Roulette Biased
Roulette is almost always a completely random game. Once you place your bet, you have no control over where the ball lands on the wheel.
But in rare cases, you can influence the results. One of these cases is when you’re dealing with a biased wheel.
A biased wheel is one that, due to wear and tear, is no longer producing random results. It favors certain pockets or sections.
What’s exciting about wheel bias is that it can potentially be worth millions of dollars. I’ll cover several players later who made a fortune with this strategy.
But casinos have recently put the clamps down on wheel bias through several methods. They’ve greatly improved their ability to stop offering faulty wheels.
This leads to an inevitable question, “Is wheel bias dead?” I’ll answer this by covering previous winners, how this strategy works, and what makes it significantly harder today.
Past Examples of Roulette Wheel Bias Winners
Players wouldn’t have a problem with bias roulette wheels if they bet in virtual/online casinos, where the sequence of winning numbers is supposed to be truly ‘random’. But when playing in a land-based casino, one can always expect that the roulette wheel will behave in. A Biased Roulette Wheel is one that possesses a mechanical flaw that allows a particular number to come up an average of every 20 or 30 spins. With the likeliness of one particular number coming up you can bet on that number each spin and come out ahead of the house in the long run. The First (Famous) Biased Roulette Wheel. The history of players making big money on biased roulette wheels dates back to 1873. That year, a British man known as Joseph Jaggers traveled with a team of six helpers to the casino at Monte Carlo.
Unlike poker or blackjack (card counting), roulette doesn’t have a lengthy list of big winners. Instead, only a small number of winners’ stories have been publicized.
But those who have won through roulette have won big. Below, you can read about some of the players who became rich with this game.
Joseph Jagger
Joseph Jagger was an English engineer who lived in the 19th century. He used his engineering skills to figure out that not all roulette wheels are perfect.
Jagger theorized that some wheels can break down over time and eventually favor certain numbers. He set out to take advantage of this knowledge by hiring six clerks to record roulette results in Monte Carlo.
They returned to England and gave Jagger their results. He was then able to determine that one wheel at the Beaux Arts Casino was biased.
Jagger set off to Monte Carlo and began playing at this roulette wheel. He identified it based on distinguishable markings and earned what amounts to millions of pounds today.
Suspicious of Jagger’s improbable “luck,” the casino switched the wheels overnight. He was wise enough to eventually realize that the wheels had been switched and walked away with most of his winnings.
Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo
Music producer Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo was far from an advantage gambler when he started hitting casinos. Instead, he was like the millions of other recreational gamblers around the globe who just played to blow off some steam.
But things changed for the Spaniard in the 1990s, when he realized that roulette could be beaten. He then employed several family members to help him record results at Casino Gran Madrid.
The team was able to find a biased wheel and take advantage of it night after night. They became so successful that they took different shifts to capitalize on the wheel.
The Casino Gran Madrid staff became suspicious after they continued losing to the same few players. They used various measures to try and throw Pelayo off of his game. Finally, they just resorted to banning him from the casino.
This setback didn’t stop the Pelayos, though. They took their show on the road and continued winning at various European and Las Vegas casinos.
All told, they won an estimated €1.5 million before finally being banned from most European and Vegas gambling venues.
Billy Walters and the Computer Team
Billy Walters is known first and foremost as a highly successful sports bettor. He’s second-best known for being convicted of an insider-trading scandal.
But before all of this, he was a member of the “Computer Team.” This group of professional gamblers was one of the first to use computers in gambling in the early 1980s.
They analyzed data to make successful sports bets and win money through other casino games. Roulette just happened to be one of these other games.
Walters and his team recorded wheel results at Atlantic City casinos. They found a biased wheel at the Golden Nugget and proceeded to win almost $4 million.
The Golden Nugget finally caught on and barred the Computer Team. But not before taking one of the biggest losses in Atlantic City history.
What Does It Take to Spot Biased Wheels?
The first thing worth mentioning here is that biased wheels are rare. Casinos do a good job of making sure their equipment runs properly and doesn’t offer advantages.
Nevertheless, not all roulette wheels throughout the world are perfect. You can use the following methods to detect bias in them.
Physical Observations
Spotting imperfections in a roulette wheel is far from easy. After all, casino staff members look for any potential problems in wheels on a regular basis.
