The Calculus Diaries - Jennifer Ouellette [27]
Sean is tickled when I tell him this (possibly apocryphal) story. Any serious gambler should have a cool nickname, he declares, and promptly dubs himself S-Money for the duration of our stay. We normally focus on poker when in Vegas, but this time, we’re interested in learning craps, because it is a natural fit for discussing the calculus of probability. Much of probability theory emerged from attempts to analyze games of chance, particularly those involving the throwing of dice, sticks, or bones. There is even a theorem known as the craps principle, dealing specifically with event probabilities under repeated trials. And what better way to explore that principle than to hit the craps tables in a bona fide casino?
There are many online guides to playing craps, some with in-depth analysis of all the related probabilities, but these tend to be dense and jargon-heavy. There are also online computer craps games where you can practice placing bets and rolling virtual dice without risking any actual money. But sooner or later, you have to step up and put your wallet on the line. Craps doesn’t really begin to make sense until you get your hands dirty and play the game in a real-world setting—like Las Vegas.
Craps is a raucous, fast-moving game—there is one roll of the dice every twenty seconds or so—and this pace can be intimidating for the average newbie still struggling to grasp the rules. So we have opted to take one of the daily introductory classes offered by the New York, New York casino. Our instructor is a dapper man, slight of build, with tidy salt-and-pepper hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a wry sense of humor, whom I dub Dominic. Dominic has been a dealer for thirty years and is happy to share not just the rules of craps but colorful anecdotes from Las Vegas history.19
He starts with basic protocol: how one handles the dice. When a new craps table opens, for instance, the dealer opens a fresh, factory-sealed pack of five dice, from which the inaugural “shooter” must select two. “Whatever you do, don’t grab all five dice, toss them across the table, and yell, ‘Yahtzee!’ ” Dominic cautions. Then everyone will know you’re a rube.
The dice must be held in one hand, to prevent players from surreptitiously switching in loaded dice. You aren’t allowed to rub the dice between both hands for the same reason, or kiss the dice (“You don’t know where they’ve been,” quips Dominic), and while it’s fine to lightly blow on the dice for good luck, we were advised not to get spittle on them, out of courtesy for the next shooter. By order of the Nevada gaming commission, the casino also requires that both dice bounce off the far wall of the table on each roll, lest certain players try to “rig” the roll. We all take turns practicing this. Dominic warns us not to throw the dice too hard, but that doesn’t stop one overexcited shooter from tossing them so forcefully that they bounce off the table—narrowly missing a drop down a buxom brunette’s cleavage.
THE DUKES OF HAZARD
Some version of craps has been around for centuries, although historical accounts quibble over the details. Did craps derive from an old game called hazard, popular with English knights during the Crusades as they laid siege to a castle called Hazarth in 1125 A.D.? Perhaps the game is Arabic in origin (al-zar in Arabic translates as “the dice”). Or does craps reach further back in history to the Roman Empire, when soldiers fashioned rough-hewn dice out of pig knucklebones? There are certainly references to the game in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and it was hugely popular in France by the seventeenth century, especially among the aristocracy.
We can credit a French-Creole American nobleman with the tongue-twisting moniker of Bernard Xavier Philippe de Marigny de Mandeville for bringing craps to America. The son of a count, Marigny was born to wealth