Just a small nitpick. I betcha it was.
But they knew how to hire people who’d paid attention in math class.
LuckySevens wrote
They can in some games, specifically Black Jack under certain conditions. Also, in paramutual games such as poker, or betting on sporting events.
But you’re mistaken if you believe that casinos can be beat in roulette as has been proposed here. There is no gambling system that can make you win at roulette. None.
Long-time Las Vegan here …
There is in fact exactly one winning system for roulettte:
Be the guy who owns the wheel & makes the rules. And even then you can lose some money sometimes for awhile.
I always enjoyed the nice folks who flew into town every weekend with a system and paid my income taxes & property taxes for me so I ddn’t have to. And susidized the entertainment & food & booze & so forth, so I didn’t have to pay market rates for all those goodies.
And no, I didn’t work in the casino industry, I just lived there and enjoyed the fallout from the enless cash fountain those system players left behind.
In fact, to correct the last, casinos aren’t beaten in paramutual games. They benefit no matter how much you make. So that narrows it to Black Jack, and even that’s unlikely, perhaps even impossible, with multiple decks and tighter rules.
Right. As I said, every time somebody comes up with a scheme that alters the odds in their favor, the casinos change the rules.
In blackjack over the years, they’ve gone from one pack of cards to many, from one play all the way through the deck to shuffling early and often. And they ban card-counters, ban physical counters and computers, ban anything that makes it easier to win.
Gambling in a casino is not a stationary target of mathematical precision. It’s against the house, and the house keeps the odds in its favor no matter what it has to do. The only real world question is if casinos can be beaten practically.
Casinos would go out of business if they were stupid enough not to adapt to new times and techniques. They aren’t. It’s not just a matter of there always being enough suckers. No matter how smart you are, you can’t win in the long run, because the odds will always shift to be against you.
Sure there is. If you have the patience to record all the numbers that the ball lands on over a large amount of spins, you may find a wheel that is biased towards one number (because no wheel can be made perfect). If you find the wheel is biased enought towards one number, all you have to do is keep betting the same amount of money on that number over and over and you will be a winner in the long run. Of course casinos look out for this but it is still possible.
I predicate this by saying I have a basic understanding of probability. Which is why I have no practical need to know, and therefore don’t know, much about roulette
However, I thought that there was a number (is it 00?) that means the house wins.
If I’m right, for your idea to be correct, the bias in the wheel has to be so great that it improves the odds in your favour to an extent greater than the 00 worsens the odds in your favour. No chance.
OK, I’m wrong about the 00. Next time I’ll do research before posting. Sorry.
Anyway, my point is still good I think because the house has an edge in terms of what they pay and what the odds are on any given bet. And for your system to work, the bias in the wheel has to help to an extent greater than that edge. I would suspect that there is no way any roulette wheel is going to be out of whack to that extent in favour of any given number.
Except if it is “bent” at the behest of the casino, of course, and if it’s that sort of casino, you ain’t never going to win anyway.
The house edge on most games is rather small. Even if they only make a penny or two per dollar bet (on average), how many dollars in bets do you suppose are placed in any particular casino on any given day?
Casinos do better than a penny per dollar. The house edge in American roulette is 5.26%.
This site gives the house advantage for a variety of games. And in total, casinos do wonderfully well:
**Princhester ** wrote
No, you were right on the money. A roulette table has 1-36 (which are red/black and (duh) odd/even), plus 0 and 00. (Some have only the 0 and no 00, but I’ve never seen one in Las Vegas at least)
As luck would have it, I spent the better part of yesterday at a casino playing roulette. At one point, there were 12 black spins in a row, followed by two 00s (fortunately, I was ON the 00 when it hit, and let it ride). I see these streaks every time I play (twice a year or so). The minimum was $10 inside, $10 outside and $5K max on any outside bet.
The table was really hot (lots of people were winning lots of money quickly - #35 came up three times in a row, and two times in a row a few spins later. Everyone had some chips there). The casino went into panic mode - the pit bosses ALL came over (3 or 4) to observe, and they switched out ‘dealers’ between EVERY spin. They also spun right away, so you couldn’t reach all over and put down bets on your favorite numbers, you had to drop $10 SOMEWHERE to stay in the game. Folks were bitching and complaining, and the dealer said “tell my boss, I don’t make the rules.”
Sunday total: -$300
Monday total: +$325
Barely squeaked it out this time. I usually lose a few hundred when we pop in.
Bill H., Princhester was wrong, he knew about 00, but he thought it meant you automatically lost, which it does not.
There are some schools of thought that you can win at roulette by watching the guy running the game. You naturally develop a rhythm when throwing the ball so many times, so if you track where he releases it versus where it lands, you can possibly predict the section of the wheel that it will hit.
It’s not that difficult to count through 6 or 8 decks. A bigger problem is shoe penetration and auto-shufflers.
Once a casino has gone to all BJ tables having shuffling machines (that constantly shuffle) there is no way to come out ahead (over the long haul) in anything except the parimutuels.
And as noted, the casino also gets a take on the parimutuels.
Enjoy the buffet, though!
Well, yes, I’m aware that they DO better than a penny on the dollar, I was just saying that with such a HUGE volume of gambling going on, the margin doesn’t have to be all lat large, and even small unexpected advantages for the player can outweigh the casino’s odds.
And here we are again. Didn’t you know it was wednesday?
The house doesn’t really need a margin at all, though it obviously helps. The bankroll
size factor alone would win the house a profit.
Martingales could certainly work theoretically but can’t work practically due to house limits. That’s one reason why they have them.
But they CAN be beaten, can they not? 
The bottom line: with ANY system, over the long run you’ll lose about 5% of your money playing roulette. You can do things like make it more likely you’ll win a given session, but that only makes it so that you lose more when you do lose.
There is one system, though, a closely guarded secret, that can cut the house advantage to literally nothing: http://www.caro.com/caro_roulette_system_1.htm
According to Snopes there was someone who managed to do just that at Monte Carlo. Of course, that was over 100 years ago, and even then, the casino figured out how to counter him after a few days and end his winning streak. Still, he went home with over $300,000, a hell of a lot of money back then.