Winning Roulette Strategies | Playing online Roulette

Wherever you look on the internet you find an article or two about how you can beat the roulette whee

Winning roulette strategies

Wherever you look on the internet you find an article or two about how you can beat the roulette wheel in the long-run using various ‘systems, I decided to take a closer look at some of these ‘winning’ strategies and explore them from the perspective of the guy who wrote them (and thus probably believes in them too).

Don’t get me wrong. I’m perfectly aware that beating the roulette wheel in the long run is mathematically impossible. Only when 2 and 2 add up to make 3 will you beat the wheel, and you should batter this into your head too. The way the system was conceived leaves no room for positive expected value for the player, and therefore no long term winning is possible either.

The negative EV that players will have to struggle against is ‘coded’ directly into the wheel through the presence of the 0 and the 00 slots. Even if these slots were removed, you still wouldn’t enjoy positive EV because this way roulette would become a coin-flip, 50-50 game both for the house and the player, which means the long term EV would be 0 for both parties concerned.

The 5.6% house edge on straight bets is something most gamblers are familiar with. What some of them fail to understand is, the house doesn’t make its money on this meager edge. The house edge is only a small piece in a much larger mechanism called the house drop. The house edge is the spark that sets a whole chain of events into motion, an elaborate system which eventually turns a near 30% profit for the casino.

It can be mathematically charted how every single bet that you make against a 5.6% nominal house edge will have to deal with a bigger and bigger real house edge all the time. In a word: if you play long enough, you’re guaranteed to register 100% losses.

Most roulette systems represent ways players can gain an edge over the house in roulette. While in blackjack (another very popular casino game) the house edge can indeed be turned around through card counting (which is much more complicated though than the system used to actually count cards), in roulette players are robed of such tools.

One method that keeps popping up is the charting of the wheel. The theory goes that most real roulette wheels are biased, because it is almost impossible mechanically to create a perfect wheel which does indeed spit out perfectly random results. While this may be true to a certain extent, I simply do not believe that the imperfection of the wheel can yield a significant enough edge for the player to cling on to. For a mechanically biased wheel to produce significantly predictable results for players to exploit, it would take such a blatantly obvious fault that casino authorities would certainly notice it, quite probably well before any player does.

The theory behind the charting of the wheel says that it takes time and thousands upon thousands of spins. Here’s another reason why this system cannot work. Let’s say the casino chooses not to mend its obviously faulty wheel. You try out several wheels in several casinos and spend a hard-to–assess sum of money on gaining the information you need only to find they do not yield significantly biased results for you. After weeks of searching and tons of money wasted, you come across the faulty wheel.

By this time though, your losses are so bad that you’d probably need a written consent from the casino’s management stating that they’ll let you win at the wheel in order to commit any more money on it. Again: if the casino decided to look the other way, maybe then you could theoretically recover your losses, but since casinos are not famed for being sloppy or negligent when it comes to winning players, I wouldn’t stake my financial future on this setup.

The charting of the wheel also includes writing down every result for weeks, data which can then be analyzed for patterns. The problem is that even if you do find an emerging pattern, it may well be a simple twist of fate without any consistent basis whatsoever. In roulette you can only win by taking the hit of the negative EV and by trying to get lucky on the variance.

Don’t forget to take full advantage of the comp programs your casino may offer, These are just like rakeback in poker: they’ll take a bite out of your negative EV, making it possible for you to chase your lucky spin for longer. Poker rakeback deals will significantly enhance your positive EV in poker if you’re a good player and diminish your negative EV if you’re a bad one.