About two months ago I took a couple of weeks off from the tables. Before returning to my usual regimen of 15 to 25 hours of real-world play spread over four or five days a week of in-casino action, I made sure I got in a fair bit of practice to take off the slightly rusty haze that had started to settle on my toss during that 14-day sabbatical.
Though I didn’t make any significant changes to my basic grip, throwing-motion, or release-point; I did make a slight change in my stance and the amount of weight and pressure that I put against the rail when I’m making a toss. I knew that I had gradually been putting more and more body weight on my leg nearest the table over the last year or so, and I wanted to try and balance the weight-distribution out a little more evenly.
It had become problematic as I had been having to make ever-increasing toss-motion re-alignment alterations in order to compensate for that ever-increasing shift in weight that I was placing on my table-near leg.
By simply shifting a little bit of weight off of my ‘anchored’ leg and back onto my ‘outside’ leg; there was less stress being put on my table-near anchor leg (and more specifically, less sideways torque being applied to my knee).
Now if you are throwing 6 to 8-roll hands; putting most of your weight on one leg is not really a problem for a short-duration period like that. However, once you go beyond let’s say 15 or 20 tosses, it starts to affect the muscle-loading of the anchor leg, and with my particular toss-motion, a little bit of sideways twisting torque (on my knee) had snuck in there somewhere. Now obviously you can take the weight off your shooting leg between each toss, but when you think about throwing at a low-population table where the dice are being immediately returned to you; then that rest-period is quite short, so I wanted to slightly redistribute my weight a little more evenly so that it wouldn’t figure into my mid-length or long-length hands where there was sustained, dice-returned-almost-immediately throwing over 10 or 15 or 20 minutes or more.
By putting a little less weight on that anchor leg in the first place, meant that when I got up to around the 20 or 25-roll mark, my anchor-leg muscles weren’t anywhere near to being over-charged or over-taxed from being asked to carry all of my weight for such an extended period of time and with virtually no rest in between each throw.
The difference it made in my mid-length and long-length hands was nothing short of amazing.
Admittedly though, I was stunned by the outcome. I really shouldn’t have been that surprised, but frankly I didn’t expect such a profound improvement. My shooting during my mid-length hands actually improved to the point where it was almost too good to be true. In fact there was a complete shift in the number of mid-length hands I was throwing, whereby many of them went on to now become long-length hands.
In other words, my percentage of short hands (1 to 12 rolls) stayed exactly the same, but my percentage of mid-length hands (13 to 25 rolls) declined, while my percentage of long-length hands (26+ rolls) increased to a point where I had never experienced before.
But those results were generated on my at-home table; the real proof would have to come at the real-world in-casino tables. In my next dispatch I’ll give you the results from my most recent 50 in-casino days.
Good Luck and Good Skill at the Tables…and in Life.
The Mad Professor
Copyright © 2007