Lay Bets in Craps for Easy, High-Payout Wagers

It goes without saying that craps is a difficult game to learn how to play if you don’t know the shortcuts to doing it quickly, and it’s not unreasonable for it to be a confusing game for new players. Thankfully there are ways to learn how to play craps without having to give up a huge advantage to the house and without having to learn overly-complicated wagers that seem to contradict each other at every turn. We have an easy bet for you here that has a low volatility that will allow you to get in on the action right away.

When you place a lay bet, you’re essentially betting that a seven will come before another specific number. That number can be four, five, six, eight, nine or ten. You’ll essentially be making a bet at fair odds minus a small commission of five percent when you win. However, this does not translate to a house advantage of five percent, and the house advantage will be less than 0.7 percent no matter which number you choose to bet against. The odds are slightly different for each of the possible numbers, but we’ll show you how to pick them.

The closer a number is to seven, the easier it is to roll. A six and eight have the same chance of being rolled, for example. The same goes for five and nine along with four and ten. This creates three pairs of numbers with the same house advantage on this bet. Essentially you’re going to win if a seven comes, lose if the number you’re betting against comes, and push on every other possible total. This means you’ll have to wait several rolls for your bet to resolve, and it’s a lot of fun because it builds anticipation for the result and breaks up the monotony that some games can have.

Betting against either a six or an eight with a lay bet has a house advantage of 0.69 percent. That becomes 0.56 percent if you’re betting against a five or nine, and it drops a little more to 0.42 percent when you’re betting against a four or ten. The trade-off is that the volatility is somewhat higher for the lay bets that have the lower house advantage, so you can choose whichever of the three matches up the most with what you want in a wager.