But, if you’re a true wheel bias expert, you may be able to notice a physical imperfection. Some possibilities include:
- The wheel shaft being damaged, which causes the wheel to tilt more.
- Frets (pocket dividers) being damaged, which indicates that the ball could drop into certain pockets more.
- Pockets being deformed, which also causes the ball to drop into specific pockets more.
- The ball rattling on the wheel more than usual, which indicates a deformed ball.
- The ball rattling at specific points of the wheel, which reveals a faulty ball track.
You may never be able to find one of these flaws yourself. If you do, though, it makes discovering a biased wheel much easier.
Researching Section Bias
Assuming you can’t spot any physical imperfections on a wheel, you can always do things the old-fashioned way by recording countless spins.
Researching wheel bias breaks down into two camps:
- Section bias
- Pocket bias
The first type refers to when a wheel favors a certain section. For example, a biased wheel might show preference to a 10-number section from six to 32.
The good thing about section bias is that you don’t need as many results to detect bias. Instead, you may find a flawed wheel after recording around 500 spins.
Of course, you can always continue jotting down results in order to detect bias with more confidence. But you can be fairly confident if you notice that a certain section is getting more action with a 500-spin sample.
Researching Pocket Bias
Biased pockets are harder to detect, because you’re trying to figure out if the wheel is favoring specific numbers. You may need around 10,000 spins to figure out if a wheel is biased towards one or more pockets.
Obviously this is a lot less attractive from a time perspective. You’ll need to put more hours into recording this many spins on each wheel.
But detecting pocket bias can also pay off more. After all, you receive a 35 to 1 payout for winning single-number wagers.
Obstacles for Roulette Wheel Bias Today
The primary obstacle towards winning money through wheel bias used to be putting in the work. As explained above, you need to record lots of spins to detect flawed wheels with any confidence.
However, today’s casino environment presents far more challenges. Here are some of the biggest hurdles towards making money with this advantage-play technique.
Equipment Inspections
Casinos are fully aware of what can happen if they let wheels break down and players take advantage. Therefore, they commonly inspect their roulette wheels to ensure everything is in proper order.
Staff members inspect the wheels and also run practice spins to make sure roulette games run smoothly. Casinos usually have a better chance of spotting physical flaws in a wheel before you do.
Monitoring Results
Many roulette tables feature electronic boards that record the last 10 to 20 results. One purpose of these boards is to help players who like to bet on previous results.
Another purpose is to electronically track results from wheels. Casinos can use this data to determine if specific pockets or sections are being favored.
Sturdier Wheels
The biggest change that casinos have instituted with regard to randomizing roulette is the Starburst wheel. Developed by TCS John Huxley in the 1980s, this wheel has metal frets and shallower pockets.
Roulette Bias System
Due to its features, the Starburst wheel is less likely to break down and favor specific numbers and sections. Most casinos throughout the world now feature Starburst products.
Conclusion – Can You Still Win With Roulette Wheel Bias?
Pulling off wheel bias isn’t like in the late 1800s, when Joseph Jagger crushed Monte Carlo. It’s not even as easy as it was to do in the 1990s, when the Pelayo family made a fortune.
This technique is more difficult today, because casinos are better aware of the matter. They have superior wheels that don’t suffer much wear and tear, if any.
Another problem is that gambling establishments run regular equipment inspections on roulette games. They have a strong chance of spotting flaws with these checks.
As if this isn’t enough, casinos also electronically monitor the results. They can use this data to figure out if a wheel is biased towards a pocket(s) or section.
Therefore, you won’t have as easy of a time with wheel bias as the previously covered legends. But it’s not impossible to win with this strategy.
First off, some casinos still use cheaper wheels to save money. But these same wheels are more subject to going haywire eventually.
Furthermore, the world is filled with lots of casinos and roulette games. Some of these tables are bound to feature biased results.
You may ultimately determine that trying to find these needles in a haystack isn’t worth the effort. But it’s still possible to detect wheel bias in some cases.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Get Your Brain Cells Fired Up
Just about as many people have studied the physics of a roulette wheel and ball as have tried to beat the wheel with a roulette system. The reward for being able to predict where the ball is going to land in any given spin on a roulette table is just too tempting!
