dice with death take serious risks.

☞ Dice with is used here in the general sense of 'play a game of chance with'. In the mid 20th century dice with death was a journalistic cliché used to convey the risks taken by racing drivers; the expression seems for some time to have been especially connected with motoring, although it is now used of other risky activities. It gave rise to the use of dicing as a slang word among drivers for 'driving in a race', and it can be compared with dicey meaning 'dangerous', a word which originated in 1950s air-force slang.