Those who are serious about craps probably have looked at charts detailing the house edge on the pass line as the amount of free odds permitted increases. With no odds bet, the house has a 1.41 percent edge on pass. That drops to 0.8 percent with single odds, 0.6 percent with double odds, on down to 0.3 percent at 5x odds, 0.2 percent at 10x and a miniscule 0.02 percent at 100x odds.
The more odds are permitted, the smaller the house edge on the pass-odds combination gets. However, the house edge can never disappear entirely. That’s because we’re really talking about two separate bets here. They’re interdependent because you can’t make an odds bet except in backing a pass or come, or don’t pass or don’t come wager, but they’re still two bets.
No matter how much you have on the table in odds, you’re bucking a 1.41 percent house edge on pass. On the odds portion of your combination, the house edge is zero. With more odds, the house edge on the combination decreases because an increasing portion of your total wager is on that zero-edge bet.
But for every $100 worth of pass bets you make with no free odds on the table, the expectation is that you’d lose an average of $1.41. And for every $100 worth of pass bets you make with $10,000 in odds on the table — 100x odds — you’d lose $1.41.
You can water down the effect of that house edge as you shift larger portions of your bet into the odds, but you can never eliminate it entirely.
