My mistake, if you’re not talking about the 5-way bet at the top of the table.
What you’re missing is that you don’t get paid 35-1 if you hit one of your numbers.
On a roulette table, the only difference any bet or combination of bets makes is in the distribution of your wins and losses. You can place bets that win only one time in 38 but pay 35-1, or you can place bets that pay 2-1 but only win 18 times out of 38. Either way, the house edge is exactly the same.
You’d think that you’re better off going for the best possible chance of winning (and that would be odd/even, or red/black), but that’s not true. You only get paid even money that way.
Consider this: To make 35 times your money back playing red-black, you would have to parlay your wins over 5 times, giving the house 5.26% each time.
You may have had success at Roulette so far, but I guarantee it due purely to luck. Even bad blackjack players only face about half the odds that Roulette has, and the good ones have 10 times better odds.
Ok. I agree that the 5-way bet is the worst. The reason I play the six-streets is because of the frequency of hits. I’m not playing to pay rent or anything, I’m just doing it for fun. I could adapt the same strategy to a single number, and possibly make out better, but the time between hits would be longer and I’d become bored easily. I do it this way to maximize my chance as much as possible and have some fun at the same time. If I had more patience and had a different motive for playing, I’d probably bet on single numbers.
I know this has been mentioned before, but I don’t know if you’ve seen the earlier threads.
You have a strategy of doubling your bet if you lose. That way, if you win you are back even. Well, this is fine, except that you will eventually run into a string of losses, and you will start having to bet really really large amounts. Eventually you will hit a string that will bankrupt you. The house doesn’t have the same disadvantage, since they have a much much bigger stake than you do…they can afford to lose millions at one table since they are making it all back at the other tables. Also, there are maximum bets. Once you hit the maximum, you can’t double any more.
So what the system does is often let you win at first. But if you keep playing you’ll eventually bust and lose everything.
OK, I’ve got to mention this although you will all think I’m full of B/S.
About 3 years ago I worked for about 3 months for a guy who had a system that actually worked. My job was to ‘research’ potential wheels for him to play and then be part of the two man time keeping team that fed him the information as the wheel span.
I’m only mentioning this because I know for a fact that a non-numbers based system can work given the right kind of wheel and right ball size. When I left the ‘team’ they were just getting to grip with atmospheric variables that seemed to occur around sunset (I thought that might be a bit of a red herring but what did I know…). It was a pretty mad environment but great James Bond type fun.
As a further aside, I believe time keeping is actually illegal in some US States (Nevada, for example) but is only contrary to casino house rules in the UK so we weren’t doing anything illegal.
What does craps have to do with Chaos theory? Not all unpredictable systems are chaotic.
It is possible to find a roulette wheel that is biased and play with a positive expectation. But it’s a lot of work, and once you find a biased wheel, the house will change it as soon as they notice your patterns.
I think you meant ‘clocking’ a wheel, not ‘timing’ it. ‘Clocking’ a wheel is the process of recording the results of thousands of spins in order to do a numerical analysis and determine whether or not the wheel is biased. This is not illegal anywhere in North America, unless you use a computer to help you.
dhansen – I meant both ‘clocking’ and ‘timing’. ‘Clocking’ was identifying the physical bias in the wheel itself and ‘timing’ was stop-watching the second gyration of the ball. It was the second element that I was told was not legal in some US States.
Yeah, that’s why I mentioned both my strategy(don’t necessarily double and it’ll last longer) and that you need to know when to get up and walk away. There are no guarantees in any og the games in a casino, except that you will lose. Even more so with roulette. Given enough time, you will lose, but with the strategy I use, people tend to lose a bit slower. It’s all in good fun, might as well make it last as long as possible.
It’s all in good fun, might as well make it last as long as possible.