Lost 3000$ on craps

Hello,
I was playing craps in a Las Vegas casino. I sarted playing on the pass line with $50, and nothing else, not even odds. I was counting how many times the pass line is a winner and how many times a looser. When i was loosing 10 rolls more then winnig, i increased my pass line bet to $75. I was continuing counting and i was continuing loosing. I was down now 20 rolls so i increased my pass line bet to $100. I played on a $100 pass line bet until i lost all my money. In the end i counted 200 rolls where the pass line wins or looses and i ended up with 80 wins for the pass line and 120 losers. And i was down $3000. Can somebody please tell me what are the odds of this happening and is there any point in continuing playing that way.
Thank you very much

Winning 80 points or less out of 200 is about 1 in 195. Not crazy unlikely. Sucks to hear that you pressed your bets and it didn't turn around.

How much you were betting is irrelevant to the probability of incurring that $$$ loss, so let's focus on 80 wins for 120 losses.

Fortunately this is a simple binomial distribution, with the right tools, this is extremely easy to learn to do by yourself:

http://vassarstats.net/binomialX.html

If we plug in 200 trials (n) with a result of 80 wins (k) with a probability of winning of .4929 (p) and a probability of losing .5071 (q) also 1-.4929 = .5071, the we see that the probability of winning eighty times, or less, is:

0.005158533247

Which means that you would, in 200 bets, experience results this bad or worse:

1/0.005158533247 = 1 in 193.854 times.

You ran like crap, to be sure, but hardly to a staggering extent.

If this is a betting system that you have chosen to employ in the hopes of recouping your losses once you get behind, then no, there is no point in doing that. The Pass Line bet in Craps is a negative expectation bet, so you are certain to lose in the long run. Whether or not you wish to play Craps is a simple question of fun v. risk, so if you would like to play, the best way to play is to bet as little as you can (while still being entertained) on the Pass Line or the Don't Pass Line.

I consider taking/laying odds optional. The House Edge on Odds bets is zero, so while they decrease the house edge on the game relative to your total amount of $$$ in action, they do not decrease the House Edge on the Line bets themselves. They do add Variance (which means that you're more likely to win or lose x$ faster the more you take/lay in odds.)

Tough break. Question: had you made any bets on the place numbers (4, 5, 6, 8, 9 10) do you think you would have done better? I ask this because I've been at tables when few passes are made but shooters will hit "numbers" for ten minutes or longer.

I had a similar turn with the dice some months ago: I established the point of 6 and went on to roll numbers for about 25 minutes and never made the point. While I lost my $10 passline bet with full odds ($50), I put hundreds of dollars in my rail by hitting numbers and pressing.

No bets on the numbers. I was playing pass line and pass line only. Usually i start with $50 on pass line or don't pass and if i win 10 times more than i lose i change the line, i start betting on $50 on the opposite line and i wait until they even them self up because mathematically out of 200 rolls you should have around 98 wins on both lines. So i am just waiting for one line to start winning more than the other and then i start playing the line which is supposed to catch up.
Sometimes i play Don't pass with $50 and i quickly win $500 and then i switch to a $50 pass line and wait until the pass line catches up to the don't pass and i walk away with $800-$900. And using this system i have won more money then lost but i have played it maybe for 12-14 sessions. And the last time i lost the $3000 which i thought that would be enough to hold on any bad luck.

There is no 'supposed to' catch up. Not how it works. If you are running 30 - 62 pass/no pass... you know what will happen on the next 100 rolls? No, neither do I.... but it will most likely be around 50 pass, 50 no pass. That makes it 80-112. The ratio is closer to 50-50. The absolute values are not.

Quote: deyanm

No bets on the numbers. I was playing pass line and pass line only. Usually i start with $50 on pass line or don't pass and if i win 10 times more than i lose i change the line, i start betting on $50 on the opposite line and i wait until they even them self up because mathematically out of 200 rolls you should have around 98 wins on both lines. So i am just waiting for one line to start winning more than the other and then i start playing the line which is supposed to catch up.
Sometimes i play Don't pass with $50 and i quickly win $500 and then i switch to a $50 pass line and wait until the pass line catches up to the don't pass and i walk away with $800-$900. And using this system i have won more money then lost but i have played it maybe for 12-14 sessions. And the last time i lost the $3000 which i thought that would be enough to hold on any bad luck.

Just curious....You have a system where you ussully win $800 or $900. Did you think that this system would keep working forever? I'll assume you didn't and you are just curious how bad you ran.

Quote: deyanm

When i was loosing 10 rolls more then winnig, i increased my pass line bet to $75. I was continuing counting and i was continuing loosing. I was down now 20 rolls so i increased my pass line bet to $100. I played on a $100 pass line bet until i lost all my money.
...
is there any point in continuing playing that way.

If what you're doing is losing, increasing your bet helps you lose faster.

If your actions do not produce the results you intend, do something different, rather than doing more of the same.

it's the old story, the dice do not know what the trend was and can't help you

"the dice have no memory" is usually how it is put

sometimes a guy will still be convinced that if God is in his heaven and the laws of the universe are going to work, then the dice will be commanded to make certain rolls to eliminate a streak of some sort, surely, otherwise next thing you know gravity fails, objects start floating around, and all hell breaks loose.

The way the dice normalize things though is to just do their thing blindly. Somebody recently put it this way: the anomaly you observed just decreases in significance the same way throwing a gallon of fresh water into the ocean fails to measurably decrease the salinity. The gallon of water did exist, and the prediction that the ocean's salinity would be the same was correct, but the ocean was not commanded to make amends in order to do this.

Quote: deyanm

I was playing craps in a Las Vegas casino. I sarted playing on the pass line with $50, and nothing else, not even odds.

This system wouldn't work for either side.

If you were going to bet that way, why bet the side with the highest house edge?