or Stretching Out The Yarns
TNNIGHTHAWK:
You’re not gonna believe this, but this is the way it actually happened.
A friend gave me a gaming book, that explained all the different types of games, one could find in a casino. Since I had planned on going to Atlantic City, in a few days, I thought I might pick up some pointers to help me be a decent player. I finally decided to try craps. This was in 1998.
I earned a trip to Washington, D.C., with my company, and since I don’t like to fly, I drove to D.C. From there it was just a few more hours to Atlantic City. Got to Atlantic City, around 7:00 p.m. on a Saturday, checked in at one of the Trump properties, eased on up to my room, and unpacked.
Went down to the casino floor about 8:00, and checked out the craps tables. All the tables were full, except stick left, at a $25 table. They were hollering and carrying on like a bunch of hyenas.
I only had $100 set aside for gambling, so I knew I’d need a lot of luck since this was a $25 table. There was this one guy at the end of the table with a hat on, the kind a boat captain wears. He was just getting the dice, and I noticed he set them with a 6 and 1, on top.
I put $25 on the line, and a $4 crap check, to protect my $25. He rolled a 7, then another 7, then an 11, and 3 more sevens. Even with the crap check, and flat betting, I was already up, well over $100, when he established a point of 8. I backed it up with double odds, and two throws later, he set, and made a hard 8.
The fellow to his left said “nice going, Captain.” I had been watching the others and put $10 on the hard eight. Everyone else said press it. Not knowing what they meant, I did the same, and now it became a $100, hard 8. The “Captain” said, “working on the come out, so naturally, I did the same. He immediately threw another hard 8, and I had $1000.
He continued to roll for about 45 minutes, and finally sevened out. I made about $2500 off the roll, besides the hard 8. He turned to the fellow on his left and said, “keep it going Frank.”
I looked at my watch, and it was about 9:00. I thought I should go to the room, but the gaming book said don’t quit while you’re winning, so I thought I’d wait till this Frank guy rolled. He started rolling, and he rolled, and rolled, and when he finally sevened out, it was 10:50. He had rolled for 1 hour and 50 minutes. I was betting come bets, and double odds. He rolled number after number, all numbers, hardways, everything. The table ran of of chips 3 times, and had to be replenished. They changed sticks 6 times.
He was to the right of stick, setting the 3 V, and gently letting the dice drop, into the left corner, just passed the pass line. I made $32,421 off his roll. Ten minutes before the end of his roll, I had changed to placing the numbers. I had placed all the numbers for $3200 across, and had pulled them down, the roll before he sevened out.
“Frank” got a 5 minute ovation, even the dealers were clapping. I heard one of them say later, that they had made over $15,000.
This was my first experience at a craps table, and I knew I had to try this again. I went to bed that night, a very happy camper, and drove back home with enough money to put indoor plumbing in our new house.
After that experience, I read other books, and took some courses out in Las Vegas to learn how to influence the dice. I took the Paar course with Jerry and Chris, and even rolled a few sessions at the tables with them. The best session we had was at the Mirage. Chris would close his eyes, call the number, and boom, hit the number he called. He’d hit it 9 out of 10 times. I made $55,048, in three hours during one of our sessions. This was in 1999.
My shooting finally became stagnant, so I enrolled in a GTC course in 2004, and went to Las Vegas to try and get out of my slump. I was amazed to find when I got there, the fellow that I only knew as Frank in Atlantic City, back in 1999, was in charge of the GTC course. I re-learned the game in its entirety, the grip, my betting habits, the whole ball of wax. I was able to play 4 different sessions with the GTC crew, and my average win of the 4 sessions was, $18,412. I would buy in each session with my normal $100, and just go from there.
Well, that has been a while now, and my shooting has fallen on hard times again. In fact, on any given weekend, you can see me on Hwy 72, in Tennessee, picking up coca cola cans, and other aluminum cans, to try and get a stake. As soon as I raise another $100, I’m heading to Vegas again.
Well, there you have it, the way it actually happened.
