Are Hardways Bets Good?
added 09.08.2011, 11:14PM
Once you start getting past the basic craps bets like pass line, come and don't come, you might stumble upon hardways bets. These wagers are pretty popular among both land-based and online craps players because they offer extremely high payouts.
And if you're wondering about the specifics of a hardways bet, this is a wager on 4, 6, 8, or 10, but the total must be rolled in pairs (i.e. 2-2, 3-3, 4-4, 5-5). So if you made a hard 4 bet, and the dice rolled 3-1, you wouldn't win your wager yet because both dice must show two. Assuming a 7 comes up before the 2-2 combination, you would lose the wager. Despite the strict requirements for hardways bets, many people continue to place these wagers quite frequently, which brings us to a very important question: are hardways bets worth making?
To answer this question, let's look at the house edges for all of the different hardways bets:
- For 4 and 10 hardways bets, the house edge is 11.1%.
- For 6 and 8 hardways bets, the house edge is 9.09%
As you can see, both the 6 and 8 hardways wagers offer the best chance of winning money over the long-term. However, the biggest issue here is that the hardways house edges are extremely high no matter what you pick. Sure the 7-1 (4/10 hardways) and 9-1 (6/8 hardways) payouts are nice, but what chance do you have of actually getting the payouts with such a high house edge?
In the end, you are much better off avoiding all hardways bets because of the extremely high house edge. Sure it might be exciting to chase such big payouts, but there are much more profitable wagers offered in the game of craps. For instance, pass line bets feature a lower house edge of 1.41%, while you can make the house edge even lower by backing pass line wagers with odds bets.
In any case, the key thing you should take away from all of this is that hardways bets aren't good in terms of your overall craps winning percentage.
