Actually, for the wheel you want, you're going to pay three to four thousand. I would buy any full sized wheel that was under a thousand in a heartbeat.

my friend that works for boeing out in seattle can do this fairly acurately.

I know this post is late but I've been looking for the same thing on google and there's nothing. In fact, your post is what came up! I seem to know more about it so let me see if I can help.
First of all, I read the thread so far and they don't even know the difference between "clockers" and "trackers". (There are also "signature" players but the reality of that as advantage play is very questionable.) Tracking is extremely hard to do without a computer but men do exist who do it professionally. The first obstacle is learning the entire sequence of the wheel, backwards and forwards. Second, you must find a partner who learns the same thing. Then you have to learn how to measure the counter-clockwise speed of the wheel and the clockwise speed of the ball at the same time (You need two eyes--can't be a pirate.), within two seconds after dealer begins his spin! etc., etc. I don't know how to do it and have no ambition to learn at this time. Besides, most trackers start out as clockers.

"Clocking" has absolutely nothing to do with tracking just as card counters don't know Jack about shuffle tracking. I could go on and on about what I do in a casino every weekend to win thousands at roulette but I'd rather just say...

Read Beating the Wheel by Barnhart.

There is a book called The Newtonian Casino about some kids that did this in the 60's. A great read.

I took a look online, and it appears that it's The Eudaemonic Pie, just with a different title now. The author is the same (Thomas A. Bass) and the description sounds the same.

Slight correction, it happened in the late 70's/early 80's (not 60s).

And most importantly, I agree that it's a VERY good book. It doesn't dumb the material down, gives great detail, and has a good flow to keep the reader interested. The Eudaemonic Pie is probably my favorite book I've ever read.

What about detecting wheel bias? The new automated roulette machines would seem to be very good candidates for detecting a bias. There is no dealer variable and there are many more spins in a given time frame then a manually dealt table. Just a guess but if the automated machine can spin twice a minute this means many more data points in a shorter of amount of time. In a 48 hour period data could be collected for over 11,000 spins. More then enough data to collect a bias. One would need a computer program, excel might even work and a comprehensive system for collecting accurate data. If and win a bias is detected there is the added benefit of many more spins per hour to exploit the bias.
I am of the opinion that ALL wheels have some kind of bias. It's just is the bias big enough to be exploitable. And is the casino aware of the bias and are they making adjustments to compensate for the bias as to not be exploited.
If someone, say a team of poker players that is willing, diligent and trust worthy enough to collect the data this could be a potential gold mine. Building a team devising a plan and executing the plan would be difficult to say the least but it is doable IMO.

the problem is that practically executing such a plan would be considered cheating

Why would it be cheating? Do youn mean the data collection part or the wagering part?

I'd bet the automatic wheels collect the data already.

With memory at .10/GB, anybody who has information worth saving and doesn't is guilty of gross negligence.

the part where you use a device

Data collection would be done via cell phone. Recording the number sequence in a voice memo and then transfered to excel when im home. Cell phones themselves are not illegal casinos, obviously, but using one for data collection, depending on state laws, could be. The point is mute the data collection would have already of been done once you start wagering. However in a perfect system data would be collected while one is wagering as well. To see if the edge is still there. I guess though, the win loss results would be a data collection in it self.

Good idea, stand next to a roulette wheel talking on your cell phone for hours.

In all likely hood a chance you will most likely find a noticeable bias is very very slim. Even if you are able to, I assume you have an insanely large bank roll to exploit it with and withstand the variance?

Depending on the size of the bias you would not need a big bankroll. If you found a wheel with a 3% edge the varaince would be smaller then one thinks.

Why would you need to stand next to a roulette wheel the last 20 or spins are given to you on the electronic board. One would only need to walk by every 20 minutes or so and make a record of the data. Someone who smokes has perfect cover here. Just play poker in the poker room and walk by the data read out every time you smoke and collect your data. After you have so many data points start looking for patterns whe you identified a pattern collect more data and verfiey the pattern.

The fact is there are many documented cases where people have made lots of money taking advantage of bias wheels and done so in a perfectly legal manner. And for every documneted case there are at least 100 who have done it and not old anybody.

