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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Craps is a social game, probably more so than any other table game in a casino. I find the minuscule odds advantage of playing Don’t Pass Line bets to be not worth “being the bad guy” at a table full of superstitious gamblers out having fun, but that’s just me. I’m sure the casinos love this artificial stigma.

I always wondered: how juicy would they have to make Dont Pass to overcome the social stigma at the table? Would it be enough to pay instead of push on 12? How much house edge would cause everyone to switch to the dark side? I have no doubt casinos have spent millions of man-hours of research to understand this.

EDIT: In addition, most craps games offer "odds" bets once a point is established which have zero house edge, so by taking the maximum odds, you reduce the house edge on Pass and Don't Pass to the point where it's not really probabilistically significant which side you play.

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> casinos have spent millions of man-hours of research

You'd be surprised, casinos, in fact, spend almost zero time actually working through the math of their games. All the established table games are taken for granted, and for anything new -- entirely new games or side/extra bets -- the responsibility lies on the game inventor to have a trusted 3rd party validate the math (this is usually enforced by the gaming commission) and the casino simply refers to the validated results when considering implementing the new game/wager.

Any consideration of "social stigma" about a wager is nil. As an example, baccarat is fundamentally a boring game with zero decisions, however the actual gameplay, where players have all kinds of superstitions and are allowed to touch, tear, fold the cards, can be extremely social and often quite exciting. Casinos could deal blackjack in a similar, social fashion where all players share a single hand, but none do. And certainly, no casino would shift the odds in the players' favor (pay on 12 on Don't) for some kind of social impact, as any positive benefit would be 10x, 100x subsumed by professional bettors exploiting the positive EV.

It reminds me of S. Korean "fan death."

The common belief that sleeping with a fan on can kill you by suffocation (among other "explanations") was and is a way to convince people to conserve electricity, and nothing more.

The artificial stigma is a way to convince people to not use the more successful strategy against the house.

> is a way to convince people to conserve electricity

According to Slate, the belief is older than that:

> Internet conspiracy lore sometimes blames the legend on a 1970s-era government campaign to conserve electricity, but in fact these warnings are generations older, dating almost back to the introduction of electric fans to Korea.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/01/fan-death-korean-mo...

Apparently we don’t know how the myth began.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death#Origins_of_the_belie...

Nice. Thanks for the links.

We had a Korean ESL student live with us for a few months. I was shocked when he was shocked that we run the fan blowing down the bedroom halls. I had never heard of this Fan Death, and he was having a quandary because he grew up believing that it kills people, and obviously we did it a lot.

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