About

SOTR stands for South Of The River. We are a poker collective originally based south of the river Thames in London. We started to play home games back in the early 2000’s during the ‘poker boom’ that followed influences such as Channel 4’s Late Night Poker and Chris Moneymaker winning the 2003 WSOP.

This quickly evolved into regular holidays to Las Vegas. On one trip we took a craps lesson (I think it was at the Luxor) and ever since long craps sessions have been a highlight of our visits.

There’s really no decent live craps available in the UK. So I made this game in order to recreate our experience of playing craps in Las Vegas.

It’s faster, the carpets less sticky and drinking is optional but otherwise I hope a decent facsimile.

I wanted to refresh my ancient JavaScript coding knowledge and needed a project. At the same time, I wanted to better understand the game of craps – at least the areas of the game forever untouched by our rather rigid adherence to a standard three point molly.

It is not a gambling site and does not involve real money. The simulator is built for entertainment, practice, and learning purposes.

Coding

My short research into JavaScript games and libraries quickly brought me to the p5.js world. The p5.js editor is fantastic for quickly trying out ideas with lots of community support.

The Coding Train is a great resource for (re)learning some fundamentals such as arrays, functions and iteration while at the same time providing examples of what can be achieved graphically with the p5 library. Daniel Shiffman is just a good egg. I have watched every single video.

I could not find many simulators online which provided a satisfactory physical dice roll. I spent as much time researching and playing around with 3D graphics and physics engines as I did coding the base game. I settled on three.js with cannon.es – the game is actually a three.js canvas (dice) on top of a p5.js canvas (2D craps table).

I liked Bruno Simon’s First Three.js Project – also helpful to learn about node server set-up once everything became a little unwieldy for the p5.js web editor and I moved across to VS code.

Ksenia Kondrashova’s Dice Roller tutorial was excellent insight – even if I ended up using much simpler graphics and a different approach to the face-up calculation.

Adding charts to the game was a doddle thanks to the brilliant chart.js

Craps and Stats

The daddy of craps statistics online has to be Wizard of Odds. An excellent website with a proper disciplined approach to explaining the underlying probabilities and mathematics. Especially important in a world of dice-setting, system-pedlars and the super-superstitious.

His original craps game was what got me thinking. Of course, my game has All Tall Small, even if it a sucker bet…

I also like Parlay Nation for a neat well-structured website which steps through the different bets and organises lessons in groups of paths with increasing complexity.

For videos about basic rules, etiquette and strategies the Color Up youtube channel is helpful.

No real money gambling

SOTR Craps does not offer real money betting. No financial transactions take place on this site.

The simulator is intended for educational and entertainment purposes only. If you choose to gamble in real life, please do so responsibly and only within regulated environments.