Craps is a game of negative expectations. Mathematically, the best way to manage your bankroll in a game of negative expectations is not to play. Otherwise, you will eventually lose all of your money. Most people want to know what their bankroll needs to be to win a particular game. That is the wrong question even when you are playing a game where you have a positive expectation. The real question is what type of bankroll do you need to minimize the chances of going bust? The goal is advantageously to avoid bankruptcy before your long-term positive expectations become a reality. For recreational gamers, the goal is to stay in action long enough to have fun. It’s no fun,

The biggest mistake you can make in a game of chance is to gamble with the rental money. Whether or not you have an advantage, you shouldn’t be risking money that you may need for something else. It would be crazy to be evicted from your apartment for losing the rent money at the craps table. Even if you are a profit player, like a card counter or a poker player, you must put money aside for the sole purpose of gambling. Anything can happen in the short term, including going broke if you have an advantage.

The classic money management advice for any casino player is to stop while you are in front. This is impossible to do unless you decide how far ahead you are in advance. If you want to avoid going broke you need to know how much money you want to lose before you quit. The problem with most money management advocates is that they are trying to give you the impression that you are somehow changing the odds of winning and / or losing with this technique. The reality is that stop loss limits and profit targets do not change the underlying probabilities of the game. They can help you manage your money in the short term, but you won’t make a winner in the long run if you can gauge how much money you lose per hour by multiplying your hourly action by the house edge. And your hourly promotion is just the product of your average bet size and the number of bets you make per hour. The average craps player can make 30 pass line bets per hour at $ 5 per bet. That’s $ 150 an hour. The house edge for a Pass Line bet is 1.41%, which is your expected loss per hour.

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