Building a Strategy: Overview

Simply playing a strategy you read in a book or saw on YouTube isn't good enough. You need work with it, know it inside and out, and what its designed for, or you're going to get pummeled

Why

It's important to have 100% confidence in your strategies and to really know where they are strongest and weakest. It'll help you to determine which strategy is right for every situation, shooter, trend and table.

Some strategies are great at lower limit tables (Regressions), but are tough at a high limit table unless you have a huge bankroll. So, have a few well practiced strategies in your pocket.

There's lots of strategies out there, well documented. Here's some criteria you can use to not only evaluate them, but to build your own from scratch, or based on one you've seen elsewhere.

What

What is a strategy?

Unlike other table games, where strategy is pretty much done by following a prescribed plan or memorized card, Craps (and to an extent, Roulette) requires a bit more nuance to fully create a strategy designed to win.

The Hallmarks of a Great Craps Strategy

1. Wins more often than it loses No strategy can win 100% of the time (house edge ensures that)

2. Strong against short rolls (<4) 80% of rolls are only 4 numbers after the point. Just 2.7-3.25 of those are box numbers!

3. Profits on long rolls

4. Responds well to trends

5. Is tuned for a given type of shooter: random rhythm controlled yourself

6. Has a specific goal, purpose, and play type: grind party short game going big

7. Has a win goal

The 3 Major Components of a Craps Strategy

1. Coverage: What numbers/scenarios are you betting on There are common ones: Inside, Outside, Across, Iron Cross, Field Using Math or Trends

2. Exposure: How can you get beat? Depth, Length, Width, Can you shift exposure elsewhere? Can/Should you hedge?

3. Spread: How much are you betting Minimum, 2x, Greens, Blacks What are you going out with, per-shooter

4. How will you handle your wins Collect? Press? Spread?

These are independent vectors or axes of variability. You can apply the same collect/press strategy to any numbers you're betting on. You can always bet the same numbers but do different things with the profits, etc.

Testing your strategies

1. Test your strategy on a single shooter only.

2. Test the chip movement, using "if this, then that" given all scenarios

3. Identify Strengths and Weaknesses, filling holes where you can

Base Testing a Strategy

• Use and Re-Use the same "golden" set of the most common rolls

Live and Scale Testing

• Get on your table and roll it out with 100+ hands

• Write a WinCraps script and run it over 100,000 rolls

Video