Why roulette can't be beat using statistics

Poker_p

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I once tried to make money at a casino, in particular, I tried to hack roulette. My team and I studied this process for a long time and came to the conclusion that it is almost impossible to win at roulette. It's more of a game of luck than statistics or probability.

I based my strategy on the classic Martingale. My strategy was as follows: I divided the roulette field with two lines - horizontal and vertical, thus dividing the numbers into two halves. The first time I divided horizontally, I wrote down all the numbers on either side of the line, then did the same thing vertically. I then placed bets on the half of the table that did not fall out more than three times in a row. Based on the logic that the probability of the same half falling out more than four times in a row decreases, I made the bets, everything was fine and the strategy worked until one half fell out 10 times in a row, which cancelled my balance.

Eventually I came to the realisation that none of this was working. Mathematical progression showed that there is no limit to the probability of the same half appearing - theoretically it can appear indefinitely. Probabilities tell us that even if a certain half doesn't appear more than once, there is still a chance it will appear again, and no strategy can guarantee success. Ultimately the game comes down to luck.

I would like to emphasise that I took exactly the legal office with all the awards from the list of trusted Aussie casinos.
And still I couldn't win.

This experience has shown me that roulette cannot be predicted or beaten, and that relying on betting systems is not worth it in the long run.
 
Not sure why you needed a team to come to that conclusion - it's one of the most fundamental factors of gambling.

If your expected RTP is above 100%, over the long term you should win money.
If your expected RTP is below 100%, over the long term you should lose money.

Anything else would distil down to using variance to try and beat the curve - you may win in the short term but not in the long term.

I took exactly the legal office with all the awards from the list of trusted Aussie casinos.
I don't know if it's changed very recently, but last I heard online table games were banned in Australia - so in that case, the list of "trusted" casinos would be precisely zero.
 
Lay your money out on the table however you like - you're only getting 97.3% of it back on average, every spin.

Allow history to influence your bets and you're subconsciously linking games, which has absolutely no effect whatsoever.

Roulette - an incredibly simple game that people overcomplicate in pursuit of an advantage.
 
This experience has shown me that roulette cannot be predicted or beaten, and that relying on betting systems is not worth it in the long run.
No shit, Sherlock :D

I worked on this for years and came to the same, inevitable conclusion.
There is only ONE way to win long-term from Roulette... be the owner of the casino!

KK
 
I know of a couple of people that do and have done very well on roulette and have made profit overall.

However they both have two major things in common, neither use martingale betting or play online.

One is actually now banned from land based, the casino no longer wanted his custom??

I would say roulette can be beaten by a very tiny minority of players, but many factors need to be in play, including but not limited to a bias wheel, using physics computer, collusion, cheating, inexperienced dealers, allowing late bets etc
 
I would say roulette can be beaten by a very tiny minority of players, but many factors need to be in play, including but not limited to a bias wheel, using physics computer, collusion, cheating, inexperienced dealers, allowing late bets etc
Pretty much this, I would also add "promotion stacking" to the list but that's an incredibly rare beast now-a-days.

The interesting ones in that list are the biased wheel, and allowing late bets.
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    beat casinos in the 1960s for more than a million dollars (around $8-9m today), monitoring tens of thousands of spins and using that analysis to identify biased wheels. Now-a-days casinos are monitoring everything in that regard so as a biased wheel develops (as it will over time, assuming it's not RNG-based 🤢 ) it's most likely to be spotted by the casino first.
  • Late Bets is the more interesting one, because a player has far more information than before the spin proceeds. It may be possible for a human to come up with a strategy, but mostly becomes the preserve of real-time physics modelling (such as
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    , who proved the concept in the 1970s but would be considered cheating because it is tool-assisted).
 
Poker_p, here is quick a tip, but it won't work for everyone, many people are half-blind and will struggle to learn... Learn visual ballistics, and play only offline, and stick to call bets. The dealer is the weakest link in roulette. Study their behavior, noting which sides they hit and when. Pick experienced dealers, they usually have a "dealer signature". Avoid newbies, they're often stressed out.

