Roulette Wheel Bias

[Runner Runner]

I just saw the episode of beating vegas about the family that exploited the lack of randomness in roulette wheels in Europe and then also in Vegas. Is there really opportunity to beat a double zero roulette wheel? I think it must be too unlikely that a wheel is going to be off enough to beat that 5% house edge.

They said on the show that on the single zero wheels they were able to turn a 3% house edge into a 6% player edge by playing certain numbers. Those must of been some f**ked up roulette wheels. Surely casinos are taking measures now to make sure that these things are spinning more true and the numbers are coming up almost perfectly random.

[cardcounter0]

The wheels have changed. The pockets are not as deep, the fins are not as high, the ball is larger and bounces around like a ping pong ball, to introduce more randomness.

Also, many of the casinos keep an automated eye on the wheel which records numbers and then runs statistical measures on huge samples of spins to make sure there isn't a bias.

[AlienBoy]

Not to mention that European wheels have only ONE green sero, and most wheels in LV have 2, for a VERY substantial difference in house advantage.

And I'll wager that the few euro wheels in Las Vegas (such as the one in the high roller room at the Wynn) have all the bias removed to the point where there is no significant advantage in wheel tracking.


There is another method of gaining an advantage with roulette - and that is ball tracking. Using a computer to do this is not allowed (Read "The Eudaemonic Pie") - but people with a very good sense of rhythm have learned to rhythm track and bet in octants (they get the rhythm of the ball and wheel speed, and bet the 2 octants they predict the ball will land on.)


AB

[wickss]

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There is another method of gaining an advantage with roulette - and that is ball tracking. Using a computer to do this is not allowed (Read "The Eudaemonic Pie") - but people with a very good sense of rhythm have learned to rhythm track and bet in octants (they get the rhythm of the ball and wheel speed, and bet the 2 octants they predict the ball will land on.)


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Are there some books on this method?

[PairTheBoard]

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There is another method of gaining an advantage with roulette - and that is ball tracking. Using a computer to do this is not allowed (Read "The Eudaemonic Pie") - but people with a very good sense of rhythm have learned to rhythm track and bet in octants (they get the rhythm of the ball and wheel speed, and bet the 2 octants they predict the ball will land on.)


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Are there some books on this method?

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The method takes advantage of Wheels that have a slight tilt whereby the ball comes off the rim at about the same place every time - the high side. When I tried this method around 15 years ago I found that most wheels had such a tilt. You can then Scope the wheel vs the Ball as the ball passes the Drop off point. Your eye quickly catches on to the Strobe effect and you can "see" the wheel advance then retreat in the strobe as the ball slows. If the dealer is keeping a fairly constant wheel speed you can predict about 5 ball revolutions before the ball drop and estimate where the wheel will strobe to by that time.

There was a guy Selling this method around the time I tried it. I figured it out on my own after realizing from his offer that something like this was possible. I believe I got it right because this was discussed on this Forum a while back and a poster who claimed to have been on one of the MIT blackjack teams said they bought the method I described, bought a wheel to practice on, and tried it.

Unfortunately, they had the same results I did. Although it "Felt" like I was doing it, the statistics I kept indicated otherwise. However, I still wonder if someone extra talented at such Wheel-Ball tracking could do it. I had the disadvantage of working alone and believe it or not, I got Heat at the Frontier when I tried it there. They even called down a Dealer and told him to spin the wheel extra fast. He spun the wheel so fast the ball was flying off the wheel at times when it landed. Ideally you should have a partner place the bets on the numbers. You could signal octants by small bets on Red-Black, Even-Odd with periodic changes in the code.

PairTheBoard

[cardcounter0]

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tried this method around 15 years ago

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This is the key phrase to your story. Now it is not unusual to see a pit boss using an extremely large level or even a laser beam to make sure the wheel is exactly level. Also why the big fat guy that tries to lean against the table watching the wheel gets yelled at.

Roulette was such an easy game for the house, I guess they got careless over the years with it. Since then they have tuned up the wheels and made some changes to the configuration of the wheel and procedures.

This situation was kind of like the Big 6 Wheel deal I posted about here a while back and was hooted at by the resident 'experts' who knew the house advantage of the Big 6 Wheel, and only an 'idiot' would think they could beat it.

[stigmata]

To my knowledge, the laws are still not tightened up here in the UK -- roulette devices are still technically legal and the game is thus beatable.

As an academic exercise I have tried to look into how such devices work but there seems to be very little public information on it. I have some pretty mean looking equations for a Newtonian Eudaemonic Pie -type version. I don't think this will work anymore anyway, as I believe it relies on wheel tilt.

However, I think the Hungarian group operating a couple of year ago were using a simpler method . Apparntly this method was published in a Hungarian publication a couple of years back, but there is no translation. I think this method was perhaps capturing relative pos/velocity of ball and wheel (using a digital camera, rumour is that no laser was involved) and using regression anlysis or something to predict the final sector. I'm pretty confident that it was in everyones interest (police/casino/hungarian gang) to obfuscate the coup and make it seem much more high tech than perhaps it truly was.

If anyone managed to got any further researching this case I would be interested - as I say, the media were pretty sketchy about the details.

[AlienBoy]

The Eudaemonic Pie computer did not require tilt, but it did require that tilt be accounted for.

The math is fairly basic calculus, and requires mainly an understanding of the rigid body dynamics of the system. The Eudaemonic Pie team spent about a year doing the analysis without the aid of modern high speed computers and programs like Mathematica.



As far as books, Mechanical Engineer Chris Pawlicki wrote one on the subject.



AB

[crazy canuck]

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However, I think the Hungarian group operating a couple of year ago were using a simpler method . Apparntly this method was published in a Hungarian publication a couple of years back, but there is no translation.

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If you get me a copy I can do the translation.