TossBoss
Even though I have been implicitly sworn to secrecy, the increasing hunger for knowledge, combined with the urgency of these dreadful times, compel me to reveal the history of Dice Control and my role in its development.
My story begins in 1916, when my dear old pappy was on his way back to the East Coast from France and England, where he recently labored to bring peace to the battered continent of Europe, or at least to 24 Germans, a couple of unidentified collateral assets, and a dying horse which had been left beside the road to otherwise die a natural death.
Pappy, even for a 19-year old, was a smallish man, and gifted with extraordinary peripheral vision and hand-to-eye coordination. He was quiet and alert and never…ever…drank alcohol. Although he had deployed his talents in the service of his country as a USMC sniper and with an old M1903 Springfield 30-06, with a 1-in-4 twist barrel, his real talent was in cutting through femoral arteries as though they were knitting twine wrapped in butter.
He had tried to teach me his art. I was, however, not able to learn it. And his parting advice to me was, “Better use a gun, or just bash his skull in; you ain’t got it when it comes to edged weapons.”
He had boarded a troop ship bound for New York with the intention of spending a few days in the big cities before making his way down to Orange, Texas, where he had the promise of capturing the heart of a virgin bride and working some land on the banks of the Sabine River.
Somewhere in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, Pappy awoke one afternoon to the sound of “Ho, daddy.! Seven. Seven-come-Eleven! WINNER. AGAIN.”
Shuffling over to the noisy crowd, he made his way past the throng of onlookers to the dice game now in progress on the deck before him.
A dice player was gently lifting the dice from the blanket upon which the game was being played. With a barely perceivable twist of one die and a roll of the other, the shooter stacked the dice and gripped the stack with three fingers. The dice were hurled toward the back part of the blanket, bounced upward and ricocheted off the shiny bulkhead…and landed back upon the blanket, like a dead cat coming to its final rest. “A dead cat bounce,” thought Pappy to himself.
“Seven..! The Sergeant is A WINNER. AGAIN.”
“The Sergeant …” What a name for a dice shooter,” thought Pappy.
“When yur done there, Sarge, I’d like to have a wurd wid ja.”
The whiskered “sergeant,” cast a squinted glare at dad, scanning his presence and detecting an opportunist like himself, yet one with few of the restraints that govern the consciences of most other civilized men.
“Arrrr,” growled the one-eyed dice master. “Oim dun herrre,” he intoned, trilling the r’s in a rich seaman’s brogue.
“Looks like yur a couple hunnert up. An’ it really looks like yuh know what yur doin’ wid the dah-ss.”
Working their way through the crowds of onlookers and fellow players, the two impresarios of random fortune made their way aft toward the stern of the boat and privacy.
“Why are yuh called ‘Sergeant?’ Y’re not even in the military as far as I can tell.”
“Arrrrrr..!” responded the pink-skinned young man–about in his early twenties. “Whot tipped yer off, mate?
Was it the corn cob pipe between me teeth? Or wos it me Chicago Cubs underwear?”
“Do me a favor, Sergeant: stop talk’in’ like that. It’s irritatin’. And “arrrrrr” has nuttin’ to do with being a sergeant or bein’ in the army, or anything else I can think of.”
“Ya want I should teach you how to roll da dice or not?”
“Sure,” said pappy. An’ Ah’ll pay yuh fer yur effort. An’ , by the way: what gave yuh away was yur eye. The open one. There’s nuttin in it that says you just been through hell on Earth, were ever scared, or had any notion as to what it’s like to pillage the artifacts from the still-warm body of a German you just sent to his maker.”
“In fact, yuh look like a slack-jawed huckster from Chicago, who somehow booked passage on this ship just to fleece the troops. On top of that, yuh smell like moth balls and Vick’s Linoment. I have a strong notion to…”
Pappy stopped short and re-oriented himself around his primary long-term goal: to become independently wealthy.
“I would like to throw you overboard. But I would also like to learn what you know about dice and how to win at dice. If yuh do that, Ah promis yuh: I won’t throw you to the sharks.”
Pappy learned that the scoundrel was indeed from Chicago and was on his way back to the mainland U.S. in order to team up with his younger brother who was a waiter at an uptown New York restaurant called, “Hoaglund’s Clams.” Their plan was to liaison in New York and to travel by bus to Chicago, where they would enter the clothing business and also begin a manufacturing service.
He also learned that, threatened with bodily harm by any conscience-less veteran who might carry about a bag of plundered artifacts and souvenir body parts and who was armed with, among other tools, a pair of razor-sharp combat knives, this “sergeant” would give up any secret he knew.
The ship eventually tied up at a harbor overlooking what would later become Central Park. Disembarking, Pappy and the “sergeant” made their way to Hoaglund’s Oysters and talked about the science of dice control.
Although the strange little man with whiskers claimed to be a valiant warrior, a wise prophet and the future inventor of the internet, Pappy allowed him to live long enough to gain all that the man knew about hard body physics, velocities, arcs, and statistics. And he learned everything he could about a game called “craps.”
Pappy sent his discharge papers to his parents’ address in San Antonio and boarded a train to Laredo. There he bought a horse and trotted into Mexico to hire himself and his rare skills to the highest bidder. Once he had drunk his brown bottle of root beer at a Mexican bar while his men stoned a government soldier to death with billiard balls…and wondered aloud as to why these locals seemed unable to keep a beer cold.
The fighting in Mexico began to simmer down sometime between 1916 and 1917. Pappy thought that probably meant that the gravy train had passed him by and that it was time to head back north to Orange, Texas. Besides, Pappy had mentioned, Blackjack Pershing was raising cain all around him and may not always have been able to tell the difference between Pancho Villa and an ex Devil Dog in Mexico on a paid vacation.
Old Pappy settle down in Orange and married a fourteen-year old maiden a couple of years later. The oil business was booming in Texas in the 1920’s. But–darn–there was not much demand at the oil refineries for men whose only talent was to reduce population numbers one at a time or to persuade others to “kinda go along with” him on various matters.
After a stint as a cop here and a constable there, Pappy joined up with the corporate “Strike Breakers,” based in–you guessed it–Chicago.
The whiskered “Sergeant” whom he had met on the troopship had begun his march to success and was at this time, not in the clothing business–but in the refuse handling business. He owned several trash wagons and was building a bankroll for his younger brother’s number one vision: Waste-to-Energy technology.
the “sergeant’s” real name was “Stopyra.” Pappy called him “Sopada” or “Stopper.” Stopper’s younger brother, Scheiskopf, was about sixteen years old. Even at that tender age it was clear that Scheiskopf had a talent for self promotion and loved attention.
He had taken the trash-hauling idea to a new level. He had decided to divert human raw waste to collection points, where it could be hardened and treated so as to be a combustible fuel. “Scheis,” was proud of his achievement and had taken to calling himself, the “Captain of Crap.” “Yowser,” he would often say, “I now outrank my older brother.”
Pappy was gunned down on east 6th street in Austin, Texas on a sunny 1975 Christmas eve. He was 75 when he moved up to an eternal combat theatre. But years before that, he had confided in me that he had made his living playing craps. It was only after having met professional dice setters that I learned that what Pappy did was to influence the dice, thereby insuring his steady income.
He also mentioned that I should stay way from anyone so ashamed of his name that he would have to call himself the “Captain of Crap,” or just “The Captain.”
“This ol’ boy,” he said, “talks himself up a storm. But he doesn’t know anything about dice or craps.”
“Scheis,” he said, “witnessed my secret methods–and those of his older brother. But he never learned how to do ’em. But that didn’t stop him from sellin’ snake oil. He went everywhere selling what he thought was nothing more than ‘good luck.'”
He looked sternly at me and said, “Promise me that, when it comes to gamblin’, you’ll never listen to anybody called ‘The Captain,’ or to anybody else as stupid as that guy was.”
“I promise,” I said. And so it is today.
