me on a 6, but they are giving me 7:6. That looks like a better deal than 6:5, but that can't be right........ Ah, now I see what they are doing. 36:30 is correct, and they are paying me 35:30 if I ask the dealer to put that $6 bet in that box on the table. Sneaky turds.

I then set about memorizing the payouts for the Place bets, and the odds bets. My next learning step happened when I got paid on a Place bet I had forgotten about. I finally got the nerve up to ask the dealer how he knew to pay me, when I had forgotten about it. He was nice and explained how he would position my bet on the table as it related to the position my chips were in on the rail. By locating my chips in a specific spot on the table, he always knew which bets were mine!

I don't recall when Buy bets came into play for me, but I do know WOO was where I really started learning the real math behind the different bets. For a while, I was suckered into the craps check on a come out roll, especially since I tend to throw a lot of craps numbers. But after a few sessions of doing that, it was easy to see I was spending more than I was ever recovering, so I had stopped well before WOO showed me the math on that bet.

So, unlike a lot of players who win the first time, and are sucked in by the lure of easy money, it was the math of Craps that sucked me in. I liked figuring out the payouts, and what bets to make to take advantage of the house rounding on Buy bets, what is the correct amount for a Place 6 over $100, etc.

Great stuff RaleighCraps. I too was interested in the hoopin and hollering goin on at the craps tables. I must have spent hrs. watching before I had enuf nerve to play. My first roll was a 6-pointer. 3 of them was the 5. I remember the guy next to me wasnt betting until I started to throw a 10 just about every 2 or 3 rolls. He had 4 black chips on that #. I proceded to throw it 3 more times on my roll. I was betting 5 on the passline with no odds(I had no clue what I was doing). I think I made 20 bucks on that roll( lol damn crappie #s), not counting the green chip given to me by the guy next to me.

Dang, I was hoping I had already posted my story on this thread! Well, here goes nothing...

January 2010; my 2nd trip to Vegas as an adult; in town for an Ultimate tournament. I had already lost about $600 playing really atrocious blackjack Saturday night/Sunday morning. I had no idea about basic strategy, was hitting 14s against a dealer 6 because, hey, he's got 16 to my 14, I need to beat him, right? Looking back I would like to kick myself.

Anyway, cut to early Monday morning around 1am and my friends/teammates had been playing board/card games and drinking up in the hotel room, and I was bored. (Not everyone on the trip gambled; some had already lost their bankroll for the trip.) I remember a friend telling me craps was a decent game in terms of your odds of winning. I searched "craps" on my phone and of course landed on the WOO page...skimmed it but really had no idea what was going on. Thankfully I found an empty table at the Trop (where we were staying) and the crew gave me some pointers. The most helpful dealer still worked there as of last October, but I can't remember his name to save my life right now.

I proceeded to double up $100 there, and then do the same thing or better at Hooters, Planet Hollywood, O'Shea's, and one other casino I still can't remember to this day (likely one of Paris/Bally's/Flamingo/Bill's based on my walking pattern). I know I played 5 casinos and ended up recovering my $600 in blackjack losses, playing all pass line + odds (not even max odds), no come bets, no middle bets, nothing. Most tables I was playing alone, it being early Monday morning in January. I remember the base dealer at O'Shea's saying that "her boss would fire her" or something to that extent after I had made several of my points and was about $100 up. At the time I didn't feel bad and just assumed she was fucking with me, but in retrospect and with more gambling experience now, I really have no idea what she was talking about or if she was trying to guilt trip me into a tip or something...even a sweat-the-money low-roller joint doesn't get too worried about a neophyte winning $100!

I didn't sleep at all that night, lots of Vodka/Red Bull. We had to check out that morning, and my flight didn't leave until afternoon, so it was a pretty jittery day for me. I played some more craps at Paris later that day, and broke even.

I guess I'll add mine, which is easy since I've mentioned it before:

When going to Ocean City Maryland to check out fishing charterboats with a couple of friends a some 20 almost 30 years ago, we decided to later hit a Casino in Atlantic City. One guy really wanted to go and actually made it sound one heck of a lot closer than it was; he was the only one who had experienced casino gambling and now I can see he really had an itch he needed to scratch. Unfortunately it never crossed his mind to tip the other two of us off that we really needed a little prep beforehand. It was a toss into the deep water, sink or swim, something that probably amused him. [I loved the guy, actually; he's passed away now].

We hit the Taj Mahal. I approached the Craps Tables with a minimum of information; this was before the internet [for me anyway]. I knew how to play Craps, but just that 7 or 11 won, 2,3 or 12 lost, and how the other numbers were resolved. And somehow I found out what the Passline was on a Craps Table, and that there were a ton of sucker bets to avoid. That was it! So I proceeded to pretend I knew what I was doing, knowing no etiquette whatsoever. Right away, of course, I get yelled at for doing stupid stuff like letting my hands hang down to the felt. Worse, when it was my turn to roll, I managed to let go of the dice twice to hear "No Dice!!" yelled out. First time, I threw them without making a bet. Next time, I'm thinking I have it all figured out and for extra good luck cupped the dice in my hands and let her go! Doh!

Somehow I managed to stay at the table without being asked to leave, determined to stay there and suffer through, realizing now I needed to have prepared for this! It wasn't long, though, before my friends wanted to leave anyway. Our experienced gambler, I now am betting, probably worked some betting system that busted his bankroll in record time at the BlackJack table, and for that matter we got there crazy late to begin with due to a bad estimate on travel time from that same guy.

I learned nothing about the bets in Craps I didnt already know. But I certainly found out I better learn some etiquette! About this time, I started using the internet. I may not have gambled at a Casino again till about 1996 or so. Eventually I came across the Wizard's site. Quite an eye opener! Free odds, imagine that!

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