Forget your favorite numbers; each number has an equal chance of winning. Choose roulette with a heavy ball. I recommend Genting on Shaftesbury Avenue (in case you come to London). For the best practice, buy a 2nd-hand wheel and have a wife, etc spin it while you predict ball drops. It will take some time to learn, but you'll have an edge.

Roulette is a chance-based game, and if you learn these things, you'll have a better chance to win more often than regular players. Remember, casinos will spot you if you often place bets on just a few numbers and they win. So play a few games, then move elsewhere.

...and yeah, forget about those strategies/systems like Martingale.
 
Very experienced dealers on roulette would be skilled enough to place the ball into a specific section of the wheel, not a single number, but an area of say 10 numbers, which is clearly enough of an advantage to win.

As already discussed… everything is monitored and very closely analysed, but not everything is caught and if one isn’t too greedy then things can slip through the net.

Evolution Gaming had to change the way their live games were done after being targeted. This was picked up very fast as the system would identify late bets and unusual activity, such as players winning coupled with last millisecond betting and or bet rejection due to late betting.

So I do think any game such as roulette can be beaten, but obviously in a manner that’s not fair and proper.

Rob :)
 
@JGslots There is an excellent write up on the lengths evolution had to go to in order to stop the winning winners from winning. I believe the figure was somewhere in the region of 300+ game integrity employees focused on just that. But without doubt a lot of people made significant sums of money on their games by exploiting the imperfections of the physics/execution of their games vs actually beating the maths.

@Poker_p There was a recent-ish paper from some MIT students who used a combination of machine learning and various gambling strategies to find an optimal way of playing. After billions of simulations and trillions of CPU cycles a clear winner emerged. One of the agents had figured out the best strategy to maximise your balance and minimise your losses was to simply take your chips and cash out immediately without placing a single bet. I suspect to the majority of humans this is quite obvious.
 
There was a team of physics students from a university in the 80s that used a computer in a hollowed out loafer to predict which octant the ball would land in and also had an option not to place a bet at all.

Using an oscilloscope and camera, they tracked the motion of a roulette wheel and were able to develop a formula that had a trigonometric function and four variables.

They would input the variable data by tapping a switch in the shoe with their big toe and receive the output via solenoids on their chest that would tell them where to bet. Eventually the duties were split between two people with one inputting the data and one receiving the output and.placing the bets.

It malfunctioned at one point and one of the solenoids burned a hole in the bettors skin! After that incident they disbanded as a few of the team had already left due to juggling the project and their studies and this malfunction was a good point to end it as they'd accomplished their goal of proving there was a way to predict where the ball will fall.

Ah bollocks just scrolled up and saw that Jason already mentioned these guys, I spent the time writing this out so I'll post it anyways 😅🤣

They were able to improve their average RTP to 144% while playing.

Casinos became aware of this kind of devices and brought in new laws to prevent their use but it was technically legal at the time.
 
There was a team of physics students from a university in the 80s that used a computer in a hollowed out loafer to predict which octant the ball would land in and also had an option not to place a bet at all.

Using an oscilloscope and camera, they tracked the motion of a roulette wheel and were able to develop a formula that had a trigonometric function and four variables.

They would input the variable data by tapping a switch in the shoe with their big toe and receive the output via solenoids on their chest that would tell them where to bet. Eventually the duties were split between two people with one inputting the data and one receiving the output and.placing the bets.

It malfunctioned at one point and one of the solenoids burned a hole in the bettors skin! After that incident they disbanded as a few of the team had already left due to juggling the project and their studies and this malfunction was a good point to end it as they'd accomplished their goal of proving there was a way to predict where the ball will fall.

Ah bollocks just scrolled up and saw that Jason already mentioned these guys, I spent the time writing this out so I'll post it anyways 😅🤣

They were able to improve their average RTP to 144% while playing.

Casinos became aware of this kind of devices and brought in new laws to prevent their use but it was technically legal at the time.

This was a real thing, 20 years ago -
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.

It's about the Ritz Casino and players from Serbia and Hungary. They smashed roulette for £1.3 million and kept all the money because they hadn't physically touched the roulette wheel. Scotland Yard found no evidence of crime. Just imagine what type of equipment must be out there nowadays...

Then they were Bluetooth powered and casinos later could easily spot them. Now it all should be more advanced.
 
