History's Trash Heap
by Heavy Haltom

This year marks the 10^th anniversary of my “discovery” of precision dice shooting.    I’d been attempting a controlled toss for years, although like a lot of people, I really didn’t understand what I was doing and why.  I was simply emulating other good shooters I’d seen at the tables.  It wasn’t until 1993 that the light bulb went off and it all finally came together for me. 

A lot of things have been piled on history’s trash heap over the last ten years.  The Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas burned to the ground 51 days after being stormed by the ATF.   The World Trade Center was bombed, killing six and injuring thousands, foreshadowing the tragic events of 9/11 – just ten years later.    Olympic Skater Tonya Harding and her ex-husband were arrested for the “hired” attack on her rival, Nancy Kerrigan.  O.J. Simpson was arrested, and later acquitted, in the stabbing deaths of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman.   Bill Clinton was impeached for lying under oath.  The Murrah Building in Oklahoma  City was destroyed in a bomb attack by Timothy McVey.  After a 17-year search, the Unibomber was finally arrested.  In Colorado, a six-year-old beauty queen named Jon Bennet Ramsey was found dead in the basement of her parents’ home.  Princess Diana died in a tragic car crash. Scottish researchers cloned Dolly the sheep.  The tiny Mars rover “Sojourner” sent live photos back from the red planet. The world lost a living saint when Mother Theressa passed away. 

In the late 90’s the number of folks surfing the web topped 60 million, with over 5 million web sites up and running.  Out of those 60 million internet junkies, a small group of like-minded craps enthusiasts came together.  We had handles like Irishsetter, Heavy, Mad Professor, Micky D. and Perry B.  We met on craps forums like casino.com, crapspit, allcraps, and John Patrick’s board.  Eventually our ranks grew as more players became interested in dice setting and precision shooting.  We got together for team shoots and started coaching others.   The flamers and pundits took over the unmoderated forums and ruined them for the rest of us.  Dicesetter.com was born, followed by Axis Power Craps.  The rest, as they say, is history. 

By now it’s a fairly well known fact that precision dice shooting combined with the proper betting strategy can give the skilled player a powerful advantage over the casino.  The increased demand for information on dice control has led more and more skilled precision shooters to begin teaching the technique in seminars around the country.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.  However, some of these instructors have abandoned discretion and are putting the game we love at risk.  They advertise their seminars on radio, in newspapers, and in casino tabloids.  They flaunt their skills and “hot dog” it at the tables.  They are even conducting their seminars in the casinos themselves.  And when someone complains about their marketing strategy they simply say, “You don’t understand how casinos work.”

Perhaps they are correct.  But over the last twelve months I’ve seen a marked increase in the amount of “heat” precision shooters are getting at the tables.  Sometimes it’s just a bored dealer or stick man amusing himself by trying to distract the shooter.  Often it gets much worse – with the pit and box berating the shooter after every toss, demanding that he throw the dice harder and bounce them off the back wall so hard that the dice roll back to the middle of the table.  And yes, more and more advantage craps players are being told by the casinos that their business is no longer welcome there. 

If we are to protect the viability of precision dice shooting we must, as a group, make a concerted effort to keep a lower profile.  Here are a few of the guidelines I hand out to players attending our Axis Power Craps seminars.  They’re good rules to live by.  Follow them – and perhaps the future of the game we all love will be  little brighter.  Ignore them and the game may end up on history’s trash heap. 

Heavy’s Guidelines for Staying Under the Radar: