Loaded Craps Dice

We have all seen them in the movies before: dice that hit a given number without fail.  The main character keeps rolling them and sure enough every time we see an eleven pop up, but could dice like this really exist?  Well, loaded dice are not a Hollywood invention, but in the real world they don’t always work so perfectly.  There a few popular types of loaded dice but there are just as many protections, put in place by the casino, to keep the cheaters at bay.  Remember, using loaded dice is not like implementing a craps system: it is illegal, and will likely get you in a lot of trouble.  This information is purely for education and entertainment.

The first, and most well known type of loaded dice is the weighted variety.  The idea here is that you add a weight to one face of the die.  This creates an unbalanced die by pulling the center of gravity towards that face.  When the dice are rolling the weighted side is being pulled down more than any other side and is therefore more likely to land facing down.  As long as the face on the opposite side of the dice is a valuable number, you will have a distinct advantage.  This technique is not new at all; in fact the earliest loaded die we know of was dug up from the remains of Pompeii!  After thousands of years of cheaters weighting dice, casinos know all about them and defend against them by using transparent dice, which are difficult to duplicate with internal weights.

Another popular kind of loaded craps die is made to be an irregular shape.  By skewing the perfect cube shape so that some faces are larger than others, you can drastically influence how the dice roll.  Dice like these are prone to land with the largest faces facing down, and the smallest faces on the sides/top.  When the casino security inspects a suspicious die, they can easily detect this fraud by measuring the dice with a micrometer.

The simplest way to ‘fix’ a set of dice is to change the number of dots painted on their faces.  If a particularly good number is on multiple faces of the die, that number is, statistically, far more likely to be shown than any other number.  As long as the duplicate numbers are on opposite sides they cannot be viewed at the same time and at a quick glance this technique is surprisingly hard to notice.

Even if you manage to produce a pair of fake dice they are incredibly difficult to use in a casino setting.  When you are handling the dice, all eyes are on you.  You can only handle the dice with one hand, which makes an effective swap very difficult, and if there is any suspicion that you are up to something, casino security will not hesitate to inspect the dice.  In modern casinos each die is marked with a unique serial number which serves a variety of quality control purposes, but also makes a fake die extremely easy to detect upon any scrutiny.  Loaded dice might be fun for magic tricks, and even help street performers scam some unsuspecting tourists, but in a live casino setting, even the best loaded dice are practically useless.

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