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December 2008 · Previous · Next   PDFPDF

The golden touch:
Rolling with lords of the craps table

By Mattathias Schwartz

Mattathias Schwartz was the founder and editor of The Philadelphia Independent. He lives in New York City.

For the gambler, dice have long been the best machine with which to turn a small amount of energy into a large amount of uncertainty. For the philosopher, there is no handier piece of rhetoric with which to evoke the foggy relations between God and universe, universe and man, or man and his own affairs. And so as I watched two members of the Golden Touch Craps team construct a dice pit in a windowless conference room of the Hyatt Regency O’Hare, I could not help but feel as though I were witnessing the creation of a universe, a green, felt-covered, racetrack-shaped cosmos where the dice are subject to the will of man and the men, therefore, are gods.

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SEE ALSO: Craps (Game); Gambling; Gambling systems; Parapsychology
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December 2009

THE GENERAL ELECTRIC SUPERFRAUD
Why the Hudson River Will Never Run Clean
By David Gargill

THE MASTER OF SPIN BOLDAK
Undercover with Afghanistan’s Drug-Trafficking Border Police
By Matthieu Aikins

MERMAID FEVER
A story by Steven Millhauser

UNDERSTANDING OBAMACARE
By Luke Mitchell

Also: Dave Hickey and Wendell Berry

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