Playing Against Tournament Teams

Casino games tournaments are fun, and they can be profitable too. In upcoming articles, we will continue to publish a series of excerpts from Stanford Wong’s book, Casino Tournament Strategy.

Suppose you look around the craps tournament table and see people who you think may be playing together. Is there any strategy they can use to get an extra advantage over you? The answer is yes: As soon as one of them gets ahead of you by even as little as a dollar, that person can match your bets to stay ahead of you. If that person does manage to match every bet you make, the best you can hope for is second place; you have no chance to be BR1. That is not a comfortable situation to be in.

If half the players on the final table play together as a team, they can almost certainly capture first prize — they will not win it every time but they will win it considerably more often than if they played independently — if their opponents do not know how to defend against them.

If you make small bets until a competing team member gets ahead of you and starts matching your bets, you are reduced to making bets that hopefully that person will not be able to match. You will be making or changing bets at the last instant, and you will be making bets you otherwise would prefer not to make. You and your opponent will be switching bets back and forth constantly and holding up the game, which does not make dealers and supervisors happy.

A much better defense, if you think you are up against a team, is to take the offensive. Go all-in early, get ahead of all members of the team, and stay ahead. Correlate with whichever team member is the most serious threat.

A team does not have an edge over you if you play in this manner. Sure you will bust out frequently, but you will win your share of tournaments the same as if the team members played individually. But if you do not play aggressively, the team will win more than its share and you will win less than your share.

Casino Comportment

You have a big edge in crap tournaments when you play against people who are not tournament experts. It would be nice to see those people come back for future crap tournaments. So do what you can to help them enjoy themselves in this tournament. Before the session, smile and say “Hello.” After the session, listen sympathetically to their hard-luck stories and refrain from criticizing their play. During the session, make your bets quickly. Root for the dice shooter even if you are betting on the don’t side. When you lose, smile and congratulate the victors. When you win, smile and act as if it is all luck.

When you are correlating to stay ahead of someone, do it subtly. Act as if you are making a bet because you think the bet will win. Make your opponent feel complimented that you are taking advice on where to bet. As you bet $100 in the field to approximately match your most serious opponent’s $150 field bet, you might say some nonsense like: “You are right; a field roll is due.” Unless your lead is tiny, do not match an opponent precisely bet for bet, because, as silly as it sounds, doing so might make that person unhappy.

The result should be that your opponents like you. If you advance and they do not, and they root for you to win again on the next round, you have done a good job on casino comportment.

Bets Off Instead of Down

Here is a sneaky ploy you cannot use very often because it is at odds with what you should be trying to do in comportment. Suppose you had some place bets working and now you do not want action on them anymore.

You do not have to take the place bets down and put the chips in the rack; you can simply tell the dealer you want your bets off until you say they are back on. When you do this, the dealer marks your bets with a little button saying “off.” Now when the dice roll, your bets do not win and do not lose. If your opponents are not alert, they might not notice that your place bets are not in danger of being lost, and they might not realize you will beat them if the next roll is a 7. Some crapshooters do not know that bets can be on the layout but not at risk.

Likewise, watch your opponent’s place bets and if any of them are off, treat those bets as if the opponent had those chips in the rack.

Crap tournament strategy is complicated because it depends on so many things: the house rules, the skill of your opponents, position of you and your most serious competitors at the table, how many chips each competitor has, and so forth. You may face situations that are slightly different from any discussed here. One of the many things to keep in mind in such a situation is that generally you do not have a lock. You are simply trying to grab as many of the 36 possible rolls of the dice as you can. You have generally got to give your opponents a chance to beat you; accept that. Do not think in terms of making the perfect play; think in terms of making a play that gives you a good chance to win.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you are up against tournament experts and deciding whether to make a bet, you generally are better off betting your money than keeping it in the rack. Against people who are not tournament experts, you generally are better off assuming they will keep their established betting patterns.

This article is part of a series, to be continued…

Excerpted with permission from Casino Tournament Strategy by Stanford Wong, edited for this format.