They say because of the “built-in” casino house advantage, the game of roulette can never be beaten!!
There are several sites in the net claiming they have devised a system that can beat the wheel! And they are being sold for $10 to as much as several thousand dollars!!! Several books have also been written on how to beat the game of roulette.
Any comments? Any personal experience?
Depends on what you mean by “beaten.”
The odds are not in your favor. Ever.
If you get lucky, well good for you.
Most of the “proven” methods are just tricks that make you not realize how bad the odds are.
There really isn’t any strategy at all in Roulette, like there is in Poker or other games; it’s basically a fancy slot machine.
Hi Noel and welcome to SDMB.
Use of the search function (upper right on your screen) would have revealed this recent thread.
The important distinction is whether there’s any element of skill. If there is, the game might be beatable (blackjack is a good example). If it’s pure chance, which the vast majority of casino games are, forget it. It’s possible to win, of course, but there’s absolutely nothing you can do to better the odds.
Noting streaks of reds/blacks/evens/odds/anything else won’t help. Betting systems only delay the inevitable at best. Any and all multiple bets have the same unfavorable odds as single best. The reason for this is that you have absolutely no control over the outcome. If you could guarantee a red, a black, a top 18, or whatever, or even eliminate as few as three numbers on each roll, it’d be easy money. But you can’t, so don’t bother.
Besides, a fancy system makes you look even dumber when you lose as much money as some poor mope playing hunches. 
There are three ways to beat Roulette, outside of actual cheating (like late posting, where you place your bet after the ball has already landed in the number).
The first is to use a computer to calculate the velocity of the ball, the internal wheel, and the location of the ball in relation to the wheel. This will result in an edge over the house of as much as 35%. The pioneers in this field were Ed Thorp and Claude Shannon, two very famous mathematicians and Engineers.
The problem: After this work was done, the use of a computer to aid betting in a casino was made a felony in almost all gambling jurisdictions.
The second way is to ‘clock’ a wheel and look for a bias that you can exploit. Wheels are not mechanically perfect. The frets between numbers vary slightly in height, the wheel may not be balanced perfectly, it may be tilted on one side, etc. A ‘clocker’ will watch a wheel for hours and hours, recording the results of each spin. He then takes those numbers home, plots them on a graph, does a regression analysis, and determines whether the numbers are coming up according to chance or whether there is a bias.
The Problem: Modern wheels are very well built. So you may spend days clocking wheels without finding a single exploitable bias. And when you do find one, it won’t last. If the casino sees someone continually winning, they’ll swap wheels with another at random, and then they’ll do their own bias testing of the wheel and fix whatever is wrong with it.
The third method may not be possible, but it is essentially training a human to do what the computer does in the first example. I’ve been doing some original work on this problem which suggests that it might be technically possible, although a lot more work remains to determine if it is practicable in a casino.
Forget about betting systems, hot number tracking, and all that other nonsense. None of it changes the house edge at all.
I used to hang out some in rec.gambling.craps. After a while, I just got frustrated by the never-ending stream of people who say they have a system to win in craps, which they’re selling for $100. Though they’re skimpy on the details, I think most of them have to do with “money management,” where they bet more when the table is “hot,” because they think that a long string with few sevens is more likely to continue than not. I always argued (sarcastically) that they should bet less, because a seven is due.
But you can’t win in craps any more than you can in roulette. Why the idea is appealing is that the standard deviation for how you will come out in a session is very high w/ respect to the expected value (average). This means that sometimes you do really well, and sometimes you do lousy, and people tend to attribute each to some factor (the human brain is wired to look for associations).
What I spent a lot of time arguing with the craps people about is the idea called “setting.” Many of them believe that they can throw the dice in such a way as to make certain numbers more likely. Basically, they want to make the 7 less likely. They’ve figured out with the help of some math-proficient types that you wouldn’t have to shift the likelihood of a seven by very much in order to negate the house advantage, and they’re right as far as that goes. But then they do some hocus-pocus with the dice and believe they’re changing the odds without real measurements of it.
And because of the high standard deviation and low house advantage, actually measuring it would be very difficult. You’d have to keep track of hundreds of thousands of rolls to be sure you’ve proved or disproved it. So while I would never be able to prove that they couldn’t do it, no one had data suggesting that he really could. But still they believe.
If there was any real chance of winning, the casinos wouldn’t be able to stay in business, would they?
