I wrote an interesting article about fixed, loaded and rigged craps dice that might be kind of interesting to read. It’s amazing how many different kinds of rigged dice there are and what types of clever tricks that cheaters will use to alter the performance of these dice. I listed about 20 different manipulations that are most common and there are hundreds more that could have been listed here as well.

The whole goal of fixing the dice is to get them to roll on certain numbers. This is one of the illegal forms of cheating unlike dice control, which is built and practiced as a skill. The dice are rigged so that they land on specific numbers. There are three main categories that I found as well that make up the majority of these crooked schemes!

The three types of dice are loaded dice, shaved dice and shaped dice. All the other kinds are basically subsets of these three main styles. A loaded dice usually consists of weight variations or something that alters the center of mass in a dice. For example, putting a small dumbbell inside a pair of dice to make one face heavier than the others so it will land on the surface of the craps table more often.

An example of a shaped dice is something that alters the form of the dice such as making the faces concave for convex. Also, cheaters can add slight variations of the ships like raised surfaces and even duplicate sides with the same number, sort of like a coin with both sides being heads.

Finally, a shaved dice is when you cut or rough up the dice in ways that certain sides “grab” onto the felt or cloth on the table, sort of like little hooks. The saw tooth edge or razor edge are two of the examples in the article that can do this. Other shaved variations include shaving off a side of the dice to make the whole general shape rectangular instead of cubic so the dice will land on the longer end instead of the short end. There are just tons of different little tricks that cheaters can do to the dice to rig them. In fact, some of them are clever enough to get away with even in modern casinos with transparent dice. Others are old and obvious finds as well.