A world record in Atlantic City and the length of the shooter's hand at craps

Abstract

It was widely reported in the media that, on 23 May 2009, at the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa in Atlantic City, Patricia DeMauro, playing craps for only the second time, rolled the dice for four hours and 18 minutes, finally sevening out at the 154th roll, a world record. Initial estimates of the probability of this event were erroneous, but consensus was reached within days: one chance in 5.6 billion. More generally, what is P(L \ge n), where the random variable L denotes the length of the shooter's hand (154 in Ms. DeMauro's case) and n is a positive integer? It is well known that these probabilities can be derived recursively or by Markov chain methods. Our aim here is to give an explicit closed-form expression for them, showing that the distribution of L is a linear combination (not a convex combination) of four geometric distributions.