Six Sigmas Out: The Testimony of Diceboy, the World's Luckiest Man
By: Tilt Boys

Whether it’s an uncanny ability to find a parking spot, or to be saved from stampeding wildebeest by Masai warriors, or simply rampaging through the Tiltboy’s home games, Dave Lambert, a.k.a Diceboy, has always led a charmed life. This has led the other Tiltboys to conclude that he was born ‘six sigmas out’ from the rest of the world. A sigma, as far as our non-Stanford educated minds can grasp, is a kind of unit for measuring statistical probability (but don’t write us smug letters if we’re wrong). Anyway, here’s the Diceboy…

I remember my first time playing Hold’em. I was a junior in college back at Stanford and there was a little tiny hole-in-the-wall club called The Petunia Club. All they had was a $1/$2 Hold’em game. I went down with a friend and we just saw this game that we’d never heard of. We sat down and were afraid to play a hand. I think we played for an hour and my friend won $30 and I lost $20 or so. I went back a week or so later with a hundred bucks and basically played every
single hand. I went on the biggest rush I’ve ever known, and in an hour I’d won $300 in a $1/$2 game. If I needed a double- gutshot runner-runner straight to make a hand, it would just happen. But of course, I had no idea that I was getting lucky. I just thought to myself, “This has
got to be the easiest game in the world.”

I was standing in line with this mountain of chips, waiting to cash-out, and the dealer came up to me and said, “I’ve been dealing this game for fifteen years and I’ve never seen a streak like that.”

“Oh,” I thought.

Of course, I got better over the years and my style changed, but the luck stayed with me. Even if I rile people up and put them on tilt, they’re still happy to play with me. The general view is that I’m just this wild player – exactly the kind of guy they want at the table – and they just happen to have caught me on this night when I keep getting real lucky.

But it’s not just poker. Phil Gordon and I were roommates for while, and we had this running tally as to how much money we owed each other. I was so good at Roshambo (Rock-Paper-Scissors) that the other Tiltboys would stop playing with me. Phil Gordon was basically subsidizing my rent. I remember we were at a McDonalds and we Roshamboed, best of five, to figure out who would pay for the meal. I won 5-0, which meant he owed me double. Just for fun, we decided to carry on to see how long it would take for him to win. I beat him 17 times straight (without tying once). I think if you had to the time to figure out those odds, they’re something like over 100,000:1.

But contrary to popular belief, there is skill and game theory involved in Roshambo. Back in the mid-nineties, Tiltboy Perry Friedman, who’s a genius computer programmer, created a ‘Roshambot’, which was an A.I. Roshambo player. You would log in on and it would track all your history – every time you’d played it before – and it would remember and learn your tendencies. This machine would absolutely dominate most people over the long term. Even if you thought you were playing completely randomly – you wouldn’t be – and it would beat you. I was winning significantly against the machine within a few months, and Perry was calling up going crazy, because he’d implemented some kind of emergency protection procedure so that, when it got too far behind, it would revert to random. “This isn’t possible,” he screamed. “You’re
beating random!”

My nickname, incidentally, didn’t come from my luck at the craps tables. It came from one of our home games at which Perry announced, quite out of the blue, that he could speak backwards. Phil had a keyboard that could reverse speech, so he got Perry to speak into it. I had been particularly lucky that night playing poker, and when Phil played back Perry’s nonsensical statement, it said: “Dave is Diceboy.” Everyone thought it kind of apt.

You can read all about the Tiltboys adventures in Tales From the Tiltboys, out now! Buy it at www.tiltboys.com, only $19.99