Game Within A Game… Profiting FromYour Come Out CyclePart I

For the past five or six years, I’ve been treating the Come-Out portion of my hands as a profit-center that is separate and distinct from the point-cycle portion of the same hand.

The “Come-Out” is the PRE-point-establishing part of the hand, while the “Point-Cycle” is the POST-point-establishing part of it.

The Come-Out phase of our hand is traditionally used to establish the PL-Point that you then try to repeat before the 7-Out shows up to end your hand.

Many savvy players have long known that it can also be used to spawn a fair bit of profit all on its own, and that’s what we’re going to take a serious look at in this series.  I call it my “Game Within A Game” approach to Come-Out profit.

Using The Come-Out As a Profit-Center

If you can use your dice-influencing skills to earn a profit before you even establish the Passline-Point, then it substantially increases your chances of coming away from that hand with more tied-to-current-skill revenue.

By efficiently utilizing the Come-Out as a “Game Within A Game” profit-center, your overall profit-making efficiency stands an excellent likelihood of improving too.

The most obvious way to extract an instant profit off of your Passline Come-Out rolls is with a 7 or 11 winner; therefore many players specifically set for those two numbers. 

In and of itself, that’s not a bad approach.  A C-O win on the 7 or 11 pays even-money (1:1) for your line bet, and if you can deliver up multiple C-O 7’s and 11’s, then it makes for a pretty decent return on your line-bet investment.

• A random-roller has a 22% chance of hitting either a 7 or 11 on any given throw.  His 8-out-of-36 chances to throw an instant winner means that he’ll likely throw a different, non-instant-winner, about 78% of the time.
• For example, he’ll throw a craps number (2, 3, or 12) about 11% of the time (based on 4-out-of-36 random outcomes), and a box-number (4, 5, 6, 8, 9 or 10) the other 66.6% of the time.
• In other words, the random roller will throw an instant 7 or 11 C-O winner slightly more than one-fifth of the time; a PL craps-loser one-tenth of the time, and a Point-establishing box-number about two-thirds of the time.

Increasing Your 7-Winner Rate

Each of the dice-arrangements sets that we are discussing today offer something a little different from the next, and before you blindly jump into adopting any of these sets, it is CRITICAL that you do your own research into which set produces the best results for you and your current skill-set. 

Many people find that a 7-dominant axial set like the A-7, S-6 or P-6 fills the bill in terms of producing more Come-Out 7’s. 

For example:

• The All-Sevens (a permutated Hardway-set where all of the on-axis faces are set to 7) arrangement throws off the most C-O 7’s when kept on-axis without the offsetting effect of C-O Craps (2, 3, and 12) losers.
• Although the Straight-Sixes (S-6) and Parallel-Sixes (P-6) set both throw off as many on-axis 7’s as the A-7 arrangement, they also contain a disturbing number of C-O craps-losers. 
• For someone who keeps the dice on-axis a majority of the time but isn’t planning on any prop-wagers on the Horn; then the S-6 and P-6 sets aren’t all that attractive.

Take a look at this on-axis outcome-distribution chart to see for yourself:

Even though each of these sets has four on-axis 7’s, it’s the OTHER outcomes that can make or break your Come-Out betting strategy.

I want you to focus in on the on-axis outcome-distributions for the All-Sevens set in particular.

• The All-7’s doesn’t have any on-axis PL-losing Come-Out 2’s, 3’s, or 12’s.  Equally though, it doesn’t have any C-O 11 winners either. 
•  When you compare the four randomly-expected Craps-loser outcomes (one 2, two 3’s and one 12) against the two possible Yo-11 winners that you’d see in a randomly-expected distribution of results; and compare it against the A-7 which doesn’t have ANY of them on-axis (no 11’s, but also no 2’s, 3’s or 12’s); then it’s clear that the 2:1 trade-off (four craps-losers for every two Yo-11 winners) is well worth it. 
•  By “giving up” two possible on-axis Yo-11 winners, you also dispose of four on-axis craps-number losers.  To my mind, that’s a fair trade to make when we are talking about even-money payoffs for PL flat-bet winners and losers. 
•  To make that trade-off even more worthwhile, you also get four on-axis 7’s which is what made us look at the A-7 set as a way to increase our C-O 7 win-rate in the first place.

Like I said though, you have to do your own homework to determine which dice-set works best with your current skill-set.

A Pre-Session Indicator of Primary-Face Outcomes

One of our chief objectives in dice-influencing is to keep the dice on-axis.  Within that objective, is the additional goal of having the dice end up on one of the four primary-faces that we first set them on prior to our toss.

Now obviously they aren’t going to end up that way all of the time or even a majority of the time, but it’s a good idea to determine just how often they do wind up on their primary-faces in order to gauge the effectiveness of some of our betting plans.

In the scenario that we discussed above, you are hoping to throw more Come-Out 7’s, and so we set the dice in the A-7 arrangement.  If the primary-faces show up more than their 4-out-of-36 (1 primary-hit out of every 9 throws) random-expectancy; then setting them this way may be valid.  Now clearly this is an extremely primitive way of looking at your dice-influencing abilities, but it is also a quick and dirty way to do a speedy practice-session evaluation right before you head out to the real-world tables.

You could use either the All-Sevens dice arrangement or even the Hardways-set in their traditional pip setup to do this rapid assessment.  The objective is to do a quick makeshift roll-appraisal without using any roll-tracking software or any long-form evaluation.  You just want to get a rough idea of how tuned-in your on-axis and primary-face shooting is.