Morton
I was a college freshman. It was New Years eve 1979. At the bar in Resorts I met the beautiful Playboy pin-up of the day Barbie Benton. After some small talk we went to her suite where we had an incredible love making session. About 3 AM, while sipping Champaign, we heard furious knocking at the door.
Barbie wrapped a sheet around her beautiful naked body and answered the door. When the door opened a short man that resembled a garden gnome was excitedly yelling, “Arm, Arm, the big guy needs you downstairs, we are getting killed at the craps table. Barbie replied why would you need me? You have the big guy with you. The gnome replied he can’t shoot. He in juried his shooting finger. It seems he was punched in the nose and his finger was fractured.
While Barbie was putting her pajamas on. The gnome explained that Barbie was an expert craps shooter known as “The Golden Arm” she developed a one of a kind “knuckle ball” shot. It seems she was once Phil Niekro’s girlfriend and he taught her how to adapt his pitch to craps.
As we entered the casino I saw a roped off craps table. There was a large group of guys including a doctor in a surgical scrubs, another was apparently a dentist as he had a drill in his back pocket. At the head of the table was the Bell Captain from the front desk, He had on one of those bellman caps. He was the leader and he was referred to as Bellboy or Captain Bellboy. Barbie the Golden Arm grabbed the dice in her knuckle grip and rolled until the sun rose.
A giant crowd was gathered around the table. Large crowds bring pick pockets and this was no exception. After a while I heard a guy screaming that his Brannock Device was stolen. At the time I did not know what a Brannock device was so I asked the guy. The man told me it was a device for measuring feet he uses at his shoe store job.
He came to play the big wheel and saw the crowd when he was robbed. I saw the shoe salesman months later we began talking. He said after watching the Arm he figured a way to toss the dice perfectly. It seems he was practicing in the Thom McCann by using a shoe horn and tossing the dice into a Jimmy Choo high heel box.
This is a true story. If you do not believe me you can ask the witnesses that were there, Roger Raymond and Jimmy Dice.
Nicklemidnight
It all started more than 50 years ago one December morning when I was a child of 7 or 8. An aunt had given me a child’s board game that included two dice. The day after the Christmas gift was opened, my Dad was playing the game with me.
“This is kind of a lame game, son,” I remember Dad saying. “Let me teach you a MAN’S game — craps.” As my father took a grocery sack and drew a rough layout with a crayon, he explained how to play craps and he told me of some of his exploits in the Army during World War II.
“While I was just a buck private, I was so skilled with the dice that I became known as the ‘Sergeant of Shooters,’ “my Dad told me. “Eventually, I was known simply as ‘The Sergeant,’ ” he said.
Dad put the dice in my hands that very first time and a huge feeling of excitement came over me that I have never in intensity experienced since. Dad told me, “Son, let me show you how to hold them and throw them and you will become a dominator in this game!”
What followed were weeks and weeks of practice, after school and on weekends. I first practiced my toss against my bedroom wall, then into a peach crate (with one end sawed off) set on our long kitchen table. Did my mother mind? Hardly! She was a “soft touch” for father-son “togetherness.” I fondly remember her saying, “Isn’t it cute that your Dad is your dice coach.”
There was so much I learned from my Dad. A little bit of a heavy-set man, he taught me “See a Horn, bet a Horn” as a mainstay comeout play. He taught me the different sets to bring out desired point numbers. “See this little vee set with the 2’s, and this bigger vee set with the 3’s — I was the person who invented these,” said my father.
On our peach box/kitchen table practice rig, he would have hands of 100 or more tosses on dozens and dozens of occasions. His record was 449 throws before a seven-out on a practice hand that went on more than six hours. How vividly I remember it!!!
A few years later, when I was in my late teens, Dad took me to Las Vegas. While I wasn’t 21 at the time, being mature looking for my age, I was never asked for my ID. This was in the early 1960s, and Dad was — you’d better believe me — far better at a real craps table than our practice rig! There were monster rolls morning, afternoon and night at casinos all along the Strip.