Anybody selling a system is making money off it–but only because they’re selling it, not necessarily winning with it. If it was really working, why would they be selling it? It seems to me that they would be keeping it a secret while cleaning up at the tables.
The usual systems–the Martingale, and so on–generally run into a few problems: most notably that eventually, you have to wager progressively higher amounts (like 256 units) to win 1 unit. That’s pretty risky for the payoff you’ll get. And if you lose that 256 unit wager, your next wager has to be 512 units to get that 1 unit, although the casino usually prevents that from happening by restricting you to a max bet of 500 units. The result is that you lose a certain amount anyway.
As for horse racing, the idea that someone would be so altruistic as to sell a system is ridiculous. If the system worked and everybody used it, the odds would be skewed so severely that no bettor could make any real money on a race.
There are some excellent sources out there on systems and why they don’t work–I’d recommend Scarne for starters. Some of his books are still in print, but you can probably find most of his stuff in any decent library.
My proven strategy:
Run into the casino. Beg for a token even though you don’t have enough money. Bet. Win. Hold your bet on the same number. Scream loud. Win again. Leave.
–Tim
It is quite easy to beat the roulette wheel. Simply raise a mallet or sledge hammer over your head and bring it down forcefully upon the object in question.
Try to remember, casinos are not there to make you rich.
“The fastest and safest way of doubling your money is to fold it in half.”
Honeur De Balzac
Actually, the idea is just to beat the wheel (and win a few bucks), and NOT to break the bank!
Anybody actually tried any good system?
Oh, yes. Actually, Sam Stone alluded to this earlier. Al Hibbs and Roy Walford did, back in 1947 and 1948. At the time, wheels were not as well constructed or monitored as today. They’d keep track of which numbers paid out (later they paid someone to do this for them), and find a wheel that wasn’t actually random, in which a single number paid out, for example, every 30 spins. They won several thousand dollars this way, although it took some time. This was written up in Time and Life magazines at the time. Later they won $30,000 as part of a casino publicity stunt. (the casino cheated them out of half of it, though; they claimed an obscure Nevada law about grubstaking entitled them to half)
Of course, this would be much, much more difficult today. It would also be far more work than most con artists offering a ‘system’ based on poor math skills would be willing to do…
Any system is BS. The probability of winning is less on any single bet than the payoff.
Let’s be clear about what a ‘System’ is. Most ‘Systems’ are a series of bets designed to give you an advantage. None of these can ever work. Stated formally: “Any number of negative expectation bets, when summed together can never yield a positive expectation.” If you take this to heart, you’ll never have to waste time listening to someone explain how you can win if you always double up on losses (Martingale), or have some other wacky, complicated scheme. And there are some really complicated ones, like the D’Alembert Cancellation system, etc.
However, there ARE ways to beat many casino games. It’s just not true that if the casino offers a game there can be NO way to beat it or they’d be broke. What is true is that there can be no easy way to beat these games. It’s always going to involve some work, and the casinos count on the fact that the average gambler is too ignorant and lazy to learn.
Most people understand that you can beat blackjack by card counting. There are pros out there making six figure salaries from card counting, and the casinos are still standing. Why? Because for every guy who beats the casino card counting, there are ten more who learn just enough to be dangerous, and go in and bet way more money than they should because they think they have the edge when they don’t. And the casinos employ security to make sure the really big money card counters have a very tough time of it and don’t stay long.
Baccarat has been beaten by some card counting teams. Traditional counting techniques are virtually useless, but there are some highly specialized and very difficult counting systems that can return some pretty good value.
Roulette has been beaten by clockers and in the old days, by some computer hackers (read “The Eudaemonic Pie” for a description of a team of guys who used a computer to beat the wheel).
The sports book can be beaten, because the line generally moves with the public, and the public is often wrong. So if you’re a good handicapper, you can make money betting sports. But you’d better be VERY good, with sound mathematical principles behind you.
Poker can be beaten because you’re not playing against the house, but against other players. Their mistakes, minus the house rake, equals your profit. An excellent mid-limit poker player can make up to 2 big bets per hour playing poker. So if the game is 10-20 holdem, they can make as much as $40/hr.
Then there are the casino mistakes. Sometimes they screw up the odds calculations and offer a game that can be beaten. These games never last long, but if you can get to them before the rest of the sharks do, you can make a killing.
