The Dice Institute

I think it’s safe to say that most of us put in a little extra practice before a big gaming trip.

 - We might do that by simply extending our practice time.

 - We might increase the amount of time we spend studying our BoneTracker roll-stats.

 - We might concentrate a little more on the quality of each and every throw just a little bit more than usual.

 - We might make a mental checklist of each ‘perfect-toss’ element. For example, with our stance; we might take a careful look at exactly where our feet are placed and where they are pointing to, or the weight distribution we place on each foot and how weight is shifted and transferred during the toss, or how our shoulder-tilt and torso alignment as well as our head and neck position at the point of release often leads to an unintended and involuntary chin-to-chest head-tilt that affects how level-to-the-deck and square-to-the-backwall our toss actually is.

 - We might war-game various new betting-strategies that we plan to try out during our big trip.

The list of things we might do to better prepare ourselves for a big casino excursion is endless; and it’s all done with a focus towards converting some of the casino’s money into OUR money.

Let me ask you this though:

 - Do you prepare for certain table-types (traditional felt, microfiber, 12-footers, 14-footers, bouncy layouts, neutral layouts, unresponsive layouts, small backwall pyramids, larger backwall pyramids, wide chip-rail armrests, as well as various table-heights and deck-heights)?

If you are going to be encountering various and sundry table-types during your upcoming gaming trip; wouldn’t preparing your basic toss-dynamic to deal with as many of them as possible make sense too? Or are you just planning to deal with whatever table-types you run into and let the dice fall where they may, so to speak?

Let me ask you something else:

Have you ever given any thought to specifically preparing (and I do mean REALLY preparing) to deal with a specific table or a particular table-type with a view to only targeting those defined types of layouts on your upcoming trip, to the near-exclusion of all other table-types?

I’ll tell you the reason why I pose all of these questions to you.

A while back, I started doing some super-serious war-game planning to tackle a couple of very specific tables in Las Vegas .

They were:

 - Main Street Station

 - Hooters

 - LV Hilton

 - Sam’s Town


Now obviously there are a lot of differences between the rickety Hooter’s tables and the Sam’s Town tables in length, bounce characteristics, and felt-type, just to name a few. Equally, there is a world of difference between the Hilton’s tables and Main Street Station’s tables too; again things like length, backwall rebound traits, felt, deck-height, and even lighting are significantly different at those two stores...and that was the point.

I had those four casinos pegged for a trip-specific experiment that targeted one of the things they each have in common.

Most of you will immediately recognize that two of these casinos offer 10x-Odds, and the other two offer 20x-Odds. I was specifically war-gaming my practice-sessions towards those four high-Odds houses as a precursor to a much larger experiment that was to come.

For the first phase of this experiment, I wanted to see how a particular betting-technique would fare over the widely divergent table-types at these four casinos. However, I also wanted to give my betting-experiment as fair a chance of success as possible; so I directed my practice-sessions towards mastering the table-conditions that I’d be most likely encountering at just those four places.

I did that by tailoring my at-home table to mimic the different felt-types I was going to be encountering. I also altered my normal table-position to simulate not only the most likely shooting-position I would encounter when I got to those tables, but I also paid special regard to the actual distance-to-the-backwall shooting-lengths and bounce-characteristics that I would likely be having to deal with at each of these places too.

If you’ve read my “Mad Professor’s Precision-Shooting Laboratory Tour” article as well as my “Practice Tips” article on tuning your at-home table or practice-rig; then you know I am a strong proponent of specifically tailoring them to simulate real-world casino-table conditions.

I mean to me, it makes absolutely no sense at all to be tossing on an at-home rig that gives you an ungodly number of primary-faced on-axis hits; yet when you go to the casino, you have a hard time keeping the dice on the table, let alone getting them to do what you want them to do.

I spent a little over three weeks just practicing for those four specific casinos. While I still put in my usual near-daily casino play during that time, my practice-time focus was dedicated solely to my upcoming trip to those four joints.

The over-riding question of course, is whether or not all the preparation is worth the effort when you know ahead of time about the specific kinds of tables you are going to be encountering when you get to a destination.

We’ll explore the results of all that preparation in Part Two.


Until then,


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

The Mad Professor
Copyright © 2008