Online Craps in Canada: The Best and Worst Bets

Craps looks chaotic from the outside: a crowded layout, a dozen simultaneous wagers, and a vocabulary that seems designed to keep newcomers away from the table. It is in fact one of the most mathematically transparent games in the casino, and anyone playing online craps in Canada can reduce it to a short list of decisions. A handful of wagers carry a house edge of well under two percent. Most of the rest sit between five and seventeen percent. The gap between playing craps well and playing it badly is wider than in almost any other casino game, and it depends entirely on which parts of the layout you use.

How a round of craps works

The come-out roll

Every round opens with a come-out roll. If the shooter rolls 7 or 11, a pass line bet wins immediately. If the shooter rolls 2, 3 or 12, known as craps, the pass line loses. Anything else, meaning 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 or 10, becomes the point.

Chasing the point

Once a point is established the shooter keeps rolling. The pass line now wins if that point number appears again before a 7 does. If the 7 arrives first, the round ends, the pass line loses, and the dice pass on. That ending is called sevening out, and it explains why the game revolves around the seven: there are six ways to make it with two dice, more than any other total, which makes it the single most likely result on any roll.

That is the entire structure. Everything else on the felt is an optional side wager layered on top of it, and the quality of those side wagers varies enormously.

The low-edge core: pass, don't pass, come and don't come

Four bets do nearly all the useful work. The pass line carries a house edge of about 1.41 percent and follows the sequence described above. The don't pass bet is its mirror image, winning when the pass line loses, with one adjustment: a 12 on the come-out is a push rather than a win, which is how the casino keeps its margin. Its edge is roughly 1.36 percent, marginally the better of the two.

The come and don't come bets work identically but start mid-round. Place a come bet while a point is active and the next roll acts as a fresh come-out for that wager alone, establishing its own number. The edges match their counterparts at 1.41 and 1.36 percent, and come bets are how experienced players get more money onto the table without touching anything expensive.

Those figures deserve context. A single-zero roulette wheel runs at about 2.70 percent and the double-zero version at 5.26 percent, so a pass line wager is meaningfully cheaper than a straight-up number in our guide to online roulette. Craps, played on the line only, is among the least costly games on any Canadian casino site.

Free odds: the only zero-edge bet in the building

Once a point is established, you may back your pass line bet with an additional wager called free odds. It pays at true mathematical odds with no house margin taken at all: 2 to 1 on a point of 4 or 10, 3 to 2 on 5 or 9, and 6 to 5 on 6 or 8. The house edge on that portion of your money is exactly zero.

The catch is that odds cannot be bet on their own. They only sit behind a line bet that does carry an edge, so what they really do is spread that fixed cost across a larger stake. A pass line bet alone runs at 1.41 percent. Backed with single odds the combined figure falls to roughly 0.85 percent; at double odds around 0.61 percent; under the common 3-4-5 times structure about 0.37 percent; and at ten times odds roughly 0.18 percent.

One honest qualification: a lower percentage on a larger stake does not mean a smaller loss in dollars. Backing a ten dollar line bet with twenty dollars of odds puts thirty dollars at risk per decision rather than ten. Odds are the right tool for a player who wants to stake more, not a way to make a fixed budget cheaper.

Place bets on 6 and 8: the sensible middle ground

Place bets let you wager directly on a number appearing before the next 7, without waiting for the come-out sequence. Only two are worth considering. Place 6 and place 8 pay 7 to 6 and carry a house edge of about 1.52 percent, close enough to the line bets to be entirely defensible.

The others fall away quickly. Place 5 and place 9 run at 4.00 percent. Place 4 and place 10 cost 6.67 percent, worse than double-zero roulette. Buying the 4 or 10 with a five percent commission improves matters to roughly 4.76 percent, but neither version approaches the six and eight.

A complete strategy therefore looks like this: a pass line or don't pass bet, backed with as much free odds as your bankroll comfortably allows, plus one or two come bets, and optionally the 6 and 8 placed. Nothing else on the layout improves on it.

The bets to avoid, and what they cost

The centre of the table is where the margin lives. These are the wagers the game is designed to sell you.

