The rigged roulette wheel that the house can cause to stop on a particular number (or color) is a movie cliche.
Is it actually possible? Do they exist?
I can’t imagine how it would work. If the mechanism was some sort of motor/brake that you could use to control the wheel, then it would take extraordinary skill to operate it so that the ball landed where you want. Even more so to operate it with sufficient subtlety that there were no sudden changes in the speed of the wheel such that punters would notice.
Likewise I suppose you could control a metal ball with electromagnets (you could have an electromagnet under one number, for example) but again if the magnet is going to affect the path of the ball, it’s going to look awful funny.
This doesn’t address your question, but I thought it was interesting anyway: http://www.snopes.com/luck/monte.htm
(In 1873 a British mill engineer won big by exploiting an imperfect roulette wheel that favored some numbers over others.)
I just felt that it’s worth pointing out that you don’t need to stop the ball on a particular number at will every time in order to win big. Even a small edge in the odds of a few percent allows you to rake in the cash.
I saw an episode of the History Channel’s ‘Breaking Vegas’ (aired May 17, '05) that discussed a wheel analysis technique: wheel bias. The Spanish family team would watch the wheel night and day for a week, record the winning numbers, and used an early personal computer to learn the few numbers that gave the ‘cheats’* the advantage.
*it’s not really a cheat, the show was careful to explain.
Sure, but what I’m talking about is where the dealer can affect the wheel when he wants to: in the movie cliche he typically just reaches down with one hand and presses a button under the table.
All roulette wheels are rigged. They have an extra number or two which changes the odds to the house’s favor. Surprisingly, while it’s not hidden, many gamblers fail to take this into consideration.
Seriously, casinos make their profits by maximizing the money flow and raking in their percentage. Cheating at the games would be an unjustifiable risk. Suppose you rigged the game to add an extra 10% advantage for the house; a fix that big would be noticable and would cost you more than a 10% reduction in players.
I live in the centre of Madrid, Spain. Most slot machine halls here have at least one roulette wheel. They are automatic, run by computers. You buy virtual cheaps and place them via the touch screen.
There are two makes of roulette wheel here, one much larger than the other. The smaller one is rigged, the larger one maybe not. An engineer told me it worked using compressed air: when everyone has placed their bets, the computer calculates where the ball should stop and air blows through small holes (which are visible) at the numbers people have bet on. Sometimes I have seen a ball land and stop and then leap out of a number as if attached to a string! But it’s air.
If the larger, more luxurious table is truly rigged it’s more subtle, but the owners have told me it’s very well controlled. A man started a fight one day after placing his chips 20 times to cover 36 of the possible 37 numbers and losing 15 or 16 times in a row. It wasn’t the first time he’d tried that.
Compressed air? That is darn clever, but I need more explanation.
So we want to keep the ball out of numbers 1 2 and 3. So we discretely select those numbers on a control panel. some nifty plumbing sends the air blowing through the holes. OK, I can accept that.
Now, the ball comes into slot 1 (for example). It does this despite the air, and as the wheel has slowed. ‘Centrifugal Force’ has reduced quite a bit. As it decreases, the air has enough force to blow the ball out of the slot, ‘like it was on a string.’
So now the ball is forced back into the channel. What happens next? Will it have enough ommph to jump back into another slot? Does just roll around in the channel never dropping into any number?
Scare notes (on page 421 of Scarne’s New Complete Guide to Gambling) that gaffed wheels are rare as the game already favors the house. Wheels can be rigged by installing electromagnets under favored numbers (perhaps the 0, 00 and Eagle). The croupier can activate the magnets to protect the house from a heavily bet number.
This of course requires sneaky wiring (and a gaffed ball with a steel core).
A simpler method (for those of us who failed wood shop) would be to place the magnets at the four points of the compass on the wheel’s bowl. This works well, but requires a careful hand on the hidden switch to ensure the ball does not drop onto the number that was bet on.
