Roulette: Guide to Betting Part 2.

 

If you take Einstein's oft quoted saying, "you cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it", to heart then you are well on your way to being a great roulette player.

 

However, despite one of the most proficient mathematicians and physicists the world has every known advocating the fact that there are no sure bets on the roulette table, the variety of Even Money Bets have lead so many hundreds of thousands of players to attempt to beat the house, often using one of the famous Martingale Technique's many variations.

 

In the Martingale Technique a player must double their stake at each point in the game at which they lose, the theory being that the laws of probability dictate that the next bet is going to be a winning one as there is always a 1/2 chance of winning with an Even Money Bet, if you double the stake each time then at the point you win you will recover all the money that has previously been lost, in addition to this you will also win a profit that will be equal to the original bet at the point at which you began to double the stake.

 

In practice however, the Martingale Technique has systematically been proved to fail, and playing this technique over a long period of time is likely to result in significant financial losses for the player who would chose to employs it.

 

Another well known technique takes advantage of the Fibonacci sequence and is thus known as the Fibonacci System, both the Martingale and Fibonacci systems are called progressive systems of betting and they have never been proved to be statistically advantageous to the player in the long-term, and in fact have been proved many-a-time to be detrimental to the player.

 

Another strategy that has been advanced as a technique for betting on roulette was conceived of by the ‘Los Angeles Times' editor, Andres Martinez in his book ‘24/7' about Las Vegas. In his experiment the idea was to divide your roulette bankroll, for a particular session, into sections of 35. Each section is wagered on the same number for 35 sequential spins, this means that if the ball falls on the number chosen before 35 spins then the player will win back the original amount of the bankroll, and can then play with the money won, i.e. money belonging to the house. The probabilities for the player are very good, but they are not great and they amount to a 60.7% chance of the number being drawn within the 35 spins, when playing American Roulette which has the double zero, the odds are more favourable on a European Roulette wheel.

 

A common thought among roulette players is that by betting on a green number (these are 0 and 00) the player removes the house advantage because they are house numbers but the statistical probabilities pertaining to these house numbers is exactly the same as any other number on the wheel. They are house numbers because their existence on the wheel makes the probabilities uneven between the player and the casino, their removal from the game would make players and casinos equally likely to win or lose.

 

Many prominent scientists, mathematicians and engineers have attempted to discover a system that will allow the player to overcome the house advantage by predicting the performance of the individual wheel. The famous example of this approach is Joseph Jagger, who in 1873 broke the bank at a casino in Monte Carlo; he did this by exploiting the uneven spin cycles of the roulette wheel, as in the past, the wheels were not well balanced and this gave different statistical probabilities of drawing particular numbers, and portions of the wheel, so by examining the individual wheel it was possible to observe which numbers were more likely to be drawn.

 

In 1961 another mathematician, by the name of Claude Shannon, created a specialist computer that was able to establish the bias in any given roulette wheel.

 

As a counter attack to these techniques of beating the roulette wheel casinos now have specialist equipment that they use to monitor then performance of their roulette wheels, and if the detect a problem they then re-balance and re-align the wheels to make them fair again and to keep the outcome of the games as randomised as possible. Ironically the equipment that they use is a more sophisticated version of the machines that were once used to the advantage of the player.

 

In 1991 the publication of ‘The Newtonian Casino', written by Thomas Bass, claimed to describe a system that could predict the way in which a roulette wheel would behave. The same author also wrote the book ‘The Eudemonic Pie' in which he discusses the works of several computer hackers who, during the 1970's, placed small computers on their person that would allow them to predict the place at which the roulette ball would come to rest.

 

In the 1990's a computer scientist, Gonzalo Garcia created a computer model that he used to study the roulette wheels in a Spanish casino in Madrid. With the help of family members he managed to win more than £1 million over the course of a couple of years. His actions were discovered and a court case ensued, the court ruled in his favour.

 

Much more recently, in 2004, a group of men in London used their mobile phones to predict the projection and course of the ball. The group were also taken to court by the casino but the judge again ruled in favour of the players citing that they did not cheat as their equipment did not interfere in any way with the workings of the wheel or the ball, they managed to walk away with £1.3 million!!

 

Betting on Red Only

A possibly viable strategy that a player could employ at the roulette table would be to bet on the same colour, red in this example, consecutively for a specific number of spins; we will take the example of 37.

 

All in all there are 18 pockets on a roulette wheel that are coloured red, with a total of 37 pockets on the entire wheel. If you divide 18 by 37 the probability that the ball will land on a red is approximately 48.6%. You can take this probability and workout the probability of the ball landing on the red during the entire 37 spins.

 

When this is done you can work out that the probability that the ball will land on a red space during the spin is around 99.1% of it landing at least 10 times. 83% chance that the ball will land on the red 15 times, thus out of 37 spins there is a 50% chance that 18 will land on red.

 

To break even you need to manage reds on 19 spins, this has only a 37% chance of happening. Thus you can see that to bet only on a single colour is fairly dangerous.

 

Because there are also green colours on the table, the chance of getting the ball into a red space is less than 50/50 on each spin and this is why the anomaly occurs. So this strategy is not that lucrative either.