John Scarne happened to be in Las Vegas that same week and witnessed one of my Dad’s 150-plus toss hands. “Your Dad, the Sergeant, really is the best I’ve ever seen — and I’ve seen ’em all,” said Scarne.
Dad and I played a little blackjack from time to time to “take a break” from the crap tables. Once on that early 1960s trip, while playing BJ, my father and I met a scholarly looking man who turned out to be a math professor. This man had an avid analytical interest in blackjack. “Let’s have a cup of coffee together and I’ll teach you how to count cards, Professor Thorpe,” my father told the man. “Don’t get me wong (Dad had a bit of a problem saying R’s) but I alone invented card counting,” Dad said.
That Las Vegas trip is a collage of fantastic memories. It was followed by many, many more trips together to Glitter City. On each visit to Las Vegas, many people came up to my father to greet “The Sergeant.” I worshipped my Dad for the adoration and respect he got from players, dealers and “suits” alike. Every craps stickman and dealer treated the “Sergeant” with total respect, letting him take as much time as he needed to set and throw the dice.
Many people asked about the books they had heard my father was writing about craps, blackjack and all other casino games. Dad would tell everyone who inquired about his planned books: “You know, it’s a Doey-Don’t situation.” He would explain: “Should I ‘Do’ this and tell the world these gambling secrets, or is it better that I ‘Don’t’. “
Dad did write those books on craps, blackjack “as a business,” roulette and all other games, but he never had the chance to have them published. On our way to a New York book publisher in the late 1970s, we first stopped at Atlantic City as its first casinos were opening. There was an early-morning break-in at our hotel room while we were at the tables. All of his manuscripts were stolen. It broke my father’s heart.
“Some slob let ee self into our room (Dad had a bit of a Scotch accent) and stole my life’s work,” my father shouted in anger and anguish.
My Dad was never the same after that theft. His anger smoldered and then grew as he began to hear from player acquaintances that a New York real estate developer, known as a real “captain” in his field, was using my father’s ground-breaking gambling innovations.
Still in all, I told my father many, many, many times over the years: “Dad, what’s important is that I KNOW that you are the best, the very best, at any casino game, any place, any time.”
Mastercrapsman
Aboard our tincan USS Vogelgesang, we call him Dice Mc Call. Though his real name is Harry Mc Call. The saltiest E4 I have ever met. Wears the WWII Pacific Campaign Medal among his chestfull of medals and five red hashmarks (20 years service) in his sleeve on formal inspections.
He got his nickname shooting dice at the ASW helo hangar. He plays dice against the single E-5s and E-6s who have less time in the Navy than he had spent in the chow line and payline combined.
I got a chance to watch this Bro operate with the dice one night when I had to go find him so we can prepare the midrats (midnight rations) while we were plane guarding in the Tonkin Gulf.
I watched him pick up the dice, the dots forming the Vee (to commemorate the Victory in the Pacific, he told me later) He is kneeling on the blanket and facing starboard and waits for the starboard ship’s roll before he would throw the dice. His hand movement was deliberate and slow like he does with the poached eggs quite a contrast when he is scrambling country style eggs. This mate was rolling the inside numbers after inside numbers, sometimes bullfrogging the same numbers the next throw. Had to leave while he was rolling so I can cover for him.
The next morning I found a wad of twenties on my ditty bag courtesy of Dice Mc Call. I got me a nice sum of liberty money for our scheduled R & R in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Being single at that time, of course most of the money went to Mamasan for a night with her nice looking (that is how she introduced her) niece Meihling. My first piece… mind you. That is why I’ll never forget my shipmate Dice Mc Call.
Dice Mc Call retired when our ship pulled in at the D & S (destroyer and submarine) Pier in Norfolk, VA. He retired an E-4 although got busted in rate twice for fighting at the messdeck. The Skipper gave him field promotions twice too. The guy never got seasick and was a hell of a hard worker, rough seas in all.
He did not want a formal ceremony, just wanted to go home to Philly. He told me…”I want my shipmates to go home to their families instead of standing a few hours for inspection”.
