Craps Lore

If you’re visiting Las Vegas and staying in one of the more affluent hotels on the strip, we urge you to go down town to Glitter Gulch-or Freemont Street. We suggest you spend a little time playing blackjack or craps in the smaller hotels there. Here you’ll find all the locals betting minimum amounts and exchanging hard luck stories.

In essence it is a rich game of gambling information and gossip tossed around. If you decide join the elderly men with their cowboy hats and long droopy cigarettes you’re in for a treat. At night four blocks are covered by a gigantic domed ceiling containing a multitude of coloured lights light up the night sky. To say the least it is a memorable experience altogether…it’s Vegas Baby!

Binion’s Horseshoe Casino is the original site for the World Series of Poker (WSOP). It is also renowned for having no limits at its tables. The first bet you placed could form your limit. In theory you could place a $1,000,000 bet on a Blackjack table and it would become your limit.

Both players and staff at the casino are normally very superstitious when it comes to craps. In the old days in Vegas if a craps table was losing the casino a lot of money-the casino would suddenly close its doors for business. Dice which provided a hot roll for a player would be thrown away or crushed. There is even talk of one pitboss taking a hot pair of dice out into the desert, dug a little hole for them and then buried them. A Mafia method for getting rid of the dice…capische?

One down town casino even brought in a glass case to display a pair of craps dice that produced a winning streak of no fewer than 17 Points made in a row. It must have cost the casino a fortune and made some players rich beyond their wildest dreams. What a session it must have been for anyone slowly increasing their bets as the hot roll got going. After a couple of weeks the casino was astonished to find that the display case has been broken into and the dice removed. Long story short it turned out to be one of the casino’s shift managers. He hated those dice with a passion and they simply had to go!

There was also a case of a man who entered the Bellagio with $50,000 to play craps. During the course of 24 hours at the table he turned his original stake into $950,000. At this point in time he was exhausted. He then decided to continue playing until he reached a $1,000,000 so that he could tell his friends that he had beaten this new ultra-luxurious resort out of a million bucks. He played another 24 hours non-stop. Although he ended up $10,000 short of the one million mark he simply could not reach it. Eventually, unable to stand it any longer he left the casino with $850,000. When the man left he tipped each dealer $10,000. It remains one of the most amazing stories of a player playing craps at the Bellagio and beating the casino at its own game.