Roulette systems - do they work?

[lotus guardian]

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Okay, I'm fond of hyperbole. There are lots good jobs that don't require more than rudimentary math skills. But come on: roulette? Single numbers: 38 slots, 35:1 payout. Even money bets: 18/38 slots win. It ain't rocket science. The math is fairly complex for poker, blackjack and many other card games (I don't consider Three card poker, Let it Ride, Carribean Stud, etc. to be poker. They are carnival games that use poker hands.) The math is pretty easy for craps, but not quite as obvious as it is for roulette. Casino war is pretty simple mathematically, but they do that little bit of misdirection where the dealer takes the chips out of the tray and appears to (but really doesn't) match your extra bet when you go to war. I confess, I played Casino War once and it took me about half an hour before I spotted the con. Don't get me wrong: I knew there had to be a house edge somewhere, but it took me awhile to figure it out. But it mystifies me how anybody who is beyond counting on their fingers can fail see the house edge in roulette.

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The point is that people don't try to calculate EV or house edge when playing a casino game. Yes, the math is very simple and probably most of them would be able to figure it out, but they don't approach the problem like that. They just see that sometimes they win and sometimes they lose so they think "hey, I just need to get lucky and I'll win". It's not obvious for those people that after a certain number of bets your standard deviation will decrease in relation to your negative EV and you'll certainly be a loser in the long run.