Barona Casino Card Craps

Overnight, I traveled around Southern California to check on the various card craps games still being played.

Hollywood Park -- the card club near Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) has one small table with about eight player positions. Bicycle Casino got rid of its card craps more than a year ago.

Pechanga, Pala, and Rincon casinos have card craps.

At each casino the games are slightly different but basically cards are used to determine the roll of the dice. At some casinos you throw two dice which pick two cards, or one card with two numbers on it, or an automatic shuffler is used to select two cards with no player participation.

Well, since I play over at Rincon I decided to try some of their card craps instead of playing video poker. And I got lucky. Very lucky. I hit five out of six points for a fire bet payoff of 250-to-1 and I had the maximum Fire Bet of $5 which paid $1250. I also won close to five hundred dollars on my "roll" but my turn with the dice followed several other players and those "hands" cost me about $400. So overall, a profit of about $1350 less tips to the dealers. Not bad. I took a photo when there were five of the Fire Bet numbers marked, and even though I frequently take photos of my royals at video poker, security got upset that I was taking a photo of the table (no players or dealers) and they told me to stop taking photos. The photo is below, click on the thumbnail to enlarge it. It's not the best photo because I took it in a hurry.

But that's not the purpose of this thread. The purpose is to tell you that while I was playing at Rincon, some other players at the table told me about the card craps game at Barona. And after they told me about it, I called Barona to confirm the information.

Barona has a far superior card craps game and the reason is you get to see the cards face up.

At Rincon the cards are face down in positions one through six for a red die, and one through six for a green die. The positions on the dice choose the card positions. So for example, when I threw a red 5 and a green 2, instead of a 7-out, the red 5 position was card showing a 3 and the green 2 position was also a card showing a 3 for a hard six.

At Barona the cards are dealt into the six "dice positions" face up, so you can see if you need, for example, a 6 and a 4 in order to make the point of 5, and you can see what cards in what positions would make for a 7 or 11 or boxcars.

A supervisor at Barona told me that sometimes the six cards end up in the actual dice positions, so a 1 will be a 1 and a 2 will be a 2 and so forth.

Barona also has 5-times odds on all come and pass bets while most other casinos have 3X, 4X, 5X odds.

Barona does not have hop bets and there is no fire bet or any other exotic bets.

Here is the table layout at Rincon with the Fire Bets marked.



Click on the thumbnail above to enlarge the photo.