That’s the kind of shipmate he was… always looking out for the troops.
I found his collection of Motown records and a pair of dice on my bunk the day he left.
What a shipmate.
Fair winds and following seas Dice Mc Call, wherever you are!
Jeffrey47
The fire at the old MGM wasn’t as much my fault as everyone wanted to believe. A confluence of energy? Yes. Intentionally set? Absolutely not, at least not by me.
My trial on the arson and murder charges would have been more high-profile had it not been kept so completely under wraps. The judge had gagged the lawyers, sequestered the jurors, and closed the courtroom. When I last checked, the court file and all the transcripts were still being called “missing.” I suppose the international insurance conglomerates wield their power in ways we don’t dare to imagine. Certainly the press has always seemed weirdly muted about the whole fiasco.
With my acquittal, and after all the forensic investigations concluded, Krikorian collected of course, and everything at the MGM was replaced down to the last paperclip in the counting room. My heart sank when the property was later dealt to Bally’s.
The realization that I had a valuable skill in my extra-sensory and psychokinetic powers hadn’t sunk in yet when, at about ten years old I was mystifying my mom’s Mah Jong clatch with card tricks. I can still hear my mom’s best friend, Edna, saying “With talent like that, L’il Jeff, you could make a fortune in Vegas.” They all cackled like chickens and I never let on that I could barely tolerate the heady smell of their combined perfumes, along with the cigarette smoke, the chopped liver and onions, and the alcohol.
As a psych major in college, I had read about experiments at Duke University in the 40’s with dice and psychokinesis (PK), and that’s pretty much when the light bulb went on. Professor Rhine had reported that caffeine aided in the effect, so I began consuming Nodoz and instant Yuban and sliding dice on boards, eventually tossing them onto my desk, and later onto a little “practice rig” I devised that, by the way, would become the standard with dicesetters later and came to be known as a “practice rig.” Well into the wee hours I experimented, for weeks. And I kept meticulous records.
It didn’t take long, though, in my heightened state of extra-sensory, caffeine-buzzed, way-beyond-Carson-time consciousness to ascertain that not only could I influence the dice a little bit with my PK abilities, but they could also be arranged and tossed in ways that would add to my telekinetic skill and produce winning outcomes a lot more often!
Weirdly, however, there were some dice arrangements – one in particular that I’d set with the two dice exactly the same but without the snake-eyes or boxcars (all the “hardway” outcomes showing) – which seemed to actually produce poorer results even as my PK skills continued to improve (unless I bet the don’t and only used the set after the comeout)! Go figure. There is still a lot we don’t understand about psychic energy.
One thing that Rhine had found, and which, unfortunately, I had not fully understood at the time, was that PK skills seem to become progressively more effective as the subject’s targets for his PK energy’s attention increase in number.
That’s why things got so out of hand, I think.
There I am in the MGM craps pit. The dice are doing exactly what I’d learned to make them do at home. The cheering had finally become deafening, the crowd around the table had grown to about three or four deep. It wasn’t that I actually kept the dice for those 5 hours. It was just that nobody else ever wanted to toss them for themselves – even when I rolled an occasional loser.
And as you looked around the dice pit, it was becoming clear that I was not the only one getting hot. The other tables were packed too, and they were getting equally loud; all the tables were dumping. After a while, it was just pandemonium in the entire craps pit. Chip fills weren’t coming fast enough, and no one was leaving.
I realized Rhine had been right. Some forty years after his experiments, I was proving him correct in a big way. As I stood there and just kept tossing, and as the dice on every one of the nearby tables kept obeying my will, nobody knew it but me. PK! I was concentrating on the dice and my targets had become all the dice rolling on all the tables in the pit. My PK skills peaked in a frenzy of an every-gambler’s wet dream of a prolonged, relentless, widespread, and irreversible casino losing streak, mind over matter forcibly beating back every applicable law of probability. Mind overcoming mother nature herself, it seemed.