So, if you are throwing more than 1-in-9 intentional primary-face 7’s with the A-7 set or more than 1-in-9 primary-face Hardways with the HW-set; then it may be indicative that your right-here, right-now dice-influencing talents are where you want them to be in order to make some of the bets we are contemplating here today.

Again, this is a purely unscientific approach, but it will give you a good indication of how grooved-in your shooting is at this very moment.  Besides, a pre-session warm-up is always a good idea when you are planning to put your money in harms way.

Set Re-Arrangement Often Means Profit Re-Invigoration

Let me give you an example of how you might re-arrange a given dice-set so that it more closely matches the specific outcomes that you are looking for. 

In Part One of my Craps Tournaments…The Basics and Beyond series, we looked at how a modestly skilled player can set and shoot for one particular number.  In that example it was done to win a free entry into the LV Hilton’s $100,000 Craps Tournament, but you can also apply this to your current betting regimen and make it part of your own Game Within A Game” Come-Out approach.

Now obviously you have to determine where your best or most dominant facial-outcomes are derived from and set the dice that way.  For example, if you throw a lot of primary-face outcomes and you’ve learned to control the number of double-pitch outcomes; then arranging the targeted-outcomes (the ones you want to show up) on those four primary-faces makes a ton of sense.  But before you do that, you have to figure out what amount of influence you are imparting to the dice.  

That is, the more influence you can exert, the more profit-making opportunity you will get in return. It is also true though, that the less influence you are able to consistently impart, the less revenue-earning prospects that you will enjoy.

The Ace-Deuce/Yo-11 Angle

Suppose you want to extract a little more profit from your Come-Out rolls than the even-money (1:1) payout that your flat line-bet pays on the 7 or 11.   A good candidate for that would be the Ace-Deuce and Yo combination.

The Ace-Deuce (3) and Yo (11) each have two outcome-combination ways that they can be made (1/2, 2/1, 5/6, and 6/5).  Traditionally, each of those two numbers has a 1-in-18 chance of randomly appearing, but our objective in this exercise is to make them appear significantly more often than that.

We start with the Straight-Sixes (S-6) dice-set, but we permutate (transpose) it so that the top-faces are 6/5 and the near-faces are set as 5/6.   This gives you two primary-face outcomes as 11 and the other two primary-face results as 3 (2/1 and 1/2).

This can be a very powerful C-O Prop-bet if you make a $1 bet straight-up on both the Ace-Deuce (3-craps) and the Yo-11.

Now some gaming authors call these “Crazy Crapper” bets and say that any skilled shooter who wagers on them must be completely out of their mind.  Let’s see if those guys even have a clue about what they are talking about.

Let me give you an assumptive example for three different levels of on-axis proficiency:

Even a 50% on-axis shooter is able to kick the crap out of the house-edge on both the 3 and the 11.

It is what you do with your actual edge, which means the difference between seized opportunities or squandered advantage and earned profit or unnecessary loss. 

Again, your on-axis efficiency does not even have to come close to the theoretical 100% efficiency to make a given dice-set work. 

Even mediocre axial control delivers up usably bettable and tangibly profitable results. 

• For the 55% O/A shooter with a 20% edge over both the 3 and 11 as well as the 2 and 12; the S-6 that is permutated as was outlined above, is a Horn-bettors delight. 
• On the Come-Out you could also make this into a World-bet instead of the Horn since the 7 is also expected to show up 21.5% of the time.  That “little” 4.83% difference-from-random for the 7 actually represents an increased expectancy-rate of 29% (28.9742% to be exact).  So if you are seeing nearly 30% more 7’s; you’ll probably want to do something about that, wagering-wise.
•  But even if you only want to deploy $2 to cover the Ace-Deuce and the Yo-11; this would make for a very compelling and profitable wager EVEN FOR A MODESTLY SKILLED 50% on-axis shooter.  A 12.5% player edge is not something to be sneered at…at least not by anyone who wants to convert their shooting-skill into ascertainable profit.

Like I said, some gaming authors call these “Crazy Crapper” bets.  It looks to me like either they haven’t got a clue about what they are writing about, or their own shooting and what they are teaching their students is so flawed and so close to random, that their own shooting hardly ever puts them in a position of being truly skilled. If that is the case, then I can certainly understand why they warn their own students and even their own “certified” instructors to stay away from bets like this. 

If you don’t have a validated skill and you are unable to influence the dice in any meaningful way, then you too are definitely well advised to stay away from these so-called bad bets.   On the other hand, if you do have a validated edge, then you might want to consider how crazy you would be if you DIDN’T take proper advantage of your skill.

Next Time

Obviously we’ve only just started to scratch the surface of utilizing the Come-Out sequence as your own personal profit-center.  There is much, much more to cover.

Coming up, we are going to explore just how many rolls you should expect to have within the C-O sequence.  Not only will the numbers surprise you, but we’ll look at several ways to actually extend the average number of rolls-per-Come-Out that you can weave your dice-influencing magic on.

Further to that, we’re going to explore all kinds of betting options that are tied not only to different dice-sets but also different on-axis efficiencies. 

The objective of this series is to show every shooter, from the barely-beyond-random 45% O/A novice to the +60% O/A semi-pro, just how to exploit their talents and maximize their profits during the Come-Out phase of their hands.

I hope you’ll join me for that.

Until then,

Good Luck & Good Skill at the Tables…and in Life.

Sincerely,

The Mad Professor