Craps, but also gambling in general, provides immensely beneficial life lessons for the players who are able to interpret them correctly and learn from their mistakes. No matter how much experience you have with a certain game, no matter how many hours, days, weeks or months of your life were spent at the table, luck is a component that should never be underestimated.

If you fail to include chance in the equation, then not even the best strategy will be able to keep you afloat. While the story that I’m going to present did not have tragic consequences, it does make a strong point on how the protagonists were able to understand where they went wrong in the thought process and adapt their conduct.

The background of this craps tale

Picture if you will, a young boy of Italian heritage, and gambling was essentially an integral part of day to day life for him, no matter if it came in the form of casual poker with his friends on the weekend or investing his grandfather’s money, who was another fervent gambler, at the horse track. In his youth, casual gambling was more than a passion and pastime activity, even though the amount of cash he invested only constituted a part of his allowance savings.

You can only imagine his joy when the first legal gambling venue – aside of course for the city of Las Vegas – was inaugurated in Atlantic City by the time he was in his early 30s, in 1978 to be exact. However, his grandfather was even more enthusiastic about the Resorts International Casino and would regularly take the 3-hour drive there a few times a week.

The plot

After numerous sessions that balanced each other out rather evenly, his grandfather entered an improbable, weeklong winning streak. In fact, he earned sufficient cash on that week that he could afford to purchase bikes for all of his grandchildren which, on a side note, were not exactly few. Having become overconfident on his strategy, the grandfather invited his enthusiastic grandson I was talking about earlier for a craps session, with the promise to reveal the infallible winning strategy and asked him to emulate his moves.

The results and moral of the story

Both the grandfather and his grandchild were playing exactly the same way and betting the exact sum of cash ($1,000 each). However, a couple of hours later, both of them were completely broke and staring at each other with a confused look on their faces. The same strategy that had earned the old man several thousands of dollars had stopped functioning, out of the blue. The moral? There is no 100% feasible gambling strategy, so don’t spend all your money if you’re on a losing streak, even if your playing style was effectively earning you cash before.