Craps can be seen as a particularly difficult game to learn how to play. It can seem like there are tons of different bets available, and because it has a fast pace, it can be hard to figure out what's going on just by watching. Nobody can expect to jump right into a game of craps and know every single thing that's going on including all of the possible bets, but there is an easy way to get started in just a few minutes and have a pretty good handle on what all is happening.

The first thing that you need to know is that the pass line bet is the central bet of all of craps. This bet is placed on the shooter's first roll, and it wins if that first roll is a total of 7 or 11. You'll immediately lose on this bet if it's a total of 2, 3 or 12. Aside from that, a roll of 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 or 10 will start the game into another phase where the shooter will roll continuously until one of two things happens.

When one of these six numbers are rolled, it establishes what's known as the point. The point is just the number that was rolled. The shooter will then continue to roll until either the point comes up again or until a seven is rolled. If the point is rolled first, then the pass line bet wins. However, if a seven is rolled, then it's a loss. That's really all that there is to it when it comes to the craps gameplay. A pass line bet has a house advantage of about half of a percentage point per roll, but since you'll watch it over multiple rolls, it averages out to about 1.4 percent per bet.

There are tons of other bets available in craps besides the pass line bet, but all of them center around what the next roll is going to be. You can also take the opposite of a pass line bet which is called a don't pass bet. Essentially, the don't pass bet wins if the pass bet would lose, and the opposite is true as well. The only difference is that a don't pass bet pushes on a 12 instead of being a win to keep the house advantage intact.