"To 1", "for 1" and the chance behind them

A box on the layout says 8 to 1. You put $10 on it and it comes in. What do you pick up?

Leoformer dealer · rules and maths

I dealt for years, and the question I heard most at the table was never about strategy. It was “so how much is that?”, asked after the chips were already down. The answer had been printed on the layout the whole time, in a shorthand nobody ever teaches you.

Two spellings, one bet apart

Every betting box on a layout has a number printed beside it, and the chips you place in the box are your bet (the money you put on one round). When the bet comes in, the dealer pays by the printed number. The only question is what the printed number counts: the money the dealer adds beside your chips, or everything you pick up, with your own bet already inside it.

Both spellings can stand in the same building, a few tables apart. The tie in baccarat is written 8 to 1. Four points on the craps Fire Bet is written 25 For 1. The Fire Bet is a side bet (an extra bet in a circle of its own, with its own limits and its own pay table). Its circle sits beside the pass line on the felt (the cloth of the table, where the bets and the cards go). Put an example bet on each box and watch where the bet ends up:

Amounts are examples for reading the arithmetic, never suggested bets.

If the Fire Bet box were written 24 to 1 instead of 25 For 1, the same $2 would come back as $52: one bet more. That one bet is the whole difference between the two spellings.

The spelling with “for” is rare: it turns up on side bets with the largest printed numbers.

One pay table on the floor says out loud what “for” does to the money. The progressive at the poker tables takes a $1 bet. Its payout column is headed with an asterisk, and the footnote under the column says the original wager is not returned. So $1 on the three-of-a-kind row, printed 9 for 1, comes back as $9: the dollar you bet is inside the nine, not beside it, and you are up $8.

Most pay tables carry no footnote at all, so the spelling has to be told from the numbers alone.

Leoformer dealer · rules and maths

And notice what the record does not tell you. The record tells you the amount. It says nothing about how often the box pays, and the amount a box pays and how often the box pays get mixed up more than anything else at a table.

Records with two numbers

Most records on a craps layout have two numbers, like 7 to 6, and a record with two numbers reads left to right: the number on the left is what the dealer pays, for every amount on the right that you have staked. Seven paid for every six staked. The place bets show it clearly, because the three place bet records, on the 6 or 8, on the 5 or 9 and on the 4 or 10, sit side by side in one pay table.

The place bet on the 6 and the place bet on the 5 both start with a seven, 7 to 6 and 7 to 5, and they pay different amounts on the same $30. The second number is the size of the share your bet is cut into: shares of $6 on the 6, shares of $5 on the 5. The smaller the share, the more shares the bet cuts into, and every share is paid seven:

That is also why a place bet on the 6 or 8 is made in multiples of $6, and a place bet on the 5, 9, 4 or 10 in multiples of $5: in those amounts the shares come out whole, and the arithmetic is something you can do in your head before the chips go down.

Turn the fraction over, reading 7 to 6 as six paid for every seven staked, and you have the commonest slip at the table:

How often the bet would have to come in

Leoformer dealer · rules and maths

Every record quietly asks how often the bet would have to come in for the money to come out level, and you can read that straight off the record. A record of N to 1 comes out level, nothing gained and nothing lost over a long run, exactly when the bet comes in once in N+1 tries. The bet comes back along with the N, and that returned bet is where the extra one in N+1 comes from.

9 tries at 8 to 1 with $10 on the box: 8 misses and one hit. The misses cost $80 between them, and the one hit puts out $80, so the pile of chips ends where it started.

So every record turns into a frequency: how often the bet would need to come in for the money to break even. And that frequency can be set beside how often the bet actually comes in, which the cards, the dice or the wheel decide, and the record does not.

The level record is the record that would come out level at how often the bet actually comes in. It is written on the same second number as the printed record, so the printed record and the level record can be compared at a glance.

Now set the printed record beside the level record. The place bet on the 6 is printed 7 to 6 where the level record is 7.2 to 6: short by 0.2. The Fire Bet on four points is printed 25 For 1, which is level only if four points come in 4.00% of the time; four points come in 0.88% of the time, so the level record would be 112.66 to 1. That gap between the printed record and the level record is where the price of the bet lives. What the gap costs, in per cent of every dollar staked and in dollars an hour, is what House edge of every bet and Price of an hour are for.

