Against All Odds
If casinos didn’t have the edge, Las Vegas might be a trailer park and Atlantic City a crumbling ruin. But what if they didn’t have the edge? What if there was a winning system at roulette? Can a skillful player outwit the casinos?
Most gamblers satiate the casinos by stuffing the ravenous slot machines and slaking the gaming tables in the hope of hitting it big. (Although most casinos are closed thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, the online casinos are open and seeking to take advantage of their short-lived market monopoly.)
Few players know what they are up against. The odds are complex and have challenged some of the brightest minds. Galileo calculated all the possible outcomes in Zara, a game that uses three dice. And it was Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat who, in 1654, laid the groundwork of probability theory with a proof for all the possible combinations of two dice. Games like blackjack are even more complex and it wasn’t until the 1960s that a postdoctoral maths student at MIT, Edward O. Thorp, defined the game’s basic strategy and also laid the foundations for card counting in his book Beat the Dealer.
Unlike craps and blackjack, it’s not difficult to determine the odds at roulette. All you need is a calculator.
There are two forms of roulette, French and American. The French wheel is numbered from one to 36 with a single zero. The American has an extra number: double zero. Because of the extra number, the casino’s advantage doubled, as you’ll see later, and American Roulette fell out of favor. But the French table has it’s own limitations. It is a slow game that requires three croupiers, which makes it less profitable. The pragmatic British saw the disadvantages of both and created a faster, more popular game by fusing the French wheel to the American table.
To calculate the odds on the French wheel, imagine placing a one-dollar chip on every number. That would cost $37. The pay-out on the winning number is 35–1, so your winning bet would net $36 for a $37 investment. The casino, therefore, takes 2.7% of the money that you bet. (The 38 numbers on the American wheel mean that the casino’s advantage almost doubles to 5.3%!)
Now, imagine that you are sitting down at the table with a bankroll of $100. Every spin will cost you $1. So, after 63 spins you will have placed $2,331 worth of bets and you will have lost $63. Instead of taking 2.7% of your money, the casino has separated you from 63%! (They took their 2.7% on every spin. The longer you spend at the table and the more money you expose, the more you will lose until, inevitably, you are left with nothing.)
Of course, it doesn’t work like that in practice. Covering every number on a roulette wheel is one of the dumbest things that you can do in a casino — there are dumber things, but you’ll have to wait until the article on craps to discover them.
In fact, players usually spread their bets on a selection of numbers, some randomly and some on their “lucky” numbers. And because 63 spins are not nearly enough for the odds to return an even spread of all the numbers, it is possible to win a lot of money despite the odds. And every gambler hopes, or believes, that they will be the one to beat the odds.
But the casinos have the advantage of time. They remain open every day — some never close — relentlessly balancing the numbers, so that when all the wins and all the losses have been accounted for, the casino has invariably taken its percentage. A typical roulette table will win around 30% of the money pushed down the drop-box.
Roulette systems are designed to beat the odds. The simplest and oldest of them is the martingale. Players using the martingale usually play red or black: even-money bets. The idea is to bet the minimum amount and double up if the bet loses. For example, if the minimum bet is $10, and it loses, the player bets $20 on the next spin. If that loses they increase the bet to $40. If that should win, the player would be paid $40. But they have already lost $30, making the profit only $10. Sounds easy, even foolproof? Unfortunately not.
The system’s Achilles heel is that casinos limit bets between a minimum and a maximum. On a table where the minimum bet is $10, the maximum might be $1,000. So, assuming a losing streak, the martingale would go $10, $20, $40, $80, $160, $320, $640… and that’s where it ends because $1,280 would be over the maximum. On the seventh spin, you will have bet a total of $1,270 in order to win $10. And a run of six blacks, or reds, in a row is not that unusual. You have to risk a lot of money to win only $10.
Other more complicated systems, like the d’Alembert and the Labouchere, are variations on the theme and subject to the same relentless odds. There is a multitude of books that claim to teach winning systems. On YouTube, some roulette videos on winning systems have more than two million views. The only people making money from roulette, apart from casinos, are the people selling books and making videos. Why aren’t they making millions of dollars playing roulette? Because their systems don’t work. No system will ensure that you win at roulette. Not one.
There are other ways of winning though. In 1992 Gonzalo Palayo, a Spanish music producer, found that one of the roulette wheels in the Casino Grand Madrid in Spain had a flaw. He noticed that certain numbers came up more often than others due to some bias in the wheel. He was a generous man and shared the knowledge with his family and friends, who became known as Los Palayos. It all came to an end when one of his team started dating a croupier, who was married to one of the staff, who uncovered the scheme.
It’s not easy finding a biased wheel. Most casinos balance their wheels regularly, but there is always someone who gets sloppy.
Another method of gaining the edge is called sector targeting. It is illegal in most countries now, but it wasn’t always.
In 2004 a team from Eastern Europe won £1.3m in the Ritz Casino in London. They used a sensor linked to a computer to measure both the speed of the wheel and the speed of the ball. The computer was able to calculate an arc of the wheel where the ball was likely to land. It’s not possible to predict the exact number, as roulette wheels have diamond-shaped hazards that are designed to deflect the ball as it drops, and the bounce when the ball lands is unpredictable. Knowing where the ball will land within a quarter, or even half, of the wheel, is a huge advantage, as the team proved. The casino took them to court and lost. The British Gaming Act of 1845 did not anticipate the computer age. It does now.
The Ritz team wasn’t the first. In 2001, a Hungarian, Laszlo Kovaks, was caught doing the same thing in the Star City Casino in Australia. And as far back as 1961, the same Edward O. Thorp of blackjack fame invented what was probably the first wearable computer. After a lot of research, he was able to predict the fall of the ball to one-eighth of the wheel. Another group of MIT students followed in his footsteps in 1976 and took the project a step further, but never capitalized on it. That was 45 years ago. With today’s technology and computing power, the hurdles that the early pioneers faced just aren’t there anymore.
Casinos, naturally, see all of this in a dim light. Any attempt to alter the odds in the player’s favor is unwelcome, whether it’s legal or not.
And finally, there are those that are not concerned with legal nuances and try their hand at cheating. Cheating at roulette, or any other game, is limited only by human imagination, but there are a few common techniques.
Einstein was once asked how to win at roulette. Apparently, he said that the only way to be sure of winning was to put money on the winning number when the croupier’s back is turned. Past Posting does just that. When the ball drops into its number, there is a moment when the croupier must look at the wheel, and away from the table, to determine the winning number. The cheat uses that moment to slip a chip onto the winning number or, more commonly, the winning column or even-money bet. An accomplice will sometimes cause a distraction at the critical moment.
Top Hatting is an evolution of Past Posting, and a little more complicated as it requires the cheat to put a high-value chip and a few colored chips on the winning number. The cheat expects the dealer to see the late bet but to remove only the color chips, leaving the high-value chip to be claimed by an accomplice.
If you must play roulette, don’t cheat. It’s illegal and will likely see you in jail. Take no more money into the casino that you can comfortably afford to lose and set yourself a realistic target for your winnings. It is no good taking $500 and expecting to win $5,000. You can’t expect to make much more than 7% on the stock exchange annually (a little less these days) so why not be satisfied with 10% in a night?
And quit when you are ahead. Quitting when you are ahead sounds ridiculously simple, but greed is the downfall of most gamblers. A large percentage of players in a casino are winning at some stage of the evening. Most end up losing.