In this section, we take a look at some basic roulette physics to see if this can help us, in any way, to understand the dynamics of the game and thus to gain an edge. Roulette probabilities are fixed. But that hasn’t stopped people from trying to predict those outcomes.
There might be some roulette mathematics involved here by the way!
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The first thing to say, is that the roulette wheel is designed to generate outcomes of pure chance. There is no purer form of gambling, and although most wheels are not 100% random (they may be biased, or the dealer may have a signature), they are as close to random as you can possibly get. Casinos aren’t bothered about having perfect roulette wheels. They just need them perfect enough so that humans are unable to spot any trends.
Let’s take an American Roulette Wheel. There are 38 pockets into which the ball can fall, and all are the same size. The probability of the ball landing in any of them is equal. You could say that a roulette wheel is a random number generator or an RNG.
Physical Properties of a Roulette Wheel
But, and it’s a big but- the result isn’t determined by an electronic random number generator like it is in virtual or video roulette. It is determined by the mechanics of a ball going round a wheel, and friction and gravity acting on that ball. Eventually the ball will lose all of its kinetic energy thanks to friction with the wheel and the air, and will eventually bounce across pockets losing more and more energy faster and faster until it comes to a stop.
In theory, if you are able to measure certain parameters, you should be able to work out the pocket into which the ball will fall. Even if you are unable to predict the exact pocket, you should be able to predict a “zone” of numbers. And that is enough in roulette to give you an edge, because of course you can make multiple single number bets.
Laser Eyes
Visual spotting, or even lasers have been used to collect the necessary initial values of the variables in the system. All this becomes easier if the wheel is biased- even a minor tilt of the rotor, for example, can create shadow zones on the wheel where the ball never falls.
Here we get into the actual physics of a roulette wheel, a topic that has been covered by many scientists including , using the work of Edward Thorp who wrote Elementary Probability (1966), The Mathematics of Gambling (1984) and several mathematical papers on probability, game theory, and functional analysis and Eichberger who has attempted to beat roulette with a computer in his Roulette Physics paper.
In these approximations, friction and air resistance need to be plugged in to the model. Another paper worth looking at, as this comes from the casino’s perspective, is Dixon’s Roulette Wheel Testing in which he claims that an angle of as little as 0.1° will cause a discernable bias in the wheel.
The Physics of Roulette
Friction and Drag
Let’s look at a roulette wheel. It consists of an outside s a rim along which the ball rolls at the beginning of its journey. At some stage the ball will drop down from the rim when it loses momentum and travel towards the centre of the wheel. The ball will hit a set of bumps, which will send the ball scattering in a chaotic fashion. Then the ball reaches the inner section of the wheel, with 38 identically sized pockets into which it can land.
Say there was no friction, drag, or tilt, the ball would roll around the rim of the wheel in the opposite direction to the wheel spin, infinitely. It’s path can be determined by the initial angular velocity of the ball and the initial angular velocity of the wheel. Here we are going to use Eichberger’s equation of motion for the wheel without tilt:
ω is the angular velocity of the ball, and α is the angular acceleration of the ball. The constants a and b refer to the effects of friction and drag
Tilted Wheels
If the wheel is tilted, (ie you have a biased wheel), you need additional parameters to describe this. Andy Hall (2007) has written a paper on this called the Forbidden Zones of Roulette Wheels, which make for interesting reading if you are keen on roulette physics. His equation for tilted wheels is as follows:
The ball’s angular acceleration α, now depends on the speed of the ball, AND its location, theta. This is due to the tilt- in some areas the ball is deccelerating up the tilt, and in others it is accelerating down it.
Biased Roulette Wheel
Using these and other equations to model the ball’s behaviour, the authors have made claimed that they are able to predict the final resting place of the ball with a high enough degree of accuracy to be able to get an edge over the casinos, by predicting:
Where the ball leaves the Rim and
Working out the Departure Angle of the Ball
Summary
Roulette Biased Wheel Attack
The amount of tilt that a wheel has affects how big the “shadow zones” are on roulette wheels, as modelled by these equations. But importantly, these shadow zones or “forbidden zones” relate to where the ball comes off the rim of the outer wheel, not where it stops. The casinos still have one ace up their sleeve- and that is the “bumps” that chaotically scatter the ball in all directions.
Roulette Unbiased
This is a far harder thing to model. Can you beat roulette with chaos theory? Well, that’s a whole different subject!