By now most craps players have heard of the Golden Touch Craps dice control classes where we teach players how to develop a controlled dice throw geared to giving them influence over the dice and an edge over the house.

While some craps players think that controlled shooting is the same as "dice setting," nothing could be further from the truth. Dice setting, that is putting the dice a certain way before you throw, is only one of about eight necessary steps in gaining the advantage over craps with dice control. Just dice setting and then winging the dice down the table is not dice control.

Although I have been involved in this activity for two decades and have seen some of the best controlled shooters of all time such as the Captain, the world record holder for the longest hand of all time with 147 rolls before he sevened out; the Lee Brothers, a professional team; Dominator of Golden Touch Craps; and lastly I saw the best shooter who ever lived, a woman known as "the Arm"; there are still critics who think these people can’t do what I and others have seen them do – or that these people I just mentioned don’t even exist.

Oh, yes, there is also a professional DVD on the market (Golden Touch: Beat Craps by Controlling the Dice) which shows 200 unedited controlled throws. It’s hard to watch this DVD and not come away believing your own eyes.

Still there are skeptics. In fact, there are plenty of skeptics, most of whom have never taken a class, watched the DVD, or attempted to learn how to perform this skill on their own.

Here is one critic, Mr. Dale S. Yeazel, who wrote an article he posted on the web entitled "Controlled Shooting is Bullsh*t!" I now quote how he thinks controlled shooting has been disproved by an expert in the field.

I don’t know about you but I have no intention of believing anyone [about controlled shooting] other than an expert in the field of casino game protection. ….Steve Forte, author of "Casino Game Protection – A Comprehensive Guide….Mr. Forte conducted a test where he set the dice and dropped them straight down to a craps layout, from a height of ten inches. He recorded six thousand rolls and found no significant deviation from the expected results. And as he points out in his book, on a live crap game, the shooter is required to throw the dice higher, harder, farther and around obstacles that weren’t present in his test.

Now, despite the fact that Mr. Forte is an expert in "casino game protection" and has been recently arrested for allegedly running a cheating ring in Atlantic City, two facts emerge from Mr. Yeazel’s reference. The first and most obvious is the fact that being an expert in casino cheating methods doesn’t make one an expert in dice control, a legal activity. The second and more important fact is this – Mr. Forte’s experiment with holding the dice ten inches above the table and dropping them has nothing to do with dice control.

By analogy, you can’t disprove a pitcher can throw a ball 90 miles per hour by standing on the mound and dropping the ball straight down. The only thing you have proven by doing this is that a ball dropped straight down won’t go 90 miles per hour. What Forte proved dropping a pair of dice straight down onto the table from ten inches above the felt was that the results were random. As Homer Simpson says, "Duh!"

Mr. Yeazel and the alleged cheater Mr. Forte know no more about dice control in a modern casino than I know about brain surgery.

So how do I prove that dice control exists? That’s simple really. There is a three-pronged method for proving dice control exists and that you either have the skill or don’t have the skill. First, you catalogue about 20,000 rolls and see if your SRR, seven-to-rolls, ratio is better than 1:6, which is random. That means one seven appearing for every six rolls. If you have an SRR of 1:6.5 or greater in those 20,000 rolls, you can be confident that you are changing the randomness of a craps throw.

To make even more certain that you throw is really controlled, the next test is called SmartCraps, a software product that tells you if you have axis control of the dice. In SmartCraps there are three rigorous tests to pass – and it takes a highly skilled dice controller to pass all of them.

Once you have proven that you have the skill, now you have to see if you can actually do this in a casino. Now you keep a record of your casino sessions in terms of wins and losses. With SRR, SmartCraps, and casino sessions, you’ll know whether this is a real skill or the equivalent of dropping the dice straight down on the felt. One word of caution is called for. You must make the lowest house edge bets – even good dice controllers can’t beat the bad bets at a craps game.

The bottom line about controlled shooting is that Yeazel and his mentor Steve Forte are wrong.

Frank Scoblete, #1 best-selling gaming author, is director of Golden Touch advantage-play seminars in dice-control and blackjack. Websites: www.goldentouchcraps.com and www.scoblete.com. Recent books: The Virgin Kiss!, Golden Touch Dice Control Revolution! and Golden Touch Blackjack Revolution! Join Frank at The World Casino Championships in August of 2009 in fabulous Las Vegas. Go to: http://www.goldentouchcraps.com/wcc_2009.shtml for more information. To order Frank's products or free brochure, call 1-800-944-0406.