Sully's Stuff

Flip It!

Pittsburgh. Rolled in about 11PM from Palm Springs. On take off the weather was bright, sunny and 75, on landing, pitch dark and 37.

One of the oddest things about Palm Springs were the casinos. Casino's in California do not allow dice games. To play craps, they use cards. During the week we visited 2 different casinos and found 2 different approaches to playing craps with cards.

At Fantasy Springs, they have a "flipper" who manages a red and blue deck of 6 cards each. He manually shuffles the 6 decks like a shell game or 3-card monty. Then the cards are laid out in 2 rows of 6 and the "roller" calls out the 2 card positions to be flipped over. For example, if "1-4" were called the dealer would flip the first and 4th cards to reveal the roll.

At the Agua Caliente, multiple 6 card decks were fed into 2 separate automatic shuffle shoots. The flipper draws the first card from each and flips them over to reveal the roll, then removes the remaining 5 cards from each "roll" before moving on to the next draw.

Your preference for the 2 approaches probably depends on what you like. The Fantasy Spring version was SLOW, but you got the experience of passing the call around the table -- so you maintained that feeling of the hot roller or cheering for someone. In the second, you go the speed, but everyone is focused on the dealer.

posted by Sully @ 11/11/2005