Returning from my first trip to Las Vegas, I can now make several important observations.  The fifth is this:

Play Craps

Craps turns out to be an excellent game for those who don’t ordinarily care to gamble — especially at The Mirage in the morning, when they have $5 limit tables for every sort of game.

My only prior gambling experience has been at Monopoly penny slots in Central City, Colorado.  While a spin for “20 lines” costs only 20¢, odds are good that you’ll win something.  Interactive bonus games appear occasionally, usually awarding $20 or $30 at a time for a single 20¢ investment.  I usually start with $20 in the machine and leave after a few hours with nothing, thus buying myself hours of entertainment for less than a movie and popcorn.

Being in Vegas for the first time, though, I wanted to try some table games.  Movie characters in need of money are always rushing their life savings to the roulette wheel, where they put it all on “red,” and I wanted to try it out.  At roulette, I won $10 on “black” and then immediately lost it on “even.”  It’s fun if you win, but there’s no strategy to it.

Blackjack is all strategy.  My girlfriend and I each won about $30, but found the game more methodical than exciting.  Where we really got hooked was at craps: there’s constant action, but you can make your money last as long as you want.

Put a $5 chip on the “Pass Line” and it’s possible you’ll win or lose on a single roll — 7 or 11 to win; 2, 3, or 12 to lose.  It’s much more likely that some other number will come up, and that’s when the game really gets going.  The shooter (whoever has the dice) will try to roll the same number again before rolling a 7.  No other numbers matter.  While the shooter rolls perhaps dozens of times, your $5 chip just sits there, neither winning nor losing.

Experienced players can place a lot of other bets while waiting around for that outcome.  You might bet on “the field” — that a 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, or 12 will come up on the very next roll.  A win pays even money.  You could also make a bet with higher odds.  Bet that a 7 will come up next, and if it does you’ll win 4 to 1.  As in any game, there are good bets and bad bets.  Craps even boasts one of the only bets in Vegas with no house advantage.

What I like best about it is that everyone at the table is betting on the same throw of the dice.  While we were betting the minimum $5, the man beside us was making the same bet for $50 at a time.  At the other end of the table was a man plopping $100 chips all over the table.

While I was shooting at one point, he called for $100 on “hard 6” — betting that I’d roll a pair of 3s (that’s “6 the hard way”) before rolling some other type of 6 or rolling a 7.  And I did!  I won $5 on that roll.  He won over $1,000.  It was at that point that I started getting $50 tips — the tips from other players far exceeding what I was winning from the casino.

It’s possible to gamble stupidly and lose a lot of money all at once — as we now know from experience — but it’s also possible to play quite conservatively for hours at a time.  I liked to win a little money from the casino, and then bet that money on some longer odds.  That way losing would leave me no worse off, but a win would pay a huge sum.

We still played some Monopoly after that, sometimes winning more at the penny slots than we did at the tables, but the excitement of throwing a pair of dice down the table and making everyone money on the outcome won me over entirely.