I don’t think so. If you’re playing with a team of skilled shooters; or if you’re at a table with three skilled shooters, then, yes, maybe you can flip the game. Otherwise I don’t think you can. Here’s why:

In your mind’s eye, I want you to look around a crowded craps table. What do you see? Shooter after shooter, almost none of whom will take any care with his or her roll. You’ll see novices, who can barely hold the dice in their trembling hands, fling them down the felt where they land this way and that. You’ll see "master craps shooters" who have seen too many movies and who shake, rattle then rifle the dice as if they are trying to split those cubes into a thousand pieces. You’ll see everything, but what you won’t see, at least not often, is someone such as yourself.

In the average craps game, if you’re at a table with 11 other players, no matter how great a rhythmic roller you are, even if you have a 1:8 SRR (Seven-to-Rolls Ratio), all those other shooters spell doom -- if you bet on them that is. Of course, you could only play at tables where you are the lone shooter. But that is usually not practical or even possible. It might not even be desirable as you might find yourself getting tired before you get your game in place. Like a pitcher, who can’t face all 27 or more batters in a game one after another without letup -- and must take half an inning off while the other pitcher works -- it’s usually good to have a break. If you’ve had a good roll, you have time to calm yourself before the next attempt. If you’ve had a bad roll, you’ll have time to relax and get yourself prepared for your next shot at fortune and glory.

A full table gives you rest, yes, but it also has all those "others." If hell is other people as some writer (was it Sartre?) said, then losing craps is other players. I’m not the first to realize that if you bet on every shooter at craps, you are doomed to defeat, no matter how great a shooter you are.

So what do you do? You can’t stand at a spot and not play all evening except when the dice get around to you. The casinos wouldn’t tolerate that. But you also don’t want to bet on every Tom, Dick and harried shooter. The answer is obvious. You have to find a "selection principle" that eliminates certain shooters from your betting mix. Some writers refer to this as "qualifying shooters." I refer to it as "eliminating shooters." Either way, the result is the same. You don’t bet on everyone.

I use the 5-Count and have been for 14 years now. It eliminates about 50% of the shooters you’ll encounter in your craps career. It’s not perfect, but it does the job better than any other selection principle I’ve read about or witnessed. The 50% of the shooters it eliminates are by definition those whose rolls aren’t all that long. The overwhelming majority of these shooters would have lost you money. The 50% of the shooters you bet on – which will include you, a rhythmic roller hopefully – will have all those decent, good, great and epic rolls. They’ll be plenty of losing rollers as well, but as a group, the post 5-Count shooters will have a much better batting average than the pre 5-Count shooters.

But this isn’t just an elaborate plug for the 5-Count. There are plenty of ways to eliminate shooters or to reduce your exposure to those "others." You can make your betting level extremely low on other shooters and load up on yourself. Of course, when an epic roll comes, you won’t make all that much money on a hot shooter other than yourself. Still, in the long run, despite an occasional good roll here and there, the other shooters are destined to lose you money because they aren’t changing the nature of the game. You are.

You could wait until the shooter makes one point, and then bet on him. Of course, he could roll for twenty minutes and never make that point and you’d miss out on a good roll.

You’ll have to decide how you want to handle the shooter-discard tray, so to speak. But take this to the bank for a deposit or a withdrawal, unless you are playing with a group of rhythmic rollers, the smart craps player must eliminate as many random rollers as possible.

It’s either that or doom. But, try the five count. It works!