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More Gain &
Less Pain
Lets
continue where we left off in Part II
by taking a further look at how new dice compare to old or used dice. Tip #18 New
Dice Part II
Bruised,
chipped, gouged, burned, ultra-violet damaged, and rounded-off dice are NOT what you
normally find in a casino. If you have used
your at-home dice for more than 10 or 15 hours (of actual use), then theyve probably
seen better days, and its no doubt time to start thinking about changing them. If
a dozen or so hours seems like a brief time span, you are correct. However, in the short life of validly-random
casino dice, that is the length of time where the casino is confident that the dice will
roll properly and the integrity of the game (defined by true randomness) will be
maintained. Thereafter, the cubes are
unceremoniously retired to the casino Gift Shop where they are sold to tourists for a
couple of bucks. To
keep the game as honest and as random as possible, the casinos usually change-out the dice
three times each day. They understand that
even the tiniest of flaws can change the game into the players favor, or at least
de-randomize the game so that the expectation of occurrence (possible outcomes) gets
skewed towards certain numbers. The casinos
realize this, and so should you. Randomness
and house-edge is the foundation on which the casinos build their empires (alcohol is the
fuel that keeps their perpetual-motion machine humming along, while greed and lack of
discipline are the two most powerful weapons that feed it). Lets
take a further look at your dice: Tip #19 New Dice Part III It
may seem that I am beating this dead horse just a little too much, but the fact is, most
people take the I-seem-to-be-doing-okay-with-my-current-old-dice-so-why-should-I-go-to-the-expense-of-changing-them
routine. This is similar to the I-change-the-oil-in-my-car-every-three-YEARS-whether-it-needs-it-or-not
scenario. The price you pay for laziness,
delay, ignorance and postponement, almost always ends up costing you more in the long run. Dice
DO NOT age well! If you want your at-home practices to more closely
resemble real-world conditions, then you have to use dice that mimic
real-casino conditions. That
means that you should be using new dice as much as possible. Here are a few common defects that affect the
dice: Burned Dice is when the cubes have been rubbed
repeatedly on the felt-surface of the table. If
you routinely set them into your favorite set, then quickly rub them back and forth across
the felt, you are burning that particular dice face. The friction/heat that you create is detrimental
and
has a VERY big effect on the wear and randomness of the dice. To
verify what I am talking about, just rub your fingertips very quickly, back and forth on
the casino-felt. If you "burn" each dice on a pre-selected face, the
casino feels that you can mill the dice enough to affect their outcome. Bruised
Dice occur when they make high impacts with hard objects. Just as a
car-bumper can sustain a bit of damage and not look like its been hit,
so too can a die take a hit that will throw off its balance. You cant see anything from the outside, but
internally, the structure is damaged. Bruising
also happens when people set the dice, then bang or tap them hard on the table before
their throw. The best way to determine
internal damage is to do a spin-test on each dice. Molecular Breakdown occurs
worst when a player uses petroleum-based hand-creams on a regular basis. The petrolatum reacts with the cellulose-resin
composition of the dice and starts to break it down.
Even the naturally-occurring oils in your skin will do the same thing, but
it will take much, much longer Cracking
and chipping
starts to occur at the edges and corners of your dice.
To the unaided eye, theyll appear as little nicks, scratches and
abrasions. These little defects will
catch on the felt fibers and act to skew, veer, change direction, unbalance or
otherwise interfere with the roll. In other
words, the dice are no longer truly random. Ultraviolet
Degradation is caused by natural sunlight or ultraviolet radiation emitted
from full or partial-spectrum indoor lighting. UV exposure causes a breakdown in the
composition of dice on a molecular basis. PaulSon
Gaming
commissioned an exhaustive 10-year study that they conducted from 1988 through to 1998 on
actual used dice (retired after eight hours of use on a hundred or so Promus/Harrahs
casino tables). Of course the study may have
been self-serving since PaulSon are in the business of selling new dice to the
casino-corporations. However, the
decade-long study confirmed the continued need to switch-out casino dice after each 8-hour
shift because the performance-affectors (bruising, chipping, scratching,
chunking, rounding, and burning, etc.) had a deleterious effect on (legally definable)
random dice performance. Like
I said, dice DO NOT age well! If you want
your at-home practices to more closely resemble real-world conditions, then you have to
use dice that imitate real-casino circumstances. Tip
#20 Uses for Old Dice
Heres
a couple of uses for your old dice:
Ø
Use
them to make one of DiceDocs Dice-Barrels.
Ø
Use
them for my Tiger of a Different Stripe method.
Ø
Use
them for Heavys Horse of a Different Color idea.
