John Nelsen is a former CrapsPit contributor whose practical table-position account remains in the site archive. This page documents what CrapsPit can responsibly attribute to him; it does not turn an old contributor relationship into a broader claim of professional gambling authority.
Background recorded by CrapsPit
CrapsPit’s original contributor note described John as a retired engineer with experience working with probability and statistics. It also recorded his long-standing interest in dice, casino craps and the mathematics behind the game. That information came from the site’s contributor relationship rather than an independently published professional biography.
John’s useful perspective was practical: understand the probabilities, separate table atmosphere from mathematical expectation, and notice how position and crew interaction affect the experience of playing. No betting pattern can make a fair casino game profitable by changing its house edge.
Verified contribution in the current archive
Table Position Can Make or Break Your Playing Experience preserves John’s preference for an end position, his warning about crowding the stickperson’s working space and his memory of a small six-seat table where the people around him changed the social experience.
John’s account connects position with room to handle chips, visibility of the layout and the social experience around the stick. Those are practical preferences, not evidence that an end position or lively group changes the dice probabilities.
Editorial and authorship boundary
Some old CrapsPit pages used broad “team of pros” credit boxes that did not reliably distinguish a named contributor’s words from later site edits. During the 2026 rebuild, those generic attributions are not being treated as proof that John wrote an article. A page is associated with him only when its surviving source and editorial record support that attribution.
John is not the current editor of CrapsPit, and this profile should not be read as his endorsement of later revisions, gambling operators or promotional claims. Current mathematical, legal and safety statements are reviewed by CrapsPit under the site’s present editorial standards.
How to read a contributor archive
Treat an archive page as a layered record. First identify what the named contributor personally observed. Then separate that account from calculations, legal information, and safety guidance added during a later review. A preserved anecdote can document table culture without proving a betting claim.
- Follow the linked article to see the surviving contribution in context.
- Use the publication and update dates to distinguish the original period from the current review.
- Check mathematical claims against the current rules and payout guides.
- Do not infer that an archived contributor endorses later edits, casinos, or promotions.
Use the position advice for comfort and visibility
At a crowded table, first check whether you can see your wagers, hear the crew’s calls and keep your hands outside the dice path. An end position may suit a player who prefers a wider view, while a position closer to a dealer may make short questions easier. Neither location improves the next-roll combinations.
Before moving around the table, ask the dealer how your chips and active wagers will be identified. Do not carry dealer-managed Place or Odds chips to a new position yourself. The position guide gives John’s account in context; the etiquette guide explains buying in and changing action. These links let you apply the practical lesson without confusing comfort with a gambling advantage.
So this John Neslon guy writes an article about how dice control is a “scam” and “pure nonsense”.
With that said how are you going to show us “how to optimize betting
partterns to give the greatest opportunity to win.”? Everyone
knows
the lowest house edge bet on a craps table is the line bets. And trust
me, you won’t be transforming anyone into a “player who the casino will
fear” when you damn well know the casino has the odds in their favor.
Thanks __________, for your comment. We here at the Crapspit share the author’s view that dice control is, indeed, a scam designed to prey on the hopes and dreams of people looking to make a quick and easy buck.
The idea of dice control is, indeed, pure nonsense as explained in the material here at the https://www.crapspit.org . Any craps player in the world will never gain an advantage over the casino when playing a legal game of craps (i.e., not cheating). Never. There are no skilled dice doctors, dice kings, or dice wizards who can consistently affect the outcome of a legal dice roll (https://www.crapspit.org/golden-touch-craps-review/) such that he gains an advantage over the casino. Any suggestion otherwise is either out of ignorance or to con you into buying something (e.g., seminars, lessons, books, practice tables, etc.). So get the idea of using dice control to consistently beat the casino out of your head. We believe that you are only partially correct when saying that the best a player can do is to minimize the house advantage by playing the Pass and Don’t Pass with Odds. However, as explained in the material here at the Crapspit, that can and does get quite boring after standing at the table for a while. Our intent is to help players understand there’s a way to play that can make their time at the table more fun and exciting by taking advantage of the distribution variances that do, indeed, occur over time (i.e., hot and cold streaks — https://www.crapspit.org/hot-cold-craps-table/). We believe a more “optimized” way to play is to take advantage of the distribution variance instead of mind-numbingly playing the Pass and Don’t Pass roll after roll. You are encouraged to browse our site to learn this “optimized” method. The method is