This was a real thing, 20 years ago -
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.

It's about the Ritz Casino and players from Serbia and Hungary. They smashed roulette for £1.3 million and kept all the money because they hadn't physically touched the roulette wheel. Scotland Yard found no evidence of crime. Just imagine what type of equipment must be out there nowadays...

Then they were Bluetooth powered and casinos later could easily spot them. Now it all should be more advanced.
Ah cool didn't realise there was a more recent example of it, neat they gotta keep the money. It's a shame about what happened with the phil ivey edge sorting case though!
 
This was a real thing, 20 years ago -
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.

It's about the Ritz Casino and players from Serbia and Hungary. They smashed roulette for £1.3 million and kept all the money because they hadn't physically touched the roulette wheel. Scotland Yard found no evidence of crime. Just imagine what type of equipment must be out there nowadays...

Then they were Bluetooth powered and casinos later could easily spot them. Now it all should be more advanced.
The main actor in that particular incident gave a full interview with a journalist if you search for it online. If I recall correctly there was no 'secret tech' involved but rather just exploiting the imperfections of the tables which he has spent his life doing. Perhaps he is bluffing and they really did have some secret tech but often the real answer is the easier one.

There is also a more famous case of a Spanish guy who also exploited wheel imperfections in Madrid and then brought his family in on the act. Casino ended up banning him from playing and it ended up in the equivalent of the Spanish supreme court because he considered that unlawful. I think the outcome was that he was the court sided with the player and then the casino simply put him on a 5 eur bet limit.
 
There's a few tools u can buy that can predict where the ball lands but the ones iv seen can't compute the results fast enough before 'no more bets' is announced.

And most you have to get close to the wheel so your camera can log the speed of the ball etc, then u have to move over to the table to place bets which would look highly suspicious, that's where u need a team of you.

I think the plastic domes over the wheel stop these devices working as well.



A roulette tracker tool is the closest you'll get to a predictor device.
 
The main actor in that particular incident gave a full interview with a journalist if you search for it online. If I recall correctly there was no 'secret tech' involved but rather just exploiting the imperfections of the tables which he has spent his life doing. Perhaps he is bluffing and they really did have some secret tech but often the real answer is the easier one.

There is also a more famous case of a Spanish guy who also exploited wheel imperfections in Madrid and then brought his family in on the act. Casino ended up banning him from playing and it ended up in the equivalent of the Spanish supreme court because he considered that unlawful. I think the outcome was that he was the court sided with the player and then the casino simply put him on a 5 eur bet limit.


I was reading about them in 2004, which was when i started playing roulette. I was in my early 20s when i discovered a system called Martingale.... :D I thought only a few people knew about it and believed i had found the holy grail. But missed out a fact that roulette had been played for centuries before i was born.

For three nights in a row, i won 1K a night, and i was so happy thinking that all i need is just £100-200 a day and i can leave my work. Then on the forth day i lost it all. :eek2::laugh::D

The gadget that those guys at the Ritz used likely worked like the one in this video. One person stood next to the wheel with a device attached to them, capturing sound and then passing info via Bluetooth to a bettors earpiece.

I was quite into these computers at some point, but then discovered that there were scams going on. And some people reckoned that all those roulette forums were owned by Playtech, and i just left this alone.



This video is about 15 years old, and you would rarely find such wheels at casino with heavy balls nowadays. They work well if you know how to use visual ballistics and perfectly familiar with call bets.
 
Has anyone heard of Santa Claus on youtube ? he's got a different way to look at roulette, some people call him a scammer but there's no evidence of this.

He's actually a genius to most
 
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No, i wish
You joined the forum wanting to link to free roulette tools and share your youtube and then talk up a guy guy that is called "free roulette tools" on youtube and has free (and paid) tools for seemingly tracking patterns and doing martingale variants.

Oh and your name is also roulettetools, forgot that one.
 
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You joined the forum wanting to link to free roulette tools and share your youtube and then talk up a guy guy that is called "free roulette tools" on youtube and has free (and paid) tools for seemingly tracking patterns and doing martingale variants.

Oh and your name is also roulettetools, forgot that one.
no idea what ur talking bout sorry, it's a big world
 

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