Golden Touch CRAPS

I thought I had answered just about every gaming question in my career. I was wrong. Here’s a letter I received:

Dear Frank:

I just retired at the age of sixty five and I get sixty-six thousand dollars a year in retirement. I have a half million dollars in the bank. My house is paid off. I am on Medicare. My wife passed away several years ago. I live in New Jersey just thirty minutes from Atlantic City.

Here is what I want to know. I love playing craps and, don’t laugh at me, I want to play every day, 365 days a year and I mean that.

I like to Place the 6 and 8 and I usually do this for $60 each when I have played in the past.

So what will I need to have in the bank to play every day just the way I want to?

Sincerely,

William S.

Dear William:

Yours is a tough question. I wouldn’t want you to take your five hundred thousand and blow it in a mad orgy of daily play. You might need that money when you get much older. So let us say that you take one-hundred thousand and make that your initial starting bankroll. That will leave you with four-hundred thousand for real life as opposed to casino life.

Put that money in a separate money-market checking account that gets you interest. You will also take a certain amount from your retirement, say $500 per month, and put that in your account on a monthly basis. This adding to your 401G ("G" means gambling) is to cover some of your yearly losses.

Assuming you are not playing with an advantage as a controlled shooter, then we have to use the house advantage on the bets you are going to make to establish what your expected loss is every year. And playing every day can assure you of losses just about every year.

Let’s take a look. If you Place the 6 and 8 for $60 each, you are putting $120 on the felt with the house edge at 1.52 percent – we can combine these bets into "one bet" for this discussion. You can expect to lose $1.82 each time you make these bets. Let’s assume 108 rolls per hour. Since the 6/8 will occur 30 times per 108 decisions, and the 7 will appear 18 times, you will be in on 48 decisions per hour, wagering a total of $5760 per day and your daily expected loss will be approximately $87.55.

Now here comes the killer number. You can expect to lose – hold your breath – $31,955.75 in one year.

If you were to take $500 per month out of your retirement funds, you have a total of $106 in your gambling account that first year which we now minus $31,955.75 from. That gives us, meaning you, $74,044.25 left at the end of your first year of play. You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to realize that in about four years you have probably lost all your bankroll and your playing days might be over.

So you are going to have to scale down your 6 and 8 place betting or say goodbye to your dream. It’s your choice. How much should you go down to play every day? Make $12 six and eight bets. That’s $24 per decision which equals about 36 cents every time you place the bets. Take 48 decisions per hour, total bet $1,728, with an expected loss of $26.27 per day. Now multiply 365 days and your yearly loss is approximately $9,588.55. This gives you somewhat more than 11 years of play.

If you expect to live longer than 75 years, and I hope you do, then consider just making a single 6 or 8 bet at $12, or look for five-dollar tables, which are hard to find in Atlantic City, and make the 6 and 8 for six dollars each.

If you wish to play every day, this is the economic reality that you face. If you play half as much time (every other day), then you can cut your losses in half.

I realize that at $60 on the 6 and 8 you are in the "somewhat" high roller category in terms of comps but you will have to reduce your expectation in that area too. Many players have no idea how even small house edges, and the edges on those 6s and 8s are small, can hack away at their bankrolls with long-term play.

I do wish you good fortune in your future playing career. Just keep your head on your shoulders!

All the best in and out of the casinos!

Frank Scoblete

Frank Scoblete, #1 best-selling gaming author, is director of Golden Touch advantage-play seminars in dice-control and blackjack. Websites: www.goldentouchcraps.com and www.scoblete.com.