no secret, so please don’t think we’re offering any newfound system. We acknowledge that it’s nothing innovative. It’s simply a rock-solid way to play the hot and cold streaks without relying on the dice-control con. And don’t forget, when reading the material on this site, make sure you read the material as it relates to adapting to a cold table as well as adapting to a hot table (adapting to a cold table is just as important as adapting to a hot table). We understand but disagree with you your response regarding the phrase, “a player who the casino will fear.” You are correct that the casino won’t literally be afraid of a rock-solid player, but rather it may feel anxiety toward such a player who knows how to maximize his winnings during a hot streak and minimize his losses during a cold streak (i.e., the casino will likely think differently of you than the average player who plays less solidly, including the dice-control wannabes—that is, the casino may be uneasy over the prospect of an anticipated misfortune, which is a form of fear). In that sense, the casino will “fear” the rock-solid player who knows how to adapt and who knows how to take advantage of hot rolls. For example, if you bet only the Pass Line with Odds (as you mention in your comment) during a blistering hot roll, you’ll likely not win anywhere near as much as other players who adapt their betting patterns to take advantage of the hot streak. (Remember, hot and cold streaks do, indeed, occur in craps because of distribution variance.) ). We believe a more “optimized” way to play is to take advantage of the distribution variance instead of mind-numbingly playing the Pass and Don’t Pass roll after roll. You are encouraged to browse our site to learn this “optimized” method. The method is no secret, so please don’t think we’re offering any newfound system. We acknowledge that it’s nothing innovative. It’s simply a rock-solid way to play the hot and cold streaks without relying on the dice-control con. And don’t forget, when reading the material on this site, make sure you read the material as it relates to adapting to a cold table as well as adapting to a hot table (https://www.crapspit.org/hot-cold-craps-table/). We understand but disagree with you your response regarding the phrase, “a player who the casino will fear.” You are correct that the casino won’t literally be afraid of a rock-solid player, but rather it may feel anxiety toward such a player who knows how to maximize his winnings during a hot streak and minimize his losses during a cold streak (i.e., the casino will likely think differently of you than the average player who plays less solidly, including the dice-control wannabes—that is, the casino may be uneasy over the prospect of an anticipated misfortune, which is a form of fear). In that sense, the casino will “fear” the rock-solid player who knows how to adapt and who knows how to take advantage of hot rolls. For example, if you bet only the Pass Line with Odds (as you mention in your comment) during a blistering hot roll, you’ll likely not win anywhere near as much as other players who adapt their betting patterns to take advantage of the hot streak. (Remember, hot and cold streaks do, indeed, occur in craps because of distribution variance https://www.crapspit.org/craps-math/distribution-variance-casinos. )
Thanks again for your comment. We encourage this type of dialogue because it serves to help everyone better understand the realities of the game, which is what we strive for here at the Crapspit.
Editorial clarification — September 7, 2026: The reply above is retained as a historical response. Fair dice can produce hot-looking and cold-looking sequences, but those labels describe past results and do not predict the next independent roll. Changing a betting pattern after a streak changes exposure; it does not create a player advantage or improve the next-roll probabilities. The original reply is preserved for context.
Agreed, “dice control” are the wrong words but one can influence many of the tumbles and that along with the variance factor works very well. Mathematics aside, physics has something you may wish to consider as well.
Hi Jesse, thanks for your comments.
It sounds like you’re a proponent of dice control and you’re trying to make a case for its validity. No matter how you hard you try, you’ll never prove the validity of dice control to anyone other than suckers and dreamers.
We accept that it’s possible (possible, but we believe it’s not probable) to control the dice consistently enough to influence how the dice tumble after hitting the tabletop, but no one can influence how the dice bounce off the pyramid rubber (i.e., the little rubber spikes) on the back wall. We go into detail about the rubber spikes in our articles, so we won’t reiterate it here in this post. https://www.crapspit.org/dice-control-scam/
If you still believe in dice control after reading our articles ( https://www.crapspit.org/craps-dice/ ), then we’d like to challenge you to practice for the next 20 years (20 years ought to be enough time to master a dice-tossing technique). Then, if we’re all still alive in 20 years, we’d like to meet you in Vegas to watch you play a legal game of craps for ten two-hour sessions. The challenge must be spread over at least ten two-hour sessions because anyone and everyone, even a self-proclaimed dice doctor, can get lucky and have a single winning session. Prove us wrong and accept this challenge! At the end of the tenth session, we’ll see if you’re an overall winner or loser. If you’re an overall winner, maybe we’ll buy you a $50 steak dinner, but if you’re an overall loser, maybe you’ll by us one. The bottom line is that we believe dice control is a scam to get suckers and dreamers to spend their money on the products that the scammers sell.