The $2-MILLION craps win at Caesars Palace

A friend of mine who is a dealer at Caesars Palace was anxious to tell me about the player who won $2-million in one session at Caesars Palace. I had heard about players winning as much as a million dollars before at Caesars but this was the first time I heard of a single player winning two million dollars.

Of course, since I've been around the game of craps for 20+ years I know not to immediately "swallow" reports of a player winning a million dollars or more. I know the game of craps and unlike a slot machine game like Megabucks where a $3 bet can win millions of dollars with a single bet or push of the button, to win big money at craps you have to bet big money.

The single biggest payoff in the game of craps is the Fire Bet which pays 1,000 to one and I don't know of any casino that allows more than a $10 Fire Bet which limits that payoff to $10,000. And Fire Bets are very difficult to make and it takes time to win that much money since the shooter must establish and then make all six "points" on the craps table -- the 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10. The highest paying "regular bet" on the table pays 30 to 1 if you bet that the shooter will throw aces (2) or boxcars (12) on the next throw of the dice.

Most bets on the craps table pay about two to one or three to one or even less.

So when I hear that someone won a million dollars or two million dollars in a single session my first question is "what the heck was he betting?"

Well, as you might expect and as I expected, the big winner was betting big. In fact, I was told that at any one time, for any one roll of the dice, he had as much as $160,000 in "working bets" on the table.

But even with that much money on the table it took him a while to win $2-million.

Consider this: If he had a "flat bet" or passline bet of $10,000 and the point was 6 and he had maximum odds (five times the passline bet) he had $50,000 for "odds" and the payoff for that was $10,000 even money for the passline and $60,000 was the payoff for the $50,000 odds... a total payout of $70,000. The high roller would have to win that kind of action about 30 times to have a two-million dollar profit.

There's a reason why I am writing this: craps is definitely a game where the wins can multiply and a small bet can yield big profits. But the big wins don't come quickly and you need to have a lot of money at risk to win a lot of money. This is why you can't get sucked in to stories about players walking away with big money -- unless you also have big money to risk.

There's another reason why even with big money there aren't many big winners at craps -- and that's because there are betting limits at most casinos. At Caesars Palace, for example, some bets are limited to $50,000 and those bets pay "even money." The bets that pay 10 to 1 or 30 to 1 may be limited to a few thousand dollars each. You might see in the movies how someone rolls the dice with a million dollars on the passline -- but that's in the movies. Big bets like that don't happen in a real casino.

By the way, I was told the player was a top executive at a Hollywood movie studio -- one of the biggest. These guys are used to making big bets and risking big money on a roll of the dice at the studio lot and in Las Vegas.