Craps: How to Play, the Real Odds and Where to Play Legally in the US

What craps is, and why the table gets so loud

Stand near a craps table for five minutes and you will hear it before you understand it. A dozen people cheer the same roll, groan at the same seven and trade chips faster than at any other game. The noise has a simple cause: most players bet on the same outcome, so the whole rail wins or loses together.

Craps is a game of two dice and 36 possible results, and every price on the table is built from those 36 pairs. One player throws, everyone else bets, and the shooter role moves around the table. The rules sound intricate because the layout carries more than twenty bets, but a first-timer only needs one of them.

That one is the Pass Line, and it happens to be among the cheapest bets in any casino. Learn it, add odds behind it and you are already playing craps the way experienced players do. Everything else on the felt is optional, and most of it is expensive, which is exactly what our guide to every craps bet spells out.

How to play craps in one hand

A hand starts with the come-out roll. If it is a 7 or 11, the Pass Line wins at once; a 2, 3 or 12 is craps and it loses. Any other total becomes the point, and the dealer moves a round puck onto that number with its ON side facing up so the whole table can see it.

Now the shooter keeps rolling until either the point comes back, which wins for the Pass Line, or a 7 appears, which loses it and ends the shooter’s turn. Rolls in between do not touch a Pass Line bet at all. When the hand ends, the dice pass to the next player and a new come-out begins.

That is the whole structure, and our step-by-step guide on how to play craps walks through buying chips, where to stand and what to say. If you want to see a single hand in slow motion, the page on the come-out roll and the point follows every roll and what it does to each bet.

The best way to learn is to play craps a few dozen hands for free. Use the table above: put a chip on the Pass Line, roll, and watch the puck and point as the hand develops. When a point is on, try a place bet on the 6 or 8 and notice that it stays up after it wins.

The crew around a casino craps table

A full-size craps casino table is run by four people. Two base dealers stand at the sides, take your cash, hand you chips and pay the bets in their half of the layout. The boxman sits between them, watches every payout and guards the chips. Opposite him the stickman pushes the dice and calls each roll.

The layout is printed twice, once for each end of the table, with the proposition bets in a single box in the middle. Stand anywhere along the rail, drop your cash on the felt rather than into a dealer’s hand, and ask for chips. The craps table layout guide names every box and what it pays.

Legal online craps, state by state

Seven states license online casinos. New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania and West Virginia are the big markets, and Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island have one or two operators each. Everywhere else in the US, offshore sites that accept Americans operate without a US license, and players have no regulator to turn to if a withdrawal stalls. We only list licensed sites.

Licensed sites offer two kinds of online craps. Computer-dealt games use a certified random number generator and let you play at your own speed from about a dollar a bet. Live-dealer craps streams a real table from a studio, with real dice and a bet timer. Both settle the Pass Line at the same even money.

To play online craps you need to be 21, open an account with your real details and be physically inside a licensed state when you place a bet. Our guide to online craps for real money covers the licensed operators, what to look for at each one and how to check a license on the regulator’s own website.

Checking a license takes a minute. Each regulator publishes its list of approved online casinos: the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, the Michigan Gaming Control Board and the West Virginia Lottery. If a site is not on the list for your state, it is not a legal place to play craps for money.

Craps variants you will run into

Walk through a modern casino and you may see three versions of the game. Bubble craps seals real dice under a glass dome and lets you play from a touchscreen seat, usually at a lower minimum. Crapless craps removes the losing come-out numbers but charges more for it. Card craps replaces the dice with cards where state law requires it.

Card craps deserves a word of its own. In California, state law keeps dice from deciding the outcome alone, so tribal casinos there use cards or a mix of cards and dice to produce the same totals. The bets and payouts look familiar, but always read the table’s own rules before you buy in.

The rules and the math change more than the look. Crapless craps raises the Pass Line edge from 1.41% to about 5.38%, while a fair bubble machine keeps the standard prices. Our overview of craps variants compares them side by side, and you can learn how to play bubble craps before trying one.

What the house edge means over a night of craps

A house edge is a long-run average, not a fee taken from each bet. On any single hand you win or lose the whole stake, and a good shooter can pay the table for twenty minutes. Over hundreds of decisions, though, the edge becomes the most reliable number in the room.

Take a $10 bettor at a busy table that decides about 30 Pass Line bets an hour. At 1.41% the expected cost is around $4 an hour, less than a drink at most Las Vegas casino bars. The same player betting $10 on Any Seven every roll would expect to lose about $160 over the same hour.

That gap is the single most useful thing to know before you play craps for money. It is also why we put the house edge next to every bet on the free table: select any bet and the price appears. Players who learn to read those numbers spend less and usually play longer.

Play craps responsibly

Craps moves quickly, and a fast table can play a hundred rolls an hour. Decide on a budget before you buy in, keep the money for the odds inside that budget and stop when it runs out. If gambling stops feeling like entertainment, our page on playing responsibly lists limits, self-exclusion and free, confidential help.