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BGonline.org Forums
soft vs hard
Posted By: Colin Owen In Response To: soft vs hard (Bob Koca)
Date: Sunday, 12 February 2017, at 6:26 p.m.
If shaken sufficiently well then I guess that the loss in the approach to randomness could be negligible with a weak roll. But it still concerns people, like Neilkaz and others, that players roll the dice properly. The Tournament Backgammon Rules and Standards Guide state:
"When cups are in use, both the shake and the toss are important, required randomizing components."
Don't forget that a skilled dice mechanic can give the appearance of shaking. One die is held just inside the lip, with the other die shaken, and sometimes hitting it. There was a very interesting thread about 4 years ago. Here's a key post:
http://www.bgonline.org/forums/webbbs_config.pl?noframes;read=139185
I think it's about reducing doubt and grey areas. You say if dice were shaken in accordance with the rules - but what exactly is that? What is 'vigorous'? Sounds remarkably subjective, and there are plenty of players who try to stretch the definition way down, in practice. I do definitely prefer a quantified minimum number of 'up and down' shakes in the rules. That being said, I recently added some clear adhesive bumpers to the bottom of a Svilo Round Classic Cup. These cups are great in that, as well as a large lip, they already have a bottom bumper - few other cup makers do this - so dice will tend to turn even when shaken merely from side to side. The bumper is about 15 mm diameter, and I added eight 7-8 mm ones evenly spaced around it. If you skid the dice even quite lightly they are turning all the time! How many of them you actually need to approach randomness though, I don't know. So it helps if dice are rolled properly too. This is the kind of thing I used:
Randomness is relative to the observer, isn't it? I mean, for a roulette cheat with a computer measuring the release speed of the ball, he has an idea what section of the wheel the ball is more likely to settle in, so it's not random for him, it's pseudo-random. For all others at the table it is random. My point is that for the player on shake his roll may actually be random - but his opponent may not know that.
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