Still, I doubt most people would ever run into a rigged wheel. The game pays the house in a predictable manner. There is no real reason to cheat.
Actually I can see the compressed air method working well, particularly if you are not so much interested in having the ball fall on a given number as you are interested in having it not fall on a given number.
As long as you are only trying to get it to (say) not fall on seven, then the compressed air wouldn’t have to blast the ball away right back into the channel, or blow it out “like it was on a string”. It would just have to be enough to make the ball tend to skip seven and go into the next slot along. That might well be possible to do with sufficient subtlety that no one need notice, particulary with a light ball.
I must say I have no idea of the usual weight and composition of a roulette ball.
One could perhaps rig the numbers with small electromagnets and use a magnetic ball. Selecting a number on a control board would set all the magnets save the winning number to repel the ball and the winning number to attract it. I know nothing about electromagnets so I have no idea if it’s possible to flip the polarity like that but if it is I think this would work.
I can’t think that it’s possible to have a magnet repel a ball. If it’s just metal it will attract. If you magnetise it, it’s going to have a positive and negative pole, and there would be no way of making it stay oriented so that its repelling pole stayed near the wheel’s magnets: quite the opposite.
Alumimum is repelled by a magnetic field, many times smaller then iron is attracted to it, but is is used sometimes to sepperate AL from other metals in recyclying facilities.
Assuming attractive force however the magnet might be in the ‘raceway’ to keep the ball up when it gets to that number.
Well obviously you have never been stuck in Casablanca, escaped from your Nazi occupied homeland, desperate to leave for America. But you haven’t enough money to pay off the local authorities, so you are trying to win it at the roullette table. Oh the odds are desperately against you, and your wife fears she may have to convince the authority with the travel visa with her womanly charms. Perhaps then if you run into a casino owner with a gruff exterior but a touch of sympathy in his heart, a man who came to Casablancea for the waters, a professional drunkard, a cynic who can’t remember last night and never plans for the next. Perhaps if you found that man and he understood your plight, perhaps then you might run into a rigged roullette wheel.
I would have thought that a simple way to fix a wheel would be to make the bottom of the numbered slots just a little more or less bouncy - so that the ball is statistically more likely to come to rest in one of the less bouncy numbers. This would not be very obvious while still allowing the odds to go in favour of those in the know.
Certainly that would work. Presume a gaffer was able to spend a few quiet hours with the wheel, he could then come back later and make a killing on that wheel. It work until the Casino wised up (give them two hours, I guess) or the word got out and everybody and his brother starts hitting that one wheel.
The casino could also set up a wheel that way. But why bother? An honest game will pay a fixed percentage to the house forever. Why muck such a sweet deal up by rigging the game?
A while ago, we heard about some enterprising folk in Europe who were able to use lasers to range the ball and predict where it would land (on the fly) before bets were in. Link. Considering that the gamblers had to do this in a concealed manner and didn’t have a stable mount point, it should be very easy for a casino to get very high accuracy with such a system. Once the ball’s path can be predicted, very small adjustments in the speed of the wheel would make it go wherever you wanted it to.
Obviously, Rick’s is unlikely to have had lasers installed, but that’s probably how a casino would do it now.
Technically interesting, but is it practical? Can I operate it in my tuxedo while yelling ‘Banco?’
If I had such a device, I (as a bettor) would have a clue as to which numbers would come up. As The House, I do not see how it could help me. But then it is late here.
OK, so the house has this system that tells them ahead of time which number will come up. But that’s not really what the system tells you: What it really tells you is “if the wheel spins freely without outside interference, this is where it’ll come up”. So you scan your table, and see where the ball is going to end up. If it’s going someplace you like, you leave well enough alone. But if it’s going someplace you don’t like, then you apply a slight breaking to the wheel, or have a little mechanical gizmo to kick it a bit, or the like. This changes where the ball will end up. Now, if the new destination spot is one you like, you’re done. If not, then you nudge it again, and so on.