I Watched Him Make $ 80,000
on the Roulette Wheel

The following is taken from chapter 19 of the e-book You Aren't Supposed to Know - A Book of Secrets, which is one of six e-books in The Secrets Package.

In any casino, secrets and "systems" are passed from player to player. The result? Big profits - for the casino. Most systems are really just ways to lose slower. Some are just ways to lose differently. For example, with one system you get many small wins followed by big losses, while with another you make occasional big bets that are won or lost randomly.

On the other hand, there was that one man who made $80,000 over several months on my roulette wheel, when I was working in a casino. I'll get the details of how he did it in a moment. But first let's look at some misconceptions about gambling...

(This deleted part can be found in the book.)

Biased Roulette Wheels

Okay, there are great books out there if you want to count cards. This, however, is a story about roulette. One of my favorite players used to win regularly. When I ran the table, we would talk philosophy while he patiently made his simple bets all night. I knew he was winning, but not how much. After I quit the job, I met him for coffee and discovered that he had made over $80,000 in sixteen months of part-time play. That made it more interesting.

I'll assume you have seen a roulette wheel (you can go look at one online by searching "roulette" on a search engine). But in case you aren't familiar with how it works, here's a brief explanation. Players bet on numbers or combinations of numbers. The dealer or "croupier" spins the wheel in one direction, and the ball in the other. This is to make predicting where the ball lands almost impossible.

There are 38 "pockets" or numbers on an American wheel (1 through 36, plus "0" and "00"). 18 of them are red, 18 are black, and the "zeros" are green. Players place their bets, and when the ball falls, they are paid according to the number of that pocket. We'll ignore all the other various bets and concentrate just on the "straight up" bets. These are when you bet on one number.

You get paid 35 to 1 if your number comes up, so you receive $35 for each dollar bet, plus you keep the bet. Since there are 38 numbers, you can see that the house has an edge (5.6 percent, to be precise), but what if certain numbers came up more often than they should - for example, more often than 1-in-35 spins? That's when you can make money.

Let's suppose, for example, that number 5 is coming up an average of once every 29 spins. If you bet ten dollars on it every time, you would lose 28 times, for a total loss of $280 every 29 spins, but you would win once, which would pay you $350. In other words, in the long run, you would be making $70 for each 29 spins. ($350 minus $280) When there weren't many customers, I sometimes did 60 or more spins per hour, so you can see that this could be very lucrative.

So why would that number or any other come up more often than it should? The short answer is Who cares - just bet it! The longer explanation has to do with the nature of the wheels. The pockets could be manufactured imperfectly, with one or more slightly larger than the others, therefore catching the ball more often. One or more of the dividers between the pockets could be loose, meaning it absorbs the force of the ball instead of bouncing the ball away. The ball would therefore tend to drop into that pocket more often.

There are other reasons, including more temporary ones, like a drop of sticky pop in one of the pockets, or a build-up of dust. The important point isn't what causes a "biased" wheel, though. The important point is this:
Biased wheels exist, and can be taken advantage of.

Why would a casino let this happen? Roulette wheels are expensive, and so they are not often replaced, unlike cards and dice, which casinos replace daily. This means that if there is a bias, it sometimes remains for months. I know for a fact that managers where I worked were aware of their biased roulette wheel, but as long as the table made money for the casino overall, they were too lazy to worry about one guy making a profit on it.

Charting a Roulette Wheel

John (not his real name) came in initially with two friends, as he explained to me. They took turns "charting" the wheel. This is nothing more than writing down the number that comes up on every spin. They did this for weeks on both roulette wheels in the casino. It is an incredibly boring yet crucial part of the process, often amounting to nothing, since there may not be a bias.

You see, if the number eighteen comes up ten times in a hundred spins, it is meaningless. The sample is too small. You need to know if the bias is real, and therefore will continue, or is just a statistical fluke. Without getting into probability theory and a discussion of standard deviations, suffice it to say that if you want to be fairly certain the bias is "real," you need a sample of about 5,000 spins or more.

Any less than that, and you may be betting on a false-bias. The mathematics can be difficult, but a simple example help explain: Any ten coin tosses can result in seven heads or tails, right? But an unbiased coin probably won't ever come up heads 7,000 out of 10,000 tosses. Big numbers show true bias. John's crew eventually had 15,000 spins recorded in a little notebook.

As it turned out, the number "0" was coming in 1-in-28 spins. This surpassed the 1-in-33 threshold they had decided they needed to make it safe and worth their while. Only John had the patience, though, to continue sitting there night after night, placing one bet on one number, over and over. Within a couple weeks, his friends quit. They not only didn't have the patience required, but probably also didn't like the fact that even with the odds in their favor, they had nights when they lost as much as $700.

So night after night John sat there discussing politics and philosophy with me and the other dealers, placing one bet on 0 for each spin of the wheel. He was making between $50 and $100 per hour depending on the number of spins per hour, and assuming the bias was consistent in the long run. Eventually, after more than a year, and $80,000 in profits for John, the casino got a new wheel.

If you want to try this yourself, here is the simplest formula:

1. Find a roulette wheel.

2. Watch 5000 spins, writing down the number the ball falls into on each one.

3. Start betting any that came up more than 151 times (1-in-33 spins).

4. If none are coming up that often, find a new wheel and start the process over.

If you do notice temporary reasons for a bias, like a sticky pocket with a few drops of someone's drink splashed in it, you may want to watch to see if they are corrected (cleaned, in this case). Most biases remain for a while because they are not noticed by management, or their cause is unknown, and replacing roulette wheels is expensive. Of course, cleaning isn't.

A cheap solution some casinos use to thwart "wheel charters," is switching a couple wheels around. If you memorize the wood-grain pattern of the wheel you'll know if it was moved or replaced (John had done this). This kind of roulette system works only on specific wheels (those with known biases), so you have to know you're at the same wheel each time you play.

This is the second half of the chapter. The first half looks at dumb ideas that gamblers have, including the "due" fallacy, the "hot streak" fallacy, and slot machine fallacies. It briefly covers card counting in blackjack. If you are interested, you can find out more at The Secret Information Site.