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Comment by ultimafan | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to think about- would it really matter if the casino was loading their dice? Craps allows you to bet for/against almost every possible bet and you usually have people playing pass/don't pass and come/don't come on the same table. Offering weighted dice to screw some players out of their money is probably going to result in the other players making just as much if not more back. Superstitious players absolutely would notice a "streak" and switch their bets to match it, and the casino isn't going to be able to swap/take away the dice without killing the vibe and making those same players cash out.

Feels like it's in their best interest to have a "fair" game where they skim some percentage of odds off the top.

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For a casino? In practice, yes, fair games are perfectly consistent with greedily skimming a game, and fair games draw gamblers.

That said, when organized crime gets involved, somebody always thinks "if I rig this, I'll do EVEN BETTER!" Maybe they're a corrupt employee skimming from the house, maybe they're a loyal employee skimming for the house, but unless you have something like the Nevada Gaming Control Board forcing fairness on them, you basically never get it. At least, from what I've read on the subject. Source: I've read some books on card counting & otherwise beating the odds in casinos, and this my vague memory.

And it's ironic that the house wants to rig games, because a biased game means a mathematically savvy individual can go in and calculate how results differ from "fair" games, and can then skim some profits for themselves if the bias is larger than the house advantage.

A lot of money in craps gets bet on odds that are close to even-money. It's hard, I think, to weight dice so that the house would increase their take by a measurable amount.

A lot of the effective value of a casino is gamblers ruin -- gamblers stop betting when they run out of money, but the house can't run out of money. If the game has sufficient variance and the players are not aware of the bias, then the house still wins.

It's for a reason similar to this that the only game I will play in casinos is craps.

It's not hard to imagine ways to get cheated out of a "fair" bet in card games, roulette, slots, etc. whether it's a mechanical cheat, sleight of hand, adjustment of odds, or whatever. Not saying it happens or is even a common occurrence but it's very easy to imagine ways it COULD happen or has happened in the past that are impossible for the player to detect.

Craps is the only game it feels like to me where provided the payout odds used are the same standard you see everywhere and the dice aren't metallic there is virtually no way to cheat the player/a bet in a way that wouldn't also benefit another player/another bet.

I would guess that only playing low value games is another strategy against the house cheating. And you can't lose much.

For the house or a croupier to cheat, the benefits versus the risks would need to be high enough (more likely in high value games?)

Cheaters might be able to sneak in some loaded dice, so the dice being easy to inspect is good for the house.

It doesn't hurt for them to make it easier for the more paranoid players to inspect stuff.

Also there's the scenario of an employee colluding with a player.

Nothing to do with scruples, but I don't think casinos need to load dice too. They already have 'loaded the maths' and this is in the open - over time they win. Why act covertly in an underhand way, whilst also providing the opportunity for gamblers to test themselves against probability? You'd think they wouldn't want to jeopardise their market provision and need the belief of their consumers to maintain this.

It is in their best interest to have a fair game. The transparent dice are to prevent the players from cheating the casino, not prove it's fair to the players.

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