Beginner's Luck

AP News story that I pulled off excite.com:
May 24, 4:08 PM (ET)

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) - Saturday was a record-setting night for a novice craps player at an Atlantic City casino.

Patricia Demauro set a new record for the longest craps roll, hanging on for four hours and 18 minutes at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa.

Borgata officials say she beat the previous record by one hour and 12 minutes. They say Stanley Fujitake of Honolulu, set that record nearly 20 years ago in Las Vegas.

"This was only my second time playing craps, so this was very exciting for me to be a part of history," says Demauro, who lives in Denville in northern New Jersey.

Demauro bought into a game for $100 and quickly amassed a cheering crowd. When she finally lost around 12:31 a.m., after 154 rolls of the dice, she was greeted by Borgata with a champagne toast.

The casino wouldn't say how much Demauro won.

link to source article

Doing some math, 4:18 is 258 minutes. 154 rolls in 258 minutes is 1 roll every 0.5969 minutes, which is a roll every 35.8 seconds. Although I've never actually timed it, this seems like a fairly typical scenario - it takes about that much time to pay people off and get the dice back to the shooter.

I also wonder how many 7's she rolled during this time. The odds would say it was around 9 or 10. Obviously, to not crap out, she would have to roll a 7 when she was establishing a point (puck in the "off" position). So I'm wondering if she rolled an "average" number of 7's and just got lucky with the timing, or if she rolled an extremely low number of 7's.

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