Craps with odds beats blackjack, and costs you more
Backed with full odds, craps is the cheapest table game in the casino measured per unit wagered. Measured per hour at the same stake it is more expensive than blackjack, and taking the odds changes that hourly figure by nothing at all.
The claim, and the arithmetic under it
Once a point is established at craps you may back your line bet with a second wager behind it. That bet, free odds, pays what the point is actually worth: 2:1 on 4 and 10, 3:2 on 5 and 9, 6:5 on 6 and 8. Because it pays true odds, its expectation is zero, and nothing else on a casino floor can say that.
The pass line itself costs 7/495, or 1.4141%. Adding odds does not change that. What it changes is the size of the denominator: the same expected loss now sits on top of a larger total wager, so the cost per unit of action falls.
| Bet | Exact edge | Per unit wagered |
|---|---|---|
| Craps, pass line alone | 7/495 | 1.4141% |
| Craps, pass line with 3-4-5× odds | 7/1870 | 0.3743% |
| Craps, pass line with 10× odds | 7/3795 | 0.1845% |
| Blackjack, standard rules, played correctly | – | 0.5150% |
So the headline holds. A 3-4-5× craps table, backed every time, is a cheaper game per dollar wagered than blackjack played perfectly, and a 10× table is not close.
Now measure it the way you actually lose money
Nobody spends an evening wagering one dollar. They spend an evening at a stake, for a number of hours, and what leaves the wallet is the expected loss per hour. That figure is set by the line bet and the speed of the game, and the odds bet touches neither.
| Game at $25 a bet | Decisions an hour | Total wagered | Expected loss an hour |
|---|---|---|---|
| Craps, pass line alone | ~30 | $750 | $10.61 |
| Craps, pass line with 3-4-5× odds | ~30 | $2,833 | $10.61 |
| Blackjack | ~70 | $1,750 | $9.01 |
Read the middle row twice. Taking full odds nearly quadrupled the money put through the table and moved the expected loss by zero. The percentage fell because the denominator grew, not because the casino took less.
What the odds bet is actually for
It is not a discount. It is the only way to get money onto a casino table at a fair price, and that is worth knowing for a specific reason: if you want more action, backing the line is free, while every other route to more action costs between 1.41% and 16.67% depending on which craps bet you reach for.
The corollary is the part the advice columns skip. If you want to lose less, the lever is the line bet, not the odds. Halving the stake and backing it fully halves the hourly cost. Keeping the stake and backing it fully changes nothing except the variance, which grows sharply, because a $25 line bet with 3-4-5× odds puts an average of $94.44 at risk each time a point is established.
Why the comparison flatters craps anyway
Blackjack's 0.515% assumes you play every hand correctly, which is a real assumption: the figure decays with every departure from basic strategy, and it is not hard to give back a percentage point through ordinary table instinct. Craps asks nothing of you at all. The pass line has no decisions in it, so 1.4141% is what a beginner pays and what a veteran pays.
Against that, blackjack's number moves with the rules on the felt in ways that dwarf the difference here. 6:5 blackjack costs 1.39 percentage points, which puts that table at nearly 1.9% and makes the comparison a rout. Hitting soft 17 costs 0.22. Surrender, the one rule that pays the player, gives back 0.08.
Which produces a more useful ranking than "craps or blackjack": a 3:2 blackjack table and a craps table with real odds are both cheap, a 6:5 blackjack table is expensive, and the sign outside the pit tells you which one you are looking at long before the game does.
Both figures are computed on this site rather than quoted. The craps values come from an exact walk of the 36 dice outcomes and are stated as fractions because they are fractions; the blackjack figure comes from a full dealer-outcome computation over a standard rule set. The hourly table uses 30 line decisions and 70 blackjack hands an hour, which are ordinary observed rates rather than computed ones, and your table will differ.