I've noticed this phenomenon in my practice quite often when I use the hardway set. It seems like many times when I throw a hardway number, that the dice end up in the same spacial orientation. For example: the dice land showing a hard 8. That means that each dice is showing a 4 but along with that each dice is showing a 1 pointing to the right. Could it be that the throw was so perfect that each dice moved with the exact same rotational motion until finally stopping? I find it hard to believe that I can do such a thing. Or maybe it's like the saying goes...even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while. Or is it that this is just coincidence? Has anyone ever analyzed this? Does it really mean anything? If it does mean something, how often would one expect this to occur randomly? At what rate of occurrence can you start to believe that this phenomenon is due to control?
I just considered this to be a random event because I thought that the pyramids would keep this from happening. That was until I read "Cutting Edge Craps" and started thinking about the different ways that dice can hit the pyramids. I guess now I have more questions than answers but I figured that some of you folks on here that know a lot more about this than me, probably have the answers. This may be more of an academic question than anything else but I'm interested to see how you folks weigh in on this one.

Replies:

Posted by: Timmer on June 11, 2013, 8:25 pm

Hello Lococraps,

What you describe is what we practice to try and accomplish!

From your post it's hard to say if your on-axis hard 8 was the result of chance or influence.

You'll know the answer once you've analyzed your results from a large enough sample to be statistically relevant.

Perhaps Skinny or some of the other great "math wonks" on our site will address your random occurence question...

8-) 8-) 8-)