A couple of examples: David Sklansky, a famous gambling expert, beat the Stardust up pretty badly because they screwed up the odds calculations for a parlay card they offered in the sports book. Sklansky did the math and realized that if you bet every possible combination on the card, you were guaranteed a profit. Specifically, there were 1024 possible combinations, and if you put a dollar on every one the card would return $1660. He made out like a bandit, but the card only lasted a week at the Stardust.
Another famous episode happened at the Klondike, a small casino with only about 15 blackjack tables. The pit manager there came up with what he thought was a GREAT new game: He even had the name copyrighted, and they planned to market it to other casinos. It was called “Free Ride Blackjack”. In Free Ride Blackjack, every time you got a blackjack you’d get a little disk called a ‘lammer’, which would entitle you to surrender a hand in the future and get all your money back. They thought this wouldn’t change the math very much, but in fact it gave the basic strategy player a 2% advantage over the house. Word got out amongst the pros, who flew into town and filled every seat in the place playing basic strategy (no card counting), and flat betting the table maximim ($500) on every hand.
It took 12 hours for the Klondike to throw in the towel, but not before they actually had to use the general staff as chip runners, going around to the tables and buying back the chips from the players for cash because the casino didn’t have any left.
So you CAN beat Vegas, but it requires brains, sweat, discipline, and a ton of work.
Every “system” is just a way to sell pamphlets to old people at the airport gift shops. The guys who write them all have a good enough understanding to know the score, but that won’t stop them from selling books.
I posted some details of my ‘hands on’ experiences about roulette wheels in the aforementioned thread. IHMO, it’s not about ‘beating’ anything. The aim is to find a way to get (reasonably) comfortably within a winning percentage. Once you are happy you can do that then it can still be a long haul but you know that, in the end, you will win.
I know for a fact that some wheels can be cracked.
That’s what I am saying all along, to be able to find a way to win a “little”, just reasonable enuf.
By the way, can you share your “hands on” experience with us here at the board?
As it happens, I have a system that will enable you to win consistently from roulette. I will sell it to you, and anyone that asks, for only $50.
Aw, heck. I’ll give it to you for nothing - today only.
Step 1. Find people who wish to find an easy system for winning money from roulette.
Step 2. Tell them you have such a system, and offer it to them for $50.
Step 3. When they pay you the $50, refer them to Steps 1-3.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Noel *
The key to getting within a playable percentage (at least for the guys I worked with) was to find wheels that were, to some extent, predictable. Older wheels were better (some casino’s actually buy discarded wheels from the more exclusive clubs) and the size and weight of the ball was also relevant (because of their behaviour once the ball dropped).
My job was to identify natural bias in the wheels and it really doesn’t take too much research to home in on likely candidates. Unless the casino and the croupier are pretty classy, the croupier will spin both ball and wheel at a consistent enough speed for a pattern to emerge quite quickly. My initial research included noting on every spin:
(1) Which of the diamonds the ball hit before falling into the wheel (between 80% and 90% of the time it would be a vertical diamond),
(2) The number passing under that diamond as the ball hit that diamond.
(3) The number the ball initially falls into, and
(4) The number in which the ball finally rests.
With a little practice, all of that action can be seen, remembered and noted on those little cards casino’s supply with no trouble. You need a ‘sportsman’s’ eye – in terms of speed of action and concentration it’s a bit like watching a cricket ball or baseball coming at you – but you soon get tuned in. (Casino’s here actually encourage people to note the numbers as they know no number based system can work)
Once armed with that info, you need to map a chart.
The next stage (assuming the maths look good) is to research the speed a little more closely. There is a kind of standard from which wheel and croupiers deviate slightly but you need to know each particular wheel quite well to play the percentage to it’s best advantage.
Once you’re ready, the three man team straps on the stop watches (I timed a rotation, another reads it and places a marker bet and the ‘player’ feeds from that) and you go to work !
Fill in the gaps 
The public doesn’t get to hear of the real professionals. I came to be aware and know (to some extent) a few of the London based guys. It was a pretty international ‘community’. I also remember chancing across a really good German team who came to London for a month a year – we needed to ‘talk’ so no one spoiled the ‘game’ for anyone else. Nothing heavy, it was all quite gentlemanly (this is a geeky thing, nothing ‘organised’ in the American sense). Those Germans were very switched on.