When the fire alarm sounded I was sure someone was simply hoping to take me out of the zone. But the alarm could barely be heard over the cacophony. When the smell of smoke started coming, though, well you’ve never seen anything like it. Talk about heat. First the screams; then the disbelief; then the utter panic. Nobody could possibly carry all their chips even if they wanted to, and those that tried, dropped most of them, sending bodies diving to the carpet like wild animals. Players, dealers, cocktail waitresses, even bystanders were all groveling over one another for the chips.
Like everyone else downstairs, I eventually escaped before the actual firestorm came and consumed the casino. I managed to take a fistful of purple chips home with me, and without even realizing it, I’d stuffed the pair of dice I’d been throwing in my pocket. I still love having those little mementos.
It wasn’t the eye in the sky or any witness accounts of my actual tossing that nearly caused me that wrongful conviction for aggravated grand arson and murder. It was the aggressive investigators who found my storehouse of used dice, my practice rig, and all my research notes on PK at my apartment — plus a clever prosecutor who proceeded on the novel theory that “this was no accident” – and that my PK skill was just not to be condoned in a righteous community like Las Vegas.
I was painted not only as an eccentric and dangerous dabbler in a very dark voodoo magic, but also as a racketeer with an elaborate scheme to defraud the casino and its shareholders and the insurance companies that stood to payout hundreds of millions in claims. Only jurors could quash the scheme, prosecutors argued, by finding me guilty, since, due to some quirky language in the insurance contract, arson by a winning patron was not a covered risk, only arson by losers — or by valet-parking employees.
My defense of course centered on the casino’s motive to torch the place, given all the money being lost to players in the craps pit. There was some testimony on my behalf about some frayed wires and a purely accidental fire, but I never believed it. My lawyer insisted we get that in.
For all the clever antics of the prosecution, in the end jurors must have concluded I’d only exhibited a purely physical skill when, in my in-court dice throwing demonstration, I rolled 24 primary hits in a row, twice (in one run,19 of them were the hard 6) and exhibited an astonishing 47:1 SRR over the 240 rolls of the demonstration, rolling just 5 sevens. Since there had been no smoke and no fire in the courtroom, even with all that skill on display, I had to be innocent. As my lawyer told jurors in closing argument: “If the hardways hit – you must acquit.”
Sadly, the day after the trial ended, a fire broke out at the courthouse. The cause was found to be a smoldering electrical short in the very courtroom where my trial had taken place. Go figure.
In case you’re wondering how I could afford Johnny’s millions in lawyer’s fees; I won every penny off the tables in Vegas before and during trial, using only my physical skills, no PK, though it was always tempting.
If you’re ever playing craps in a big casino on the strip, and you notice that all the tables are dumping at the same time – it’s probably just me, finding it impossible to resist the urge to use my powers once again. If you hear a fire alarm, Soft Touch is right, head for the cashier’s cage.
Kelph
First let me say that while some of you may know me from my posts here and on other boards, I do not have a readily recognizable name as a DI master even though my abilities can be quite frightening. Why? Cover my friends. I write about being so-so, and when I know I’m being carefully observed at the tables by casino personnel or players who may know me, I deliberately screw up my shooting. It’s all about cover.
My first trip to Vegas was on a business trip in the late 60’s and an eye opener. I saw and felt all the excitement of casino table games, especially Craps, but didn’t know a damn thing about them. This led me into some deep thought when I returned to my new home and city, Los Angeles. While I always enjoyed playing games and friendly competition from child to manhood, I had never seriously gambled and wouldn’t until I felt I had enough knowledge and training to win. The game I decided to make my primary focus was Craps.
I, like many others before me, bought every book I could about Craps and quite a few systems in the attempt to learn any hidden secrets or advantage that might be nestled therein and easily overlooked by the majority of readers. Mostly what I learned was that the majority of writers were saying the same trite things that didn’t pan out in my testing. The approaches of the so called experts might vary, but the actual results were rather disappointing.
As I moved on to study Probability and the Law of Large Numbers, I began to realize that if my play was merely based on different approaches I was accepting the Casino’s limiting view of how the game worked and therefore their built-in advantage. It was at this epiphany of realization that several things became very clear to me.
