How to win at roulette | Hacker News Reader

How to win at roulette

samverhasselt.com

6 pointssaym12 comments

There is no way to win at roulette. There is no way to win at roulette. Repeat after me, there is no way to win at roulette.

Place a bet on black and if you win, then quit playing roulette for the rest of your life. Then you can say you went out a winner.

Also, anyone who knows anything about roulette wouldn't have made it past the chart showing double zero roulette. Why would you play on a double zero roulette table? Find a single zero table.

You might be able to create a bit more interesting results by playing one of the handful of no-zero tables. Google them. Even in this case your expected win rate over the long term is zero.

> There is no way to win at roulette. There is no way to win at roulette. Repeat after me, there is no way to win at roulette

That's not quite correct. If you gather enough data about a given wheel, you can exploit biases to get an advantage. Roulette wheels are not perfect random number generators. This has been successfully exploited in the field [1].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEgOQs93W1Q

Biased roulette wheels are basically a thing of the past. Now they are hooked up to electric monitoring system (that also do the fun LCD displays above them), monitor balance and track every winning number. If the computers notices a significant irregularity, they swap it out due to an abundance of caution, re-balance it and replace all the frets.

The "unbalanced wheel" thing never really worked very well -- as it couldn't easily remove the houses MASSIVE 5%+ edge (00). Now, back in the day damage frets(frets divide the numbers) could be a rather astounding in cheap backwater casinos with worn wooden frets. If you noticed them, you could bet the opposite side (ball, even slowly was likely to coast over smooth worn frets) and you could crush the casino. Today, the combination of electronically monitored balance, irregularity tracking and strong metal frets make this more of a historical thing -- but had to be fun back in the day.

Sure, but I'm sure these wheels are so closely analyzed that the casino would likely pick this up before anyone else would. Though perhaps you could find some hole in the wall game somewhere which you could possibly exploit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)

Thanks (to you and others that mentioned it) for bringing this to my attention. I'd never heard of the Martingale betting system.

Knowledge is power.

Start with $10,000, make your initial bet as $10, and walk away after winning $100.

Or take the $10,000, put it a CD paying 2%, and do twice as well, guaranteed.

You should add how many games it takes to meet your target.

The one thing with Roulette is that it can get very boring very quickly!

I worked on [this][1] product in a previous life. They knew that you only had a certain attention span, so obviously the more you played, the more they took.

In the short term, the house always wins!

  [1]: http://www.shufflemaster.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1171:rapid-roulette&Itemid=903

I can speak from experience - you'll be very surprised how an unlikely string of reds comes up when you're just betting black. Almost like it's rigged or something. Just sayin'.. .

Seems good in theory, but you will go broke using Martingale.

I believe people can go for a while winning using the technique though, which builds a self-reinforcing "I can't lose" feeling. Eventually house odds and the table limit will work against you though.

Win at the roulette <=> run the table.

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