There may have been a time at the craps table when you heard the dealer call out no call bets. Here is a typical kind of situation. You have been playing for an extended session when you run out of chips with the exception of a lone $5 chip in hand, and whatever you had on the the Pass line and its odds. You toss your $5 chip on the table and yell out to place the 6 for $25, then reach for your wallet for the additional money when the dealer yells back “No Call Bets” and shoves the money back your way. Of course when this happens it always seems like a 6 comes up, but you may ask yourself if this is standard casino operating procedure?
Before trying to raise hell with the casino staff, you first need to check and see if the crap table you played on states “NO CALL BETS” on the layout. What that sign means is that a player is not allowed to call out a bet without having at least enough chips on the table to cover their wager. The dealer wants to see you’ve got the cash in plain view before he or she will book your bets.
Another reason the No Call Bets rule exists is to prevent confusion as to the amount of your wager. You could have tossed that $5 chip on the layout, pretended to be reaching for more moolah and simultaneously yelling, “place the 6 for a nickel,” and a dealer, not visually seeing your meager $5 bet being lobbed in, might interpret “a nickel” as $500.
Because of the frenzied pace on the crap table, dealers do allow a player to make last-second bets when the dice are about to be thrown. For instance, you could toss out a $25 chip and clearly call out, “place the six for $5, and the dealer will say “it’s a bet” and return $20 change to the player after the roll. The dealer doesn’t even have to actually place the wager in its proper place on the layout for it to constitute a valid bet.
Also, the No Call Bet rule aside, if the dealer is not clear about the intention of someone’s play, he or she can and will state “no bet” and push the chips back to the player.