• Any seven — about 16.67 percent. The worst bet in mainstream casino gaming, and most often placed by players who have just watched a seven-out.
• Big 6 and Big 8 — about 9.09 percent, paying even money on exactly the outcome that place 6 and place 8 cover at 1.52 percent.
• Hardways — roughly 9.09 percent on hard 6 and hard 8, and about 11.11 percent on hard 4 and hard 10.
• Any craps — around 11.11 percent, with the individual 2 and 12 wagers at roughly 13.89 percent each.
• The field — this one varies by table, which is why the paytable matters. Where both 2 and 12 pay double, the edge is about 5.56 percent. Where one pays triple, it drops to roughly 2.78 percent. The layouts look nearly identical, so check first.
• Horn, whirl and other proposition combinations — generally around 12 percent. Bundles of bad bets sold as one.

The scale of the difference is easy to miss. Five dollars on the pass line costs about seven cents per decision in expectation. Five dollars on any seven costs about eighty-three cents, every roll.

RNG versus live dealer online craps in Canada

Canadian players meet the game in two forms. RNG craps is software: a generator resolves each roll, you play alone, and the pace is set by how fast you press the button. Live dealer craps is streamed from a studio with a real table and crew, and in most versions an automated or dealer-thrown shooter rather than a rotating player shooter.

The house edges are identical; the cost per hour is not. A live table might resolve thirty to fifty line decisions an hour once the dealer has called the roll, paid the winners and collected the losers. An RNG table can move three or four times faster, because nothing waits on anyone. Same game, same edge, several times the hourly exposure. Craps still sits well behind slots and blackjack in our roundup of the most searched online casino games in Canada, but availability has improved, and both formats now appear at Ontario-regulated sites as well as across the offshore market.

Turning the edge into an hourly cost

House edge is a percentage of money wagered, so the only way to make it real is to multiply by how much you actually put through. Take a ten dollar pass line bet with double odds: a combined edge of roughly 0.61 percent on an average stake of thirty dollars, or about eighteen cents per resolved bet. At forty decisions an hour on a live table, that is roughly seven dollars. Push the same play through an RNG table at a hundred and fifty decisions an hour and it climbs past twenty-five. Neither figure is alarming, and both compare well with a slot session. Now run five dollars on any seven at that same pace and the expected cost passes a hundred and twenty dollars an hour. Bet selection matters far more than stake size.

Bankroll and table minimums online

Craps demands more of a bankroll than its low edge suggests, because a full strategy involves several live wagers at once. A line bet with double odds plus two come bets, each also backed with odds, can put five or six times the table minimum in play. Online minimums are far friendlier than a land-based pit, often starting around a dollar on RNG tables and a few dollars on live ones, which is what makes the approach practical on a recreational budget.

Two practical checks. Confirm the maximum odds multiple the table allows, since it is the specification that most affects your combined edge. And if you play on a phone, make sure the layout is usable at that size; craps has more bet zones than any other table game, and cramped implementations lead to misplaced chips. Our list of the best mobile casinos in Canada is a reasonable starting point if most of your play happens away from a desktop.

Dice control and systems do not apply here

The claim that a skilled shooter can influence dice outcomes is contested even in land-based casinos. Online it is not applicable at all. In RNG craps there are no dice and no physics, only a generator producing results within a fixed distribution, and in live dealer craps the throw is automated or handled by the house.

Betting progressions fare no better. Doubling after a loss, pressing after a win and every variation on the theme reorganise when your money is at risk without altering the edge on any individual wager. A 1.41 percent bet stays a 1.41 percent bet whether you stake it flat or in an escalating pattern. What progressions do change is variance, and steep ones concentrate the risk of a large, fast loss.

The bottom line

Craps rewards discipline more visibly than most games. Stay on the line, take odds to the extent your bankroll allows, add come bets and the 6 and 8 if you want more action, and leave the centre of the table alone. Played that way it is cheaper per dollar wagered than roulette and most slots. Played across the proposition bets it is one of the most expensive things you can do with a chip. If you are weighing up where craps sits alongside the alternatives, our wider casino games guide sets out the comparable numbers for the rest of the floor.

You must be 19+ (18+ in some provinces) to gamble in Canada. If gambling stops being fun, free confidential help is available in every province.