I'm interested in this. Don't want a rehash of Martingale discussion, just ... are ANY strategies actually viable in the game?

Card counting works, if you're good at it, and the particular situation at the casino is favorable.

Are there cards in roulette?

Hah whoops, i read that as blackjack. No, you can not win at roulette.

If a fair roulette (ie, not mechanically biased) nope, the payouts are carefully calculated to always favor the house.

I think somebody recently did use technology and the sound or vibration of the spinning ball to improve the chance of predicting what quarter the ball landed in but was caught/banned.

I suppose if you could train yourself to do this feat without technology then it is possible but if you could you could also probably find a more productive and more valuable way to use your super power.

Well yeah, people have been cheating at roulette like that since at least 2000 or so. The first one I heard of was a couple that had a device that looked like a cell phone but was actually a camera that uploaded data to a super computer that would tell them which quadrant to bet on. You have until the ball goes around twice to place your bet. It gave them a pretty good edge and they made many millions. They got caught because they got greedy - tried to make a few huge scores instead of smaller ones. Turned out to not be considered illegal (jn that jurisdiction) because they did not interfere with the wheel. Doesn't mean the casinos can't ban them though.

Every single bet made in roulette has the same negative expectation. The variance can change though. It is mathematically impossible to combine negative expectation bets in a way to provide positive expectation.

Would you agree with these three statements?

1. You could make a quick buck but it would be based on luck.

2. Long term that luck will always run out eventually.

3. So longterm it is not viable.

Ok let this be a "hated gift" to all casinos' victims lol. Yes you can fix it so that you win the vast majority of the time something little and lose something big rarely. Overall negative avg. If you play like most people do in random little bets for a long time without any disciplined target you aim at boldly, you will do worse though. A degenerate gambler than puts $1000 on red and then leaves is a lot better than some person that tried to do it slowly with martingale or whatever (with very few exceptions see next). If you tried to reach 1100 from 1000 betting in $10 units say on black you would be destroyed very often.

Never play roulette unless you are forced for some reason to make quick money at the risk of major losses that come with small probability and you have no better alternative.

For example if you ever need $100 and you have $1000 credit (or bankroll) you can start betting $3 at 17 because say 3*35=105 so you get there right away if you win. You continue to bet 3 on some number or even the same always until you hit or you reach 1100-35*3=995 or less (so bet $3 for 2 times down to 994).

If you lose 2 times try next $4 on 17 or whatever fixed number you choose. Even better if you have any hint if there is any slight bias at the time you place the bet if there is a way to spot similar initial conditions and you have some correlation observed that cannot predict the number of course exactly but the general neighborhood in the wheel it tends to land when the initial conditions window is met. That is doable in theory but to fix in practice will require exceptional study that may be impossible to realize in actual casino settings with the fact they observe you not being the least of the problems but rather the hardness of the entire effort that will require serious science and statistics and very fast response hardware/implementation (google eyes +remote computer and ear pieces or whatever lol) etc.

In any case if we assume you have no way to get any edge continue with 4 until you no longer can reach 1100 with that 4 bet right away from the position your bankroll is at the time.

You will be able to continue with 4 until you reach at least 1 less than 960 because 1100-4*35=960. Of course 960-994=34 and 34/4=8.5. So 9 lost bets of $4 takes you to 9*4=36 down plus another 6 down for the 2 bets at 3 and you are at 42 down at 958.

You then move to 5 and continue to bet 5 on the whatever number you choose until you hit or reach anything less than 1100-35*5=925. That is another 7 bets at 5.

And so on you get the idea, you keep increasing the bet size as needed in order to be able to reach 1100 or better if you were to win that bet.

That is the best strategy to play the game if you have a fixed target to reach and then stop. It is called bold betting strategy. Basically you look at what you have to bet in order to reach your objective in case you win right away. You always bet what you need to stop as soon as possible playing by winning immediately on that move. It is that simple. You try to minimize how much betting/action you do to reach your target because clearly its a bad EV game and the less you play to achieve a target the better.

You can do a spreadsheet to see where this is getting and you will find that after 79 lost bets your last bet was 30 and you lost and you have now 27 left. So you bet all 27 and if you win you go to 27*36=972, otherwise after 80 lost bets you are done.

Basically the last one the 80th at 27 can take you to 972 and start over betting 4 right away and same as above again.

So lets say that your chance q to lose everything is the chance to lose 80 bets one after the other plus the chance to lose 79 bets and then win the last one times roughly the same chance q as you more or less arrive at the same starting bankroll within small difference.


So the chance to lose that way everything before reaching your target 1100 is about;

(in US roulette say the number has 1/38 chance to hit with 0,00 included there to give 38 possible outcomes)

q=(1-1/38)^80+(1-1/38)^79*1/38*q

Which gives q~0.1188

So basically 11.88% of the time doing this loses 1000 and 88.12% you win 100. (-30.68 the EV of this idea).


So if you want to be a smart a$$ playing roulette and appear a cool winner typically, doing the above you have 88% chance to get away with it.

Not bad since that way you will probably survive 5 times doing that about 50% of the time.

Notice this is better than martingale starting at $1 etc 2 , 4...

Of course its still a bad EV game but you made the best of it in the absence of any physics computing guess research.


And thats the best you can do regarding a bad game. If you get any fun with company in that environment and end up winning 88% of the time so that one night you will lose 1000, that night may never come if you play infrequently and you will have a cool $100+ all these times you played (or adjust to whatever you wanted to risk and have as target)


For example if you wanted to double your money you would bet integerpart((2000-1000)/35+1)=29 right away.

Then 30 etc. Redo the above in another spreadsheet.

That is better than betting it all on black say. You reach your target with higher probability.

If you did the math with the help of a spreadsheet you would see for example

q~(1-1/38)^25+(1-1/38)^24*1/38*(1-1/38)^12 =52.34% chance to lose before reaching objective or better

To compare if you bet on eg black you have 20/38=52.63% chance to lose, a bit worse (but faster resolution if time is money lol).


Notice that the numbers method is better to reach even a very ambitious target and sometimes when it works it even takes you over 2000 by a bit more since you have to bet in integer $ sizes. So a little bonus.

So better win probability 1-q=47.66% and a chance to land even higher than your target for a free meal extra.

You can use a computer to clock the wheel but that is illegal. You may be able to find a biased wheel.

I don't think roulette is beatable on "long term" (unlike baccarat or bj) but I know a few of very serious players claiming just the opposite.

Besides the physical procedures, it seems that almost everyone of them like to apply in a way or another some issues related to the famous "birthday paradox".

In their view the probability of any event will be always the same per each spin, but not the short term statistical frequency of the outcomes produced by those spins within certain situations and after a given number of spins.

Of course to not fool themselves such players must demonstrate the goodness of their strategy by a careful study of the standard deviation outcomes.

Here's a method you may not have heard of. You know those cans of compressed air with tiny narrow tubes that are used to clean computers? Well, blowing the air on roulette wheel can cause the wheel to slow a bit or speed up a bit when the ball is near your bet. Rig one up in your sleeve and make millions. Thank me later.

I previously outlined a method - the David Lyons Patented Roulette Method - that enabled a player to beat European roulette with a $1 to $50,000 betting range (you can have these limits across multiple tables) 99.98% of the time. So from a short-term point of view, pretty much a dead cert every time.

FYP