 

Multiple Betting

This method of betting can be described as a cross between the red bet and the martingale system, the difference being that the bet includes odds too. To begin with the player bets 1 chip on red and odds (obviously you can go black or evens) - each bet is classified separately to the other.

 

When one of the bets loses, the value of the original stake is doubled; when one of the bets wins the stake then returns to the original stake. The reason why a player using this technique will stay in the game for so long is because they have a 25% chance of both bets winning at the same time, and almost a 50% chance of the player breaking even, meaning one bet will lose and the other bet will win.

 

The player will eventually run out of money though, the only way for the game to last indefinitely is for the player to have an endless source of money and for the casino to have the same.

 

When this technique is put into practice the system actually backfires because the player will run out of money before making enough. The losses that this system will encourage are massive, a lot more than the other methods discussed here. In the long run, because the house will always have the advantage and there is no known way of beating it the player will lose, the best thing to do is to count your losses and run, you may even be lucky enough to win a little, but you must leave the game as soon as you are up, if your purpose for gambling is to win, rather than the entertainment factor.

 

The Dozen Bet

This system has two different versions; they are single dozen bets and double dozen bets.

 

For the single version of the dozen bet the player will use a progressive system of betting, raising their stake through increments which will begin by being set at the table minimum, so if this is £5 then the first bet will be £5, and the end stake will be the table maximum, so if this is £50 then the last bet will be £50. The aim of the technique is for the player to win a dozen bet before the final value of the table limits is reached by the player's stake.

 

There are a variety of techniques that are used for betting on the dozen: some will bet on the same dozen after it has been drawn twice; betting on the dozen that has appeared most in the last specified number of spins (you set the limit here, so however many spins you feel you should use); betting on a dozen that has not been drawn for a while (again you may set the number of spins that you need to take into account e.g. if the dozen has not been drawn in the past 7 spins).

 

In the double dozen version of this type of betting the player will bet on two dozens at each point in the game when they are allowed to bet, but they will split the stake evenly between each dozen. So, if the table limit is a minimum of £5 then £2.50 will be placed on the corresponding spaces on the roulette table, and the betting will continue until the stake for each dozen is £25, providing that the table limit maximum is £50.

 

1^st Column and 3^rd Column Methods:

If the player wagers one bet using 2 chips on the 1^st column of the roulette table, and then another bet which uses 2 chips on the 3^rd column of the roulette table, then most of the red numbers will have been covered by the bet. The player must also place two chips on the black square on the roulette table in order to cover the eventuality that a black number is drawn. Thus this bet will cover most of the numbers on the wheel, except the zero and the four reds in the 2^nd column. If the ball lands on a number that is red and is on either of the 1^st or 3^rd column then they will manage to breakeven, if the ball lands on one of the numbers not covered by the bet, i.e. the zero and four reds from the middle column, then they will lose all 6 of their chips, if the ball lands on a black from the middle column then the player will lose 2 chips. But if the ball lands on a black from the 1^st or 3^rd column then the player will be up by 4 chips.

 

The reliability of this bet is not yet documented so it will be up to you as the player to decide whether you want to play it, or indeed how much to wager- if you do please discuss the results in the websites forum as it would be interesting to establish the techniques reliability.

 

Famous Bets:

An English man called Ashley Revell sold all his possessions, his house, car, clothes...then went into a Las Vegas Casino, wearing a hired suit, and placed all the money that he had made that the roulette ball would land on red........................

It did and he won £200,000!! Lucky man!!

 

In the film Casablanca from 1942, Rick's Café American has a modified roulette wheel. The croupier can make the ball land on 22 whenever he chooses to do sol. Rick (played by Humphrey Bogart) convinces a Bulgarian refugee with whom he is  sympathetic to wager the last three chips that he has on the number 22, then tells the croupier to ensure the bet wins. The refugee's number dramatically comes up, and everyone is amazed, then Rick convinces him to let place all his winning chips on 22 again, and again signals to the croupier to let the bet win. In the film the exact amount that the refugee wins is not told, but the croupier says that the house is a few thousand francs down, though you can work out that the man won 3885 francs because the odds are (3 x 36 x 36)-3.

 

In the cartoon South Park episode "Red Man's Greed", the community of South Park are facing annihilation by a group of Native Americans, then one of the characters wagers $10,000 in order to raise money to save the community. In the first round they win, but then they let it ride, and finish by losing all of their money.

 

In the final part of the film Run, Lola, Run, from 1998 the character Lola spends all her money on buying a casino chip valued at $100. She does not quite have the money to purchase the chip, but one of the casino's employees feels sorry for her and makes up the rest of the money in order that she can purchase the chip. She places the single chip on the number 20 and the ball gets drawn, then she again wagers the single chip on 20 and manages to win again, thus winning a total of $129, 600. The reasons for the bet was to pay off her boyfriends boss to whom he owes around $29,000, so they end up with $100,000 to spend however they like.

 

In real life, for the music video for Palace & Main by the band Kent, their guitarist, Harri Mänty, travels to Las Vegas to bet the music video's entire budget on black in roulette, he manages to win and all the profits were then donated to charity.

Roulette: Guide to Betting Part 1