Word: diced
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Greek tragedies, proud men and women roll their lives like dice against the gods and lose. Man proposes but fate disposes. Euripides, the most skeptical and psychologically minded of the classic tragedians, recognized that man is sometimes his own worst fate. Iphigenia in Aulis, presented last week at Manhattan's Circle in the Square in a translation by Minos Volanakis, shows men and women undoing themselves through ambition, power, lust, fear, guile and egocentric arrogance. At its heart, however, the play is a Grecian urn of tears, an incomparably moving lament for all who die young in war. Directed...
...item on gambling [Oct. 27] invites my observation: in throwing dice, the faces with more than three points come up, on the average, a bit more often than can be expected statistically. The physics of this: where the "holes" are more in number the faces are lighter. Accordingly, the center of gravity favors the 1-2-3 faces, and the faces 6-5-4, which are just opposite, come up. The potential energy of a system tends toward least. Physics or no physics, the theorem holds for your wallet...
...most do-they can go away at least feeling that they have had a fair shake. Then abruptly last week Nevada's gambling industry found its image marked with two black eyes; the state Gaming Control Board closed the big Lake Tahoe Hotel Casino after detecting crooked dice-the second casino in a month to be shut down for running a rigged crap game...
Tipped off that heavy losses were being racked up at the Lake Tahoe Hotel, agents from the Nevada attorney general's office infiltrated the dice game, stood in at the table for over an hour as one customer plunged deeper and deeper. The man they were watching was the stickman running the game, Clayton Gatterdam, 47, whom they spotted handling the dice instead of moving them with his stick, and occasionally reaching into his apron pockets between rolls. When the agents pounced, they found four pairs of mis-spotted dice in secret compartments in Gatterdam's apron...
...game Stickman Gatterdam was running was a setup for suckers. Each set of dice was mis-spotted differently-the gull being to let the roller establish his point with straight dice, then slip in the mis-spotted pair that would make the point unattainable. Thus, by using "even splitters"-numbers 1, 3 and 5 on one die and 2, 4 and 6 on the other-Gatterdam made certain that points 4, 6, 8 and 10 could never be made. Crapping out became inevitable. Since Nevada law holds that a casino is responsible for its employees and is liable to lose...