Ø
Use
them for Irishsetters Pipless Dice exercise. Tip
#21 Irishsetters Pipless Dice
Every
once in a while, someone comes up with a great idea, and I wonder to myself why I
didnt come up with it myself. Of
course, the answer is patently clear
they are obviously much more intuitive, or just
plain SMARTER than I am. Regardless of the
reason for the oversight, I immediately adopt it. So
it is with Irishsetters Pipless Dice idea. He
uses them to cycle-up his throwing skills before a big casino adventure. Ill let him explain the reasons for using
them in his own words. I'll
continue to hit the practice sessions hard for a couple of weeks, then back off the week
of the seminar. If I practice right up until
a casino trip, I've found it can mess with my mind. If
I'm on fire in practice, I tend to be too cocky when I get to the tables. If I'm throwing poorly the night before a casino
trip, it can undermine my confidence. So the last 2 days before a trip, I'll only throw
for about 15 minutes, and I use dice on which I've removed the pips. I don't care about outcomes at that point, only
whether the dice are traveling together, landing together, stopping together,
etc.... Irishsetter
was able to peel off the white pips by first soaking the dice into paint-thinner for a
minute or two. In the alternative, you could
use a permanent-type Magic Marker of the same color as the dice, and simply color the
pips. This might not affect the dice as much
as de-weighing them by removing the micro-thin paint. Tip #22 Gradual
Changes
If
we phase in our grip, toss and target changes gradually, we can see how each
modification and adjustment affects the rest of the outcome. Therefore,
we make these changes ONE AT A TIME. We tweak
each one before moving onto the next. Its
all part of the Ready, Fire, Aim method of improving our toss to maximize
consistency and minimize aggravation. All of the tips that we are looking at in this
series can be very beneficial in providing key aids in that success equation. Tip #23 Building
Muscle-Memory
Once
we narrow down the elements of the Precision-Shooting toss that works best and most
consistently for US, then we can turn our focus towards building muscle-memory. Muscle-Memory
is how we train our bodies to do things almost automatically. Ill give you a couple of ridiculous examples
that I hope will illustrate the idea. When
you first step into a new car, the placement of all the driving, navigation, and
entertainment controls are somewhat different than you are used to. After a while, you get used to the new layout, and
everything becomes second nature (it falls naturally to hand with
human-engineered ergonomics). Now
think about how you pick up and drink from your favorite coffee mug. You can be doing a myriad of other tasks as you
take a drink. It doesnt take undue
amounts of concentration or focus. Instead,
we can do it practically without thinking or looking or making a conscious effort
all
without spilling a drop. Muscle-memory
is learned by doing things over and over and over again until they become part of what
seems like natural movement. With
muscle-memory, we train our bodies to do something so repetitively, that it becomes like
second-nature to us, and our actions become virtually automatic. Once
we train ourselves to deliver a CONSISTENTLY REPEATABLE throw, then normal casino
distractions do not bother or irritate us. In
fact, in most instances, we regard them as part of the gaming-landscape. They are there, but they have no effect on our
actual performance. Moreover,
once we get our muscle-memory properly formatted and locked into our natural
actions, we can walk up to any craps table, pick up the dice and deliver a nice,
predictable throw. Muscle-memory helps build
the consistency and the confidence that we can tackle virtually any craps table that we
encounter. Therefore,
muscle-memory is built and perfected on the practice-rig, and profitably utilized when we
step up to shoot at the casino table. Tip
#24 - Using WinCraps I
know of no better software program that permits you to set up the most complicated of
betting methods and to try them out over thousands (or millions) of rolls. The variables that you can plug in, such as when
to start betting, when to change a bet, when to call your bets off or
down, or to match your wagering to various trends, streaks, or choppiness;
WinCraps does it all. You can specify
how long you want to play (by the number of rolls/hour that you stipulate), and how much
you are willing to risk on certain routines. There
is simply nothing else like it, with so many features including the ability to enter your
own set of occurrence parameters, comp rates, SRRs, Loss-Limits,
Win-Goals, bankroll variations, and the added ability to run high-speed million-hand
simulations to test out your theories and ideas. Even
if you are not a profound believer in the potential of Precision-Shooting, WinCraps
lets you try to validate your own betting approach BEFORE you wager one red cent in a
casino environment. Many, many players would
save untold amounts of money if they tried out their high-risk, I only lose
$300/hour betting schemes on WinCraps first. On
the other hand, WinCraps will also prove out on a theoretical basis, methods that
youve already perfected at the real-world tables.
For an excellent example of this, I would invite you to have a look at my Choppy
Table Short-Leash Method that I wrote about in my
Dodging Bullets As A
Darksider article. Stay
tuned for Part IV. Until then, Good
Luck & Good Skill at the Practice Table
and in Life. Sincerely, The
Mad Professor
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