The Dice Institute

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time lately at a colony of $25 and $50 VIP tables that dot the Detroit casino landscape.

These neutral-bounce tables make for a perfect shooting foray onto the Darkside. Not coincidentally, these same tables are populated by a semi-organized group of quite talented D-side shooters who, besides their Greek heritage, also share a common goal of 7’ing-Out as quickly as possible.

Though they haunt these layouts on a nearly daily basis, and despite their steady stream of nice-sized profits; I haven’t seen more than a hint of pit-concern from any of the three Motown gaming-houses that they and I frequent.

The funny thing about shooting with this group of Darksider’s, is that we almost always equal or outnumber the Rightside population at the VIP tables.

What’s even funnier is that when the table is half-full of Darkside-shooters and the dice are ice-cold; this group makes just as much noise as a table full of Rightsiders during a scorching hot hand. Some R-siders occasionally drift over, expecting to get in on a hot hand…until they see that everyone is on the Don’t’s and whooping it up whenever a point-cycle 7-Out puts in an appearance.

A Cougar, A Minivan, and a Turkish Date
Sooner or later, having a ribald group of D-side shooters at the same table engenders it’s own form of craps lingo.

Cougar…that’s a 4-3 seven-out…as in a 43 year-old woman (cougar) on the prowl for a young male.

Minivan…that’s a 2-5 seven-out…like a minivan…two in the front and five in the back.

Turkish Date…that’s a 1-6 seven-out…like dating one Turkish virgin who is accompanied by six chaperones.


How to Make Big-Picture Money by Ignoring Small-Picture Variance
I roll-tracked the Foundation Frequencies of the entire Darkside group, keeping the closest eye on their four best shooters whom the other members customarily deferred the best table-positions to. That turned out to be one of the most fundamental reasons for the steadiness of their overall success...letting the best shooters get into proper position, and then giving them the room and the patience to do their thing.

The idea was to feed all of their in-casino F-F roll-stats into DiceTool to see how much of an overall Darkside edge each of them were producing (if any).

I did that for a while, but frankly the Darkside shooting of their top-four shooters was so reliable (and the shooting of the rest of the group so unreliable) that I really didn’t have to over-quantify (or rather, keep re-quantifying) their exact edge.

That is, once I was able to determine that their top four shooters could indeed 7-Out much quicker than random-expectancy (and they were doing this by an average of 11% quicker than random); I simply just started keeping a “How many rolls do they usually take to 7-Out” toss-count tab on them, and I’ve kept a rolling-average of that stat for each since then.

Though that particular metric varies quite wildly for each shooter from hand-to-hand; it continuously proves out to be a very reliable barometer when considered over a multi-hand session, and even more so when that same shooter’s results are viewed over many sessions.

I find that if I bet for their average performance, and not get bent out of shape if they accidentally throw an unintentional point-repeater or Come-Out loser once in a while; then I am able to garner much more overall profit than if I tried to zig and zag trying to catch an ultra-short intra-hand trend or some other such gambler-minded strategy.

This of course allows me to make big-picture money (from each particular dice-influencer's overall performance) by ignoring any roll-to-roll or hand-to-hand variance (which you will inevitably see no matter how good the shooter is); and focus strictly on what he'll likely be able to produce over a reasonable number of trials.

Granted, you have to be patient, and you have to be able to see the forest from the trees, and you have to have the discipline to stay the course despite any short-term setbacks; but the overall rewards are well worth it.

As I have said many times, while the prospect of steady and stable bankroll growth is there for the taking for practically every skilled dice-influencer out there; scarcely few take it.

In the simplest of terms, configuring a betting-strategy that is based on a given shooter's overall "average-hand" advantage is the most direct, lowest risk way to turn D-I skills into real, tangible, consistently predictable bankroll-doubling profit.

You can chase hot-strike lightning all night long, but even when you do rarely manage to catch that big hit, almost all of your profit from that hand has to go to offsetting previous losses (and the rest will eventually go to pay for future same-strategy "I-zigged-when-I-should-have-zagged" losses).

On the other hand, capitalizing on average-hand performance let's your profit build and build and build.


If You Know What is Most Likely to Happen, Why Bet Against It?
If you knew that a given shooter would, when averaged over let’s say 100 hands, 7-Out on average within five point-cycle rolls; how would you bet on him?

Knowing for example that sometimes his rolls would go on and on and never seem to end, while other hands would produce an intended 7-Out in just a roll or two, and that he would take an average of just 5 point-cycle rolls to do so; would you try to out guess the dice on each hand…betting this way or that way as each new outcome revealed itself, or would you just take the information of what you know will happen on average, and use that to structure a betting approach that would pretty much produce a guaranteed net-profit from each session?

Taken one step further; if you knew that the amount of profit that you were able to earn was almost entirely dependent on how large your focused wagers were (instead of being almost entirely dependent on your ability to accurately guess at what the next outcome of the dice would be...much like your current betting does); wouldn’t you want to be putting more effort into getting the most matched-to-risk money on table, instead of trying to outguess the dice on a roll-to-roll basis?

That’s really the question you have to ask yourself when you know that you are dealing with an overall edge, but your net-profit never seems to reflect that edge.

In other words, if you know what will generally end up happening (ie. prove itself out over a reasonable number of trials); doesn’t it make sense to put your money on that instead of zigging and zagging all over the place trying to catch a trend or a streak?


Real-World D-I Performance + Matched-to-Average Betting = Real-World Profit
Here are the real-world roll-stats from one of the shooters in the group. I’ve listed the 50 most recent hands that he’s thrown (when I’ve been in the casino with him).

Admittedly he is the best shooter among that bunch, and he has an uncanny ability to avoid Come-Out losing 7’s and 11’s.

On the other hand, he is very exacting in his demands that everyone else (including interloping random bettors) respect his personal shooting-space, maintain a chip-free landing-zone, observe complete and utter silence when he is shooting and not have any body, arm, hand, or finger movement within his line of sight or even on the periphery when he is shooting...and being quick to chastise fellow team-members, dealers, and even TGS’s alike if they dare