The full bar is the level record; the coloured part is what the box actually pays.

The casino itself prints the level record, in the pay table for another bet on the same numbers. The odds behind the line is a bet a player may add behind the pass line bet once a point is set, and its printed records are, to the digit, the level records for the same numbers:

One pair of dice, one point, two bets on the same felt. The odds behind the line is written at the level record; the place bet on the same number is written short of the level record by 0.2, 0.5 and 1 on its own second number. Reading a record correctly makes no bet cheaper, and more money on the layout is still more money on the layout. Nothing here says which bet to make.

One thing to carry away: a big number printed in a box tells you the bet comes in rarely. It does not tell you how rarely, and nothing printed on the felt will.

A record with no word in it

Sometimes a pay table does not say which spelling it uses. One casino company prints the payouts of its wheel of fortune in a leaflet, and the column is written with a dash and no word at all: 45-1 for the 45 Joker spot, which covers 1 segment, down to 1-1 for the spot covering 24 of the wheel’s 54 segments.

The smallest row settles it: read as “for”, 1-1 would hand back only your stake on the commonest spot, so the column is written “to”, and every row reads the same way.

Once the column is known to be “to”, the biggest row can be read like any other record: the record is level only if the spot comes in once in N+1 spins, and the segments the spot covers say how often the spot actually comes in.

The 45 Joker spot read as a “to” record: what the record asks for, what the wheel gives, and how far apart the two are.

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

And when a record genuinely does not say — no word, no leaflet, nothing on the layout — that is not a puzzle to work out at the table. Ask the dealer before the chips go down. Every dealer I worked with would rather answer that question than argue about a payout afterwards.

Decide your limit before you sit, whatever the records say — Game plan walks you through it. A payout you can read is still a payout you are paying for.

Payout records, on one card

That is the lesson. How to read a payout box, and how often each record asks the bet to come in, on one card to print. Read it before you sit down rather than at the table — the casino you are in may have a rule about phones there.

Practice: pay it like a dealer

A bet has come in, and the box is printed the way the rules print it, capital letters, missing spaces and all. You say how much goes out of the tray beside the bet. The four amounts on offer are not random: three of the four are the three standard misreadings of a record, so a wrong answer tells you which misreading you made.

The practice run has three levels. Level 1 is records written “to 1” in whole numbers. Level 2 is records written “For 1”, the other spelling. Level 3 is records with two numbers, like 7 to 6. Every square on the strip below is one payout, and all the squares are there from the start; when the squares of one level are full, the next level begins by itself. There is no money on this table, and nothing adds up from one payout to the next.

Check yourself

Mayaformer floor supervisor · manners, money and breaks

Five quick ones. Pick an answer, then check it. No timer, no points: just whether it stuck.

Where to check this

19+ (18+ in AB, MB, QC) · Play responsibly · the helplines for every province are at the end of this page

Further reading

• Criminal Code, section 207: permitted lotteries · Justice Laws Website, Government of CanadaThe section that lets a province, and only a province, conduct and manage a lottery scheme — the sentence every casino in the country stands on.
• About Casinos BC · British Columbia Lottery Corporation (Casinos BC)Who conducts the gaming in one province and who runs the room, in the corporation’s own two sentences.
• Annual Report 2024–25 · Ontario Lottery and Gaming CorporationWhat a provincial gaming corporation publishes about itself: what it conducts, and what share of the money brought to the tables it keeps.
• Protecting the public · Independent Gambling Control Office, Province of British ColumbiaWhat a provincial regulator does, who is allowed to run the games, and where a complaint about a casino goes.
• Minimum Technical Standards for Gaming — 11. Game Behaviour · Alcohol and Gaming Commission of OntarioThe floor one regulator sets under a slot machine’s return, and its rule that the floor holds for every bet configuration.
• The house edge of casino games · Wizard of OddsWhere the house edge is defined, and the rating table of rounds an hour this track uses for every game.

How it’s worked out