Yes that would work fine. But at that point of the thread we were (or at least I was) talking about a wheel rigged with a laser which would predict, but not control the number.
The house could further avert suspicion if they rigged a pair of regular numbers (e.g. 7 and 22). The dealer would have two buttons, one for each magnet, and he would activate the the number without the large bet.
It could be done, but with difficulty. The wheel needs to be balanced and spin freely. If you add magnets and wiring to a couple of numbers, the wheel would be lopsided. I think this would be noticeable.
Then you have to add counterweights to the other side. Then you have to make sure the wheel is not so heavy that it spins too long and so attracts attention. And so on.
It could be done, but not easily or cheaply.
I do like the idea of magnets in the bowl. You can examine the wheel all you want and find nothing. The ball is a giveaway, but that cannot be helped.
Still a difficult and expensive project, not something you do over the weekend. Lots of carpentry. Not worth the trouble of doing.
With a relatively lightweight plastic ball (or another non-conductive material) I would think that a bit of controlled static electricity could significantly affect the outcome. Put a positive charge on the ball and a negative one where you want it to land, or a positive one where you don’t want it to land.
“Damn, Herr Van de Graaf is on fire at the wheel tonight!”
The trouble I see with this is you would have to have wires to each and every number. After that, I would question if static electricity would have enough effect on a fairly massive ball. Only experimentation could tell.
Of course we do not need 100% control, anything that makes some numbers sticky and others repellent would pay out over a huge number of trials.
Still, there has got to be an easier way to make a living.
I think this would be the easiest thing to do: Rig the metal strips between the numbers so they can move up or down. If you don’t want the ball to land on a certain number, press a button and the little metal frets on either side of that number move up slightly, and the ones around other numbers move down slightly. This would greatly favor numbers other than the one you’re protecting.
One of the old bias exploits on wheels was to find unevenly worn frets which would bias towards the numbers that have the lowest frets.
I find the argument “casinos wouldn’t cheat since the odds are already in their favour” to be somewhat weak. If they could get away with cheating, surely they have lots of incentive to do it on large bets. Human nature is essentially greedy and people have been cheating at cards for a hundred years. This post is not implying casinos do cheat, but casinos are about making money, not providing the fairest odds that they can.
(At this point, I would be pleased to talk about the greatest casino cheating incident in history. It is off-topic, as it was a card cheat, but a fine story nonetheless. I would be pleased to relate this story, but I am riotously drunk on homemade wine and in no condition to write coherently.
All of which points out how nice it is to have spell-check on your browser.)
Take a look at the profits they have. They’re making money hand over foot. The casinos in Vegas were so profitable that all the hotels, hotel restaurants, shows, and other attractions attachted to hotels were run at a major loss just because it would attract gamblers. And they still give away tons of free crap with it.
They don’t *need * to cheat. People walk up, knowingly get into a game they can almost never win, and walk away thanking them for the privelege!
What you want is a wheel like the one in Casablanca (or the one i a 1960s MAD article on casinos) where you can get the ball to land in a particular well every time. I seriously doubt you could do it. And I think that any mechanism to keep balls out of a particular well will be overly complex and overly obvious in operation.
There was a book called The Eudaemonic Pie out about 15 years ago that told of a bunch of college students who built a shoe computer to calculate the most likely quadrant for the ball to land in. They claimed they did quick and rough calculations using ball speed and initial position. Sounds like hooey to me, and a great way to lose a lot of money.
Unlike dice-setting in craps, roulette ???ing (I forget the verb) actually works pretty well. Difficulty-wise, my understanding is that it is a bit harder to master than card-counting.
Roulette has built-in defenses against this. Ever notice how hard it is to cover exactly one quarter of the wheel in a contiguous block? That’s by design.
I think the laser theory is spot on the money, I know in my local casino which is quite large at least 100 roullette tables, all of the wheels have comuters underneath them, they all have lasers (poorly disguised as decorative lights) there is one on each corner of the wheel, and the wheels never stop spinning, I can’t see how a free bearing can continue spinning. also every single table is monitored by at least 3 cameras, so the dealer does not need to be the one that is manipulating the wheel. It would not seem so far fetched that a pretty basic computer program could calculate the trajectory and adjust the motor speed on the wheel according to a pre selected number inputed from a remote location (the cctv room)
Seems like the people suggesting magnets have somehow never actually played with magnets.
Try this: get a steel bearing and a small Nd magnet. Draw some straight parallel lines on a piece of paper or something. Practice rolling the bearing straight down the lines, or rig a rail system to roll it straight.
Place the magnet off to the side of the ball’s path, but not close enough to attract it, and roll the ball. Move it slightly closer and repeat until it attracts the ball.
Now, try to move it close enough so that it makes the ball’s path deviate without sticking to it. While the ball is moving at a decent speed. Consistently. Now keep in mind that the path on a roulette wheel can vary quite a bit. Notice how even the tiniest deviation will cause the ball to either A. not be affected at all or B. cause it to jump straight onto the magnet, resulting in your casino being shut down.
That’s because you’re using permanent magnets and you have the reaction time of a human.
Use a grid of electromagnets controlled by a computer with laser rangefinders for input and you can do it in a way that can’t be detected except without a highspeed camera or other sophisticated measuring device.
The better your predictive model of the ball, and the more precise the force you can impart, the smaller the changes it takes to deflect it to where you want it to go.
But, 8 years ago when this question was first asked, the model was the rigged roulette wheel in Rick’s Café Americain. I’m pretty sure Rick didn’t have lasers or computers on his rigged wheel.
So the question is, given 1940ish technology with no superconductors or carbon nanotubes or penicillin, is such a rigged table even possible? Or is it a purely Hollywood invention?
I have talked to people that swear up and down that the dealer, by the strength of his spin, could control within a 3 or 4 slot spread where the ball would land. I called bullshit on that.
When I was dealing, the wheel was spun by hand (so a different speed each time), we reversed direction each spin and the ball was flicked by hand - so it would be near impossible to control.
Zombie Roulette Wheels. Delightful.
It might be interesting to list the places where “rigged roulette wheels” show up.
– Casablanca, of course
– The Sting
–Mad Magazine article from the late 50s/early60s on gambling 9the piece said that the wheel was slightly “off” resulting in better chances for soe numbers, but the illustration shows a fully controlled wheel with selectable numbers
I can’t think of any other examples (we’ll ignore things like Disney’s Blackbeard’s Ghost, where the mechanism for selecting the number is actually a telekinetic spirit of a dead pirate), but I’m sure I’ve seen this in TV shows and other flicks.
Nine years ago, three people successfully won 1.5 million pounds from a British casino using laser scanners. Relevant at the time asked.
Although later posters speculated, the OP never mentioned Rick’s Cafe or any particular time period. Just asked whether it was possible or a Hollywood conceit.
I don’t think it was possible then. Note that Casablanca doesn’t actually show it happening. I bet if they could have made it look convincing on film, they would have. And if you can’t make it look convincing on film, you certainly can’t make it look convincing when the mark gets to change his point of view.
By The Sting, though, it might have been possible. We upgrade to 1970s technology. They measured the distance to the moon with a laser in 1969. There were pretty early electronic computers. Not within the means of your average saloonkeeper, and probably unrealistic for actual history, but with a “crazy Doc Brown is sent back in time and knows it could be done” sort of retro-sci-fi sensibility and Vegas financing, it’s not impossible.
There was no movie cliche in 2005 concerning people using lasers. **Lemur866 **has the flavour of it.
I think I’m getting old. When I first saw this thread title today I thought “hey, I’ve always wondered about that!” and only then noticed I was the OP. :smack: