Roulette
The small ‘wheel’ is the centerpiece of every respectable brick and mortar or online gambling operation. In fact, you can’t call a gambling parlor a casino unless it has a roulette wheel.
Supposedly invented by mathematician Blaise Pascal, to aid him with his experiments in random number generation, the roulette has become an instrument of fate, one that hands out fortunes and takes them back: the ultimate symbol of gambling.
Betting on the roulette is a negative EV play. More precisely, on an American roulette wheel (which features a 00 slot in addition to the 0 one) the negative expected value on every one dollar bet is $0.053, or 5.29%. Make a 5-number bet (0,00,1,2,3) and you’ll be faced with a -$0.079 house edge or 7.9%.
European roulette wheels feature smaller house-edges because they do not have the 00 slot. The expected value on a $1 bet on European roulette is – 0.027, or 2.7%.
With that in mind, it’s obvious that the very first step of your roulette strategy should be to avoid American wheels.
The house hold is much bigger than the house edge though, and on an American roulette wheel it can be as high as 21-30%. Players who repeat bets induce this ‘hold’. Let’s consider a person on a $10 bankroll who’s making $1 bets. He will probably not make 10 bets exactly but more like 15-20, because he’ll win some of his initial 10 bets. Players who go on betting until they lose all their money generate a house hold of 100%.
As far as roulette strategies are concerned we need to set one thing straight before we venture any further into the matter. There are no strategies that will yield consistent results for the gambler: it is mathematically impossible.
People however, are constantly devising new ways to attack the roulette, and despite the fact that pretty much everyone knows the beating of a mechanically unbiased roulette wheel is impossible, these ‘systems’ catch on fast with the public.
The Martingale system, betting only on red, their combination, the Labouchere system and the dozen bet are all such strategies that in the end fail to put the player ahead.
Mechanical strategies do work sometimes. By taking advantage of a mechanical mishap in the roulette-wheel system which led to biased results, players were known to beat the house consistently, such problems however are usually discovered pretty fast and remedied.