Long Tables = Po$$ibilitie$
Part Three
click here for part I or here for part II

In 1993, the American Government funded a study to see why the head of a man's penis was larger than the shaft. After one year and $180,000.00, they concluded that the reason the head was larger than the shaft was to give the man more pleasure during sex. After the U.S. published the study, France decided to do their own study. After $250,000.00, and three years of research, they concluded that the reason was to give the woman more pleasure during sex. Afghanistan’s Taliban, unsatisfied with both of these findings, conducted their own study. After 2 weeks and a cost of around $75.46, they concluded that it was to keep a man's hand from flying off and hitting himself in the forehead.

Speaking of grips, I developed this new dice-setting grip, nicknamed, the Mad Professor’s “Long-Ranger.”  Part One and Part Two chronicle the mechanics, my practice sessions and the initial in-casino experiments.

When I checked out of the Flamingo Hilton after five days, I headed Downtown to the Freemont Hotel.  Once again, I normally don’t stay at this Boyd property, but with the slow-down in the airline industry at that point, their usual Hawaiian junket-trade had dried up.  Thankfully, by the end of my five-day stay there, their business had returned to a more Vegas-like 92% occupancy level, thanks almost entirely to the return of their loyal Pacific-island patrons.

Here are the results from my second set of experiments on LONG and Medium-Long tables in the Downtown LV area: 

v       Freemont Hotel - The tables here are of the medium-long variety.  They’ve never posed a real problem for me, but again it provided a comparative base so that I could weigh and evaluate my new grip against my regular pincer-grip.  I played a total of fifteen sessions here.  Each session contained at least three separate hands.  I had quite a few opportunities where the tables were almost completely empty.  That gave me a chance to really “bare down”, and get some decent consistency going.  My worst hand had just 4 rolls, and my best contained 52 rolls.  What was more surprising was that my roll average per hand hit the 25-roll mark.   That clearly approaches my current level of 28 rolls per hand that I currently enjoy using my short-table and medium-table/short-range pincer-grip.

As a side-note, most of you know that they have an electronic roll-count display on each craps table.  When a player exceeds 15 rolls during one hand, they receive a voucher that can be redeemed for Freemont-logo merchandise.  I’ve got a closet full of their jackets, (most are nylon, and some are suede or leather), along with myriad t-shirts and sweatshirts.  This trip added a huge number of tool-kits, leather stationary folders, metal/insulated coffee-travel mugs, golf shirts, pen and pencil desk-sets, watches, ceramic cups, and desk clocks.  I hand these out to as many acquaintances, mechanics, dry-cleaners, and restaurant staff as I can when I get home.

I want to interject that I altered my betting methods quite early on in this trip.  I realized that the lower roll-average meant that I had to get an early profit locked-up sooner.  In addition, these rolls did not contain the accuracy or predictability that the “pincer-grip” provides.

With that in mind, I used the “$110-Inside/Regression” method.  That is, I started out this way: 

i)                      Bet the MINIMUM table limit on the Pass Line.

ii)                    Establish the Point, and back it up with MAXIMUM Odds.

iii)                   Place bet the 5 & 9 for $25 and the 6 & 8 for $30 each respectively.  If the Point is one of those numbers, I simply don’t Place bet on that particular number.

iv)                   After any of those Place bets hit, I reduced each of them down to one unit each.  That is, $5 on the 5 & 9, and $6 each on the 6 & 8.   The easiest dealer command is to say, “Reduce my Place bets to $22-Inside, please.”

v)                     Concurrently, I also reduced my Pass Line Odds bet to single odds.

I know that some of you may think that I am a heretic for reducing my Odds bet, but it makes shrewd economic sense.  Where my Pass Line and Odds bet are $5 each, that puts me into a position of having a minimum of a $3 profit LOCKED-IN, no matter what else happens from that point forward.

Three dollars of clear profit may not sound like much to most people, but it is a tiny step FORWARD, and not a LOSS backwards.  This small but important principal is one of my playing principals which permit me to play this game for a living, and not just as costly entertainment. 

v       Fitzgeralds - I like this casino, and have enjoyed quite a bit of success here in the past.  However, on my previous visit, I noticed that they had changed the felt and also the underlay.  I can deal with new table-felt quite easily, but the underlay gave such a lively bounce that it reminded me of the tables at Casino Niagara in Niagara Falls, Ontario.  I played two full three-hand sessions here.  Neither session produced a significant hand, but I managed to almost break-even despite the horrific and erratic bounces that the dice were making.  My shortest hand was 3 rolls, and the longest one was 5 rolls.

v      El Cortez - This place was incredibly busy with its usual troop of “regulars” who live in nearby shelters and rooming-houses.  I did not have an opportunity to get into a shooting position on either of their two long tables.

v       Lady Luck -When I first walked in here, I thought that it was closed.   The place was EMPTY!  Even the slot machines were empty.  The last time I saw anything like it was at the Maxim Hotel right before the casino closed down.  Even the Desert Inn was busier on the night before it closed than Lady Luck was on a post-WTC mid-morning Tuesday.  The craps dealers were surprised to see an actual cash-player at the tables.  They said that they had dealt to less than four players over a five-hour period.  I ended up playing “solo” until their shift ended about one hour later.  I strung together a large number of 12 to 20 roll hands.  My dealer-tokes got pretty generous as I put them into play on 6 & 8 Place bets.  They dropped more than $180 into the toke-box in those sixty minutes.  My roll average was a very decent SRR of 17-to-1.  I played 12 more sessions here over that five-day period, and the roll average remained pretty consistent at that level.

One thing that I did notice about this new grip and release, was that if the dice DID NOT stay precisely side-by-side on their roll-out, they would generate more of the Inside numbers.  I found that if the roll-velocity was gentle enough, they would roll “independently”, but still travel and roll the same distance.  When this occurred, the 6, 8 & 9 rolled VERY consistently.

A further observation was that if the force of the throw was a little too hard, the left dice would hit the back wall, and flop-over onto it’s right-side axis.  This dramatically increased the number of 7-Out’s.  

v      Golden Gate - When I moved on to this casino, my confidence-level in this new grip was increasing substantially.  I threw some decent hands, and averaged 12 rolls-between-7’s, with a range of 4 rolls on the low-end, and 29 rolls on the high-end.

I played a large number of sessions at Binion’s Horseshoe and the Plaza on their medium-length tables, but I stood at the farthest shooting position.  My SRR average was 17.  I also tried it on the shorter tables of Four Queens and Golden Nugget, where my hands nudged the 20-roll average.

I’m pretty sure that part of the success was due to my increasing comfort with the grip and the growing sensitivity of the rolling-force that I used.

I also played the longer tables at the Castaways out on Boulder Highway, at Mahoney’s Silver Nugget and Jerry’s Nugget in North LV, and The Regent out in Summerlin.  I’ll tell you about those houses, and have a financial summary on all of these sessions, plus a report on the tables of Laughlin in Part Four of this article. 

Good Luck & Good Skill at the Tables…and in Life.

By: The Mad Professor 

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