Roulette
Many historians believe Blaise Pascal introduced a primitive form of roulette in the 17th century in his search for a perpetual motion machine.
The description included the house pockets: "There are exactly two slots reserved for the bank, whence it derives its sole mathematical advantage."
In 1843, in the German spa casino town of Bad Homburg, fellow Frenchmen François and Louis Blanc introduced the single 0 style roulette wheel in order to compete against other casinos offering the traditional wheel with single and double zero house pockets.
In the United States, the French double zero wheel made its way up the Mississippi from New Orleans, and then westward.
"Outside" bets, by contrast, allow players to select a larger group of numbers based on properties such as their color or parity (odd/even).
The American-style roulette table with a wheel at one end is now used in most casinos because it has a higher house edge compared to a European layout.
[8] The French style table with a wheel in the centre and a layout on either side is rarely found outside of Monte Carlo.
Top line (0, 00, 1, 2, 3) has a different expected value because of approximation of the correct 6+1⁄5-to-1 payout obtained by the formula to 6-to-1.
This is a name, more accurately "grands voisins du zéro", for the 17 numbers that lie between 22 and 25 on the wheel, including 22 and 25 themselves.
As a 5-chip bet, it is known as "zero spiel naca" and includes, in addition to the chips placed as noted above, a straight-up on number 19.
Most of the time this comes down to the use of betting systems, strategies which say that the house edge can be beaten by simply employing a special pattern of bets, often relying on the "Gambler's fallacy", the idea that past results are any guide to the future (for example, if a roulette wheel has come up 10 times in a row on red, that red on the next spin is any more or less likely than if the last spin was black).
All betting systems that rely on patterns, when employed on casino edge games will result, on average, in the player losing money.
Certain systems, such as the Martingale, described below, are extremely risky, because the worst-case scenario (which is mathematically certain to happen, at some point) may see the player chasing losses with ever-bigger bets until they run out of money.
Whereas betting systems are essentially an attempt to beat the fact that a geometric series with initial value of 0.95 (American roulette) or 0.97 (European roulette) will inevitably over time tend to zero, engineers instead attempt to overcome the house edge through predicting the mechanical performance of the wheel, most notably by Joseph Jagger at Monte Carlo in 1873.
Edward O. Thorp (the developer of card counting and an early hedge-fund pioneer) and Claude Shannon (a mathematician and electronic engineer best known for his contributions to information theory) built the first wearable computer to predict the landing of the ball in 1961.
Ironically, this technique works best with an unbiased wheel though it could still be countered quite easily by simply closing the table for betting before beginning the spin.
In 1982, several casinos in Britain began to lose large sums of money at their roulette tables to teams of gamblers from the US.
Thomas Bass, in his book The Eudaemonic Pie (1985) (published as The Newtonian Casino in Britain), has claimed to be able to predict wheel performance in real time.
The book describes the exploits of a group of University of California Santa Cruz students, who called themselves the Eudaemons, who in the late 1970s used computers in their shoes to win at roulette.
This is an updated and improved version of Edward O. Thorp's approach, where Newtonian Laws of Motion are applied to track the roulette ball's deceleration; hence the British title.
[16] At the Ritz London casino in March 2004, two Serbs and a Hungarian used a laser scanner hidden inside a mobile phone linked to a computer to predict the sector of the wheel where the ball was most likely to drop.
[17] They were arrested and kept on police bail for nine months, but eventually released and allowed to keep their winnings as they had not interfered with the casino equipment.
Regardless of the specific progression, no such strategy can statistically overcome the casino's advantage, since the expected value of each allowed bet is negative.
The goal of this system is to recoup losses faster so that one can return to a winning position more quickly after a losing streak.
The typical shape of these systems is small but consistent wins followed by occasional catastrophic losses.
The shape of these systems is typically small but consistent losses followed by occasional big wins.
The system creates a false feeling of eliminating the risk of betting more when losing, but, in reality, it has the same problem as the martingale strategy.
The Labouchère System is a progression betting strategy like the martingale but does not require the gambler to risk their stake as quickly with dramatic double-ups.
The Labouchere System involves using a series of numbers in a line to determine the bet amount, following a win or a loss.
This is a much more flexible progression betting system and there is much room for the player to design their initial line to their own playing preference.
