Roll of the Dice

My choice for a movie last night was a re-watch of the neo-noir The Big Town starring Matt Dillon and Diane Lane at her most stunning. I recommend it. The film was made in 1987 but is set in the mid-1950s. Matt plays a young professional craps shooter in Chicago. The Big Town can be enjoyed without expertise in the game which is fortunate because I understand the rules of craps only in the broadest outline. In its casino form the betting in craps is quite complicated. Street craps is usually considerably simplified, but the fast pace still can make it hard to follow for a newbie. For all that, it has a reputation as a workingman’s game, though at the upper levels gamblers play for very large stakes. Craps was invented in New Orleans in the early 19^th century, apparently deriving from the European dice game Hazard. It reached a peak in popularity in World War 2, but still has plenty of aficionados today. It has never been my game, but as a kid I generally liked board games with dice. They introduced a random element that nonetheless was literally in one’s own hands, thereby mirroring life itself.

Dice are very old, and probably derive from the casting of bones for divination: 6-sided knucklebones in particular, which continued to be used into Classical times. Ancient cube dice were commonly made from bone (or ivory), which gives this idea further credence. The pips (the dots) allowed numerology to enhance the divinations. Once dice were invented, of course, secular gambling with them was a natural. The oldest dice ever found were excavated in southeast Iran and date to at least 2500 BCE – perhaps centuries older. Not far behind are bone dice found at Skara Brae in Scotland, which date to at least 2400 BCE. They turn up in Egyptian tombs from 2000 BCE and also are found both in ancient China and India. Given the geographic spread of these finds, I think we can surmise that the actual origins long predate any of them. Dice of alternate shapes (e.g. 4-sided pyramids and 20-sided polyhedrons) also are ancient, but 6-sided cubes by far were, and are, the most common. The arrangement of pips were largely catch-as-catch-can until Roman times. The ancient Roman die was the same as a modern one, with opposite sides adding up to 7. The Romans enjoyed dice enough to use them as metaphors for taking a chance, just as we do today. Hence Caesar’s “Alea iacta est” (“the die is cast”) when he crossed the Rubicon on January 10, 49 BCE for a do-or-die showdown with the Senate. Dice didn’t disappear in the Middle Ages in Europe but became less common and non-standard. They made a comeback in the Renaissance. The Roman pip arrangement again became standard and has been with us ever since.
 
Modern dice come in three basic types: loaded, commercial, and casino. It is best to avoid loaded dice if one values one’s own health and safety. Commercial dice are the ones found in board games and toy stores. They are inexpensive and produce results that are random enough for informal purposes, but they almost certainly have unintended small biases in them. Casino dice are carefully crafted to be as perfectly balanced as possible; even the pips are filled with a polymer of the same density as the die itself so that they don’t introduce a bias. These, though somewhat costlier than commercial dice, are not actually expensive, but casinos change them every 8 throws or so, so they go through a lot of them.
 
Can a skilled dice player beat the odds – at least by a little? Maybe. Casinos try to get around this possibility in craps by requiring that thrown dice bounce off the back wall. This introduces enough unpredictability to make nonrandom outcomes very unlikely. Even in a straight throw, minor variations in motor control, geometry, and air resistance should be enough to ensure random results with balanced dice. Yet, maybe. Casinos make a good deal of money, though, off shooters who think they can do it. My bet is always on the House.
 
Have I ever made money with dice? Not much, but some. Back in college in a Business class we were told the dart theory of investing. Beating the S&P with any one investment is just a matter of luck, we were told, and picking stocks by throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal on average produces returns no better or worse than picking them after assiduous research, which necessarily is always incomplete. I believe this is still taught today. Some years back, I figured dice should work as well as darts, so after jotting down the names of a half dozen companies that I recognized, I rolled a die and picked that number on the list. John Deere did all right. Too bad I didn’t buy more.
 

Linda Ronstadt - Tumbling Dice