Roulette

Roulette is a casino game. A croupier turns a round roulette wheel which has 37 or 38 separately numbered pockets in which a ball must land. The main pockets are numbered from 1 to 36 and change between red and black, with number 1 being red. In addition there is a pocket numbered 0 of green color. In most roulette wheels in the United States but not in Europe, there is a second zero compartment marked 00, also colored green.

If a player bets on a single number and wins, he is paid 35 to 1. This means that he is paid 35 times his bet, while also his bet is returned, in total he gets 36 times his bet. (In a lottery one would say 'the prize is 36 times the cost of the ticket', because in a lottery the cost of the ticket is not returned additionally.)

A player can bet on numbers, combinations and even colors.

The house average or house edge is what is lost on average relative to the bet. If a player bets on a single number in the American game there is a probability of 1/38 that he gets 36 times his bet (including the return of his bet), so he ends up having on average 36/38=0.9474 times his bet. Thus the house average for American roulette is 1/19 (5.26%); the same applies for the other kinds of bets, except for the five number bet where it a greater than 7%. The house average is approximately halved in the European game.

Number Trivia
Roulette has been known as the devil's wheel since the total of all numbers adds up to 666, the legendary number of the beast.

Betting Strategies and Tactics
Albert Einstein is reputed to have stated, "You cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it."

And yet, the numerous even money bets in roulette have inspired many players over the years to attempt to beat the game by using one or more variations of a Martingale betting strategy, wherein the gamer doubles his bet after every loss, so that the first win would recover all previous losses, plus win a profit equal to the original bet. As the referenced article on Martingales points out, this betting strategy is fundamentally flawed in practice.

Various attempts have been made by engineers to overcome the house edge through predicting the mechanical performance of the wheel, most notably by Joseph Jaggers, the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo in 1873.

To try to prevent exploits like this, the casinos monitor the performance of their wheels, and rebalance and realign them regularly to try to keep the result of the spins as random as possible.

More recently Thomas Bass, in his book The Newtonian Casino 1991, has claimed to be able to predict wheel performance in real time. He is also the author of The Eudaemonic Pie, which describes the exploits of a group of computer hackers who attempt to use computers in their shoes to win at roulette by predicting where the ball will fall. In 2004, it was reported that a group in London had used mobile cameraphones to predict the path of the ball.

Famous Bets
In 2004, Ashley Revell of London, England sold all of his possessions, clothing included, and brought $135,300 to the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas and put it all on "Red" at the roulette table in a double-or-nothing bet. The ball landed on "Red 7" and Revell walked away with his money doubled to $270,600.

Martingale. (The History section explains the details of why this betting strategy does not work.)

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "roulette".