The manufacturers represented them as less biases. I do not have any statistics to back it up.
But it does make sense that the removal of any material would effect the rolling unless very sophisticated things were done to offset the remove of material.
Really? I've never heard of this, and I live in Vegas where fair dice are considered pretty important.
The pips on opposing sides always add up to 7, and each of the faces are balanced (1 is in the center, 2 is on opposing corners, 3 is a line, 4 is all the corners, and 5 is the corners and the center, 6 is two rows).
At least in craps, what the casinos worry about are fake dice, and not hitting the back wall with the dice. The back bumpy wall introduces a lot of randomness. Some people try to put the dice in various initial positions and roll them so that they only roll over one axis, to try to influence the rolls. The casino will throw you out if you don't hit the back wall repeatedly.
Also, over time the sharp corners of the dice get ground down just by friction. Uneven wear is also a problem, which is why they frequently switch out the dice.
Ah thanks, very interesting. This part was telling:
"Precision dice with rounded (or cut) corners are recommended where a limited rolling area is available, the cut corners allow the dice to tumble, in particular the smallest size of 1/2 inch (13 mm) are becoming increasingly used by many RPG gamers."
I didn't think about backgammon being a small dice rolling area, but that makes total sense.
Probably. Even the extra security features probably make them cost a lot more than cheap dice, and there's a lot more QA like spinning them on various axes to make sure they are balanced.
They make up a bit of that on the backend though, selling the dice to all the tourists. :)
