This couple (with help from others) allegedly cheated at the crap table to the tune of $700,000. Supposedly they accomplished this by ‘sliding’ the dice, which involves holding the dice with the winning numbers face up, then sliding them - rather than rolling them - against the far wall.
WTF???
I can’t imagine how on earth someone could a) do this, and b) pull it off, repeatedly, in a Las Vegas Casino.
This sounds like a trick your little brother would try at the family Monopoly tournament. And yeah, he’d get busted.
mmm
Short of being amazingly dextrous and rolling specific numbers on command I’m not sure how you could do this. As the comentator in the linked article says:
Yeah, I don’t get how you could do it without being caught very early. I’ve known plenty of people who believe that they can manage to beat the odds by dice setting and precision shooting but I’ve never been convinced that any difference is statistically relevant and would be enough to beat the variance.
I suppose a flat throw and no rotation off the bounce could work, but I don’t see how you get that flat a bounce considering the design of the end wall.
And why couldn’t they have been doing it when I was betting the pass line at the craps table?
I’m also confused about the part of the article that mentions that the person sliding the dice was not betting, but I was under the impression that you had to be betting to get the dice.
Aside from the unlikelihood of going undetected, I don’t see anyone mastering (or even becoming semi-adept at) this technique. I don’t care how much you practice.
mmm
You do. My guess is they weren’t betting the big money.
What I wonder is, it’s the casino’s job to make sure the rules are followed. Provided they were throwing the dice and hitting the back wall, how did they cheat? Seems to me that is all that is needed for a legal throw.
You can bet Wynn absolutely recognized this scam pretty much immediately, but at that point it becomes a guaranteed win for the casino. If the scammers are good enough to win, Wynn security detains them and gaming control prevents any payout. If the scammers lose, Wynn pretends nothing happened and keeps their money.
It’s impossible to perform this scam while having the dice hit the back wall. There angled grooves in the wall which will turn the dice if they strike it.
It seems that if a casino is dumb enough not to notice something like this right away, they only have themselves to blame for losing all that money. Hopefully the case will be dismissed.
What I’ve heard for “Rhythm Rolling” is you try to hit the little flat area right off the table before the angled grooves start (granted I think that’s a different technique of dubious efficacy). But even then, how does “not hitting the back wall” amount to a crime instead of just a first class ticket off the property?
So what I get from that is that the accomplice bet on boxcars, and the slider may have only slid one dice to get a 6, with the other hitting the back wall for a random result. That’s probably not going to get called a no-roll, as long as it’s not happening every time. And since one is still random, the person betting isn’t going to win every time, just enough that it gets pushed into positive value.
Interesting story. I do not find it odd that the couple were able to get away with it for a while, especially since “The two are suspected of working with several unidentified customers who placed bets or distracted dealers.” Remember that the boxman has only a tiny fraction of a second in which to decide whether tocall “No Dice!” He does not want to make this call when the dice have already come to a rest and are visible.
That people can perfect tricks like dice sliding is quite believable to me. I’ve seen strange tricks myself, and am in fact surprised such tricks aren’t more of a problem for casinos.
It might be a fun exercise to figure out what betting system would be best for the cheaters. Betting boxcars or other hard-way numbers is the obvious answer, but winning those bets frequently might attract suspicion so the low-vigorish Pass/Come or Do-Not might make more sense.
What victims ? A casino’s business plan as a whole can be summed up as “Fleece customers. Exploit people’s weaknesses and/or failure at statistics. Go to the bank”. So they got fleeced back*. It’s all in the game.
and that’s assuming we can take the casino’s allegations at face value and they’re not just pissy that some people won a little too big.