Trends are short-term random number Probability aberrations feeding into the grander organized Law of Large Numbers. Some of my books, systems, articles and newsletters made quick or fleeting references to some allegedly skilled players with special shooting abilities which may or may not have been improved by certain carefully selected face sets on the dice. I had now reached a new plateau in my climb to the mountain top of Craps Nirvana.
It now seemed obvious that one would need to affect Probability in order to break out of the accepted limits casinos had believed carved in stone. I eagerly took on this challenge. The family pool-table was converted into a makeshift Craps table so I could experiment on how to gain some type of potential and hopefully consistent control of the dice.
To make this short, I discovered through lots of trial and error, that I could skillfully toss the dice on axis and thereby reduce the amount of randomness in the outcome. Furthermore, through careful examination of which numbers appeared on each position of each die’s face when combined with the skilled toss, I could not only reduce randomness but potentially increase the frequency appearance of certain numbers. Nirvana was within my reach, practice would make it possible, actual casino experience would make it better. This took a couple of years of honing to achieve.
Each business trip to a city with gambling allowed me to further test and refine my skill. As I added purely gambling trips to my schedule, I began to recognize the faces of certain other players who obviously also traveled around the country to play. Some even made a living at Craps. This was a two-way street as I also was being noticed, especially for my so called “superstitious rituals”. I was happy to share what I had discovered with these other serious Crapsters, but as human nature is, some believed, some didn’t and some just thought it way too hard to even try.
Me, I’m a loner when I play. Some of these other guys travel with their buddies, but being a buddy doesn’t mean they play at the same level or with the same skill. Mostly they’re hanger-ons, who scratch out a living off the rolls of other better players or are continually borrowing new stakes from their better playing friends.
One stands out in my mind but I’m too much of a gentleman to mention his name. Let’s just say he was a short, obnoxious sycophant (call him SOS) in the group of one of the many friends (call him Pops) I made in my early years of playing.
SOS was always asking questions, yelling at all the table players to watch what I was doing, my set, my toss and how I bet.
While I was happy to teach Pops and his friends, SOS was causing me way too much heat at the tables and finally had to ask Pops to either keep SOS quiet when we all played together or away from the table if he couldn’t shut-up. That was always SOS’s big problem; he just didn’t have enough common sense to keep a good thing quite. End result was that I taught Pops what I learned with Pops telling SOS not to join the group at the tables while I was there.
As it turns out, SOS was/is a sneaky and vengeful little SOB. A couple of years later, once he felt I had imparted all I knew, he instigated a breach in my friendship with Pops using several untruthful allegations I prefer not to go into explaining. I firmly believe that Pops and I could have straightened out the entire matter except he soon suffered a coma producing stroke that left him in a State run nursing home the last twenty years before he passed. May his gentle soul rest in peace.
Needless to say I decided to back off sharing my hard learned information with anyone else. However, the cat was out of the bag and the other members of Pops group passed on the basics to friends as did any other astute players who had repeatedly witnessed my phenomenal hands at various tables over those years. Smart players with brains picked up on the basics and had a head start working out what took me years of hard work and sweat to accomplish. If I sound bitter, I’m not….except for one small SOB.
SOS, with the only control on his oily and seedy personality hospitalized and comatose, began presenting himself as a key member at the very heart of this method of dice control. I’ve watched him become famous (infamous) and rich by presenting selective truths woven into whole cloth lies. SOS’s trouble is that he was never any good at telling the truth and not any better at telling lies. Anyone who takes a little time to dig into whatever he writes (and re-writes) can plainly see the shifting sands of his clouded mind.
I’m not writing this because I want recognition. I’m writing because SOS doesn’t deserve it.
(NOTE – believable fiction is best when combined with a small amount of truths that add credibility to the fabric of lies it contains. If the lies are too excessive, the truths will not help. Hopefully you have found this to be an entertaining and almost believable recounting of the true beginnings of Dice Influencing.)
