This is how I often play these roulette tournaments. If my balance is high enough I'll max out my bet by playing the sides of the center number as well as the corners. It's always different variations of this style of bet.
I don't play roulette anywhere but at 3Dice and only in tournament mode.
I started out with the same style of bet on number 11. A center hit on 11 would pay pretty good.
2, 5, 8, 14, 20, 26, 29 and 32 all came up before 11.
After 11 finally did come up I played the same style of bet on 2. This is almost 25% of the board. After about 15 spins of the wheel that paid nothing I gave up on 2 and moved to 14. This is even closer to 25% of the board. 10 spins of the wheel later again managed to miss all 9 numbers I had covered.
Once in a while I have a really good run in roulette. Most of the time it plays basically like this. When people play this game for real do they play almost 25% of the board and hit? Does it really hit that 25% that rarely? This is just tournament play so it doesn't really matter but if I was playing for real and the ball was just basically landing everywhere I don't put my chips I wouldn't be very happy after a while. lol
Sometimes I think it's just a really high variance slot game.