Roulette and Predictions

Through the years attempts have been made by engineers to overcome the house edge.  They try to predict the mechanical performance of the wheel.  One most notable for this strategy was an individual by the name of Joseph Jagger.  He worked on this in Monte Carlo back in 1873.  The schemes would work by figuring out that the ball is more likely to fall on certain numbers.  However, Claude Shannon, computer scientists and mathematician, was known best for contributing to information theory and arguably built the first wearable computer to do such in 1961.

Exploits like this were prevented by casinos by monitoring the performance of their wheels.  They would realign and rebalance them regularly in the efforts of keeping the spin results as random as possible.  Still there are some who claim to be able to predict wheel performance.  Thomas Bass, more recently, claims in his book The Eudaemonic Pie, that a group of computer hackers, calling themselves the Eudaemons, successfully were able to used computers in their shoes to win at roulette in the 1970s by successfully predicting where the ball would fall.

Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo used a computer in order to model tendencies of the roulette wheel.  He bet on the most likely number at the Casino de Madrid in Madrid, Spain.  Along with family members, he was successful at winning over one million dollars over a several year span.  The casino challenged the legality of his strategy, however, a court ruled in his favor.

Another group which consisted of two Serbs and one Hungarian in London, in 2004, used mobile camera phones to make roulette ball landing predictions.  This is a cheating technique known as sector targeting.  The court ruled that they didn't' cheat, whoever, because their special laser camera phone and microchip couldn't possibly have influenced the landing of the ball.  In short, they were allowed to keep their winnings.

While many have tried to make predictions and use devices to illegally or legally win at roulette, one conceivable strategy those that rely on luck use is betting only on red.  This is where the player bets that the ball will land in a red space for a certain number of spins.  For example, they may bet that it will land in a red space for 38 spins in a row.  Since there are 18 red spaced on a roulette table with 38 total spaces, the probability of landing on red is 47.37%.  Therefore, if the wheel were to spin 38 times, there is a 99% chance that the ball will land on red at least 10 times.  There is also a 50% chance that 18 will be red.  Therefore, the break-even point would be 19.  This demonstrates the difficulty of winning by this strategy.

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