I provided a link to study done by a survalince team in an an indian casino. The survey was dona at random to test the validity of the equipment. After a mere 1,000 spins a pattern emerged. A total of 20,000 spins verifed the pattern. It was estimated that if a player bet the favored numbers 25 a piece for the total 20,000 spins that there would have been 135K in profit. Around 6.75 per spin. The article does not say how big the bias was but a little math could get the numbers. Im guessing its pretty big. greater then 8%

http://www.indiangaming.com/istore/Jul07_Murphy.pdf

Interesting article.

Its almost a blue print to beat the casino. How it is on the interweb is beyond me????

Biased wheels are real, but the problem is to figure out where the positive biases are. Casinos routinely change wheels to prevent this sort of problem; if you change the wheels faster than an accurate data set can be collected, you can have horrendously biased wheels so long as nobody knows exactly how they're biased.

Even with an unbiased wheel, 20,000 spins isn't enough to guarantee long-term results; someone betting 1 number for 20,000 spins on an unbiased wheel will win between -$2,700 and +$600; you actually need about 50,000 spins before someone's a guaranteed loser and about f^2 that (where f is the fraction of the true odds that is the bias) before you can mathematically prove you've got a biased number. That is, if you have a bias which is either 2x or 0.5x the normal, you need about 200,000 spins to prove it; if you have a bias which is 1.1x or 0.9x normal, you need about 5,000,000 spins to prove it. (For reference, at a traditional roulette game at a live casino, at 20 spins/hr, it would take about 6 years to go through 1,000,000 spins.)

Things would be a little different if there were some SYSTEMATIC flaw in the wheel, like one whole side of the wheel is biased over the other. The reason this would be different is because the variance for betting large sections of numbers is considerably lower than the variance for betting a single number. As a result, with just a 200*f^2 spins, you could easily prove a 18-square bias, or with 4000*f^2, you could prove a 9-square (quarter wheel) bias.

Did you check the graph in the pdf. Im not sure how typical the that wheel is but the bias against a whole 6 number section of the wheel was obvious after 20K spins for sure and probabaly well before that. Check the graph. It's not varaince there is some sort of flaw in the wheel for sure.

I was wondering about the internal audits and maintanice of the wheels. I have a friend in the industry and was going to ask him next time i see him. Finding an identifing mark on the wheel shouldnt be to hard. They are made out of wood and should have distinguishing marks if the eye is trained to look for it.

Say the wheel is actually biased I think there are two likely outcomes. Sit in there 6 straight days, not playing just watchign recording numbers and maybe there is a "detectable variance". Then you go and bet 3 numbers all day long and possibly crush the game. You think that is going to last long even if it is accurate?

Or the "biased numbers" are just variance and you lose your bank roll?

On a different note, if I were you I would probably just go off SheetWise says. Don't know the guy but 99.9% if not all of everything I have read by him in Other Gambling Games is solid

There's no such thing as "obvious" when it comes to sequences of random numbers.

I checked the PDF and I also checked the math. It's not obvious at 20k spins and no offense but I really doubt you know enough about variance to say that it's not variance.

Here's a test. I am generating 5 sets of 5 "wheels" spun 20,000 times and simply calculating the number of times each number comes up. In each set, there is one "biased" wheel in which one number is 10% more likely to come up than the others. Your task is to identify which wheel in each set is the biased one, and which number of that series is the biased number.

http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/3799/82890561.png
http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/3818/82429368.png
http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/1259/47855933.png
http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/1093/83207868.png
http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/8836/12033216.png

Answers below:

Set 1:

Set 2:

Set 3:

Set 4:

Set 5:

A computer simulation done with a random number generator is not the same as series of numbers genrated by an actual mechanical wheel. I am not a statistics expert, that I will surely admit. I would expect that the varince in the wheel would be much more random then showing bias against two big sections of the wheel. Thats the point Im trying to make.
I Just don't think that something with as many compents and varaibles as a roulette wheel can produce compleately random results ever. It can however become very close, close enough that the bias can't be exploited. But I just have my doubts about most wheels being engeinered and maintined well enough that a bias could not be detected and exploited.

Heh.