It doesn’t take a genius to know that winning at roulette takes ‘something special’. Either you have a system based on some maths (especially relevant to those who celebrate today, as ‘happy Pi day‘), or a mobile feed to a remote computer to crunch the numbers, or you have intutition of some form or another. What’s your take on this? Before you make your mind up consider these examples borrowed from Wikipedia which nicely inspire the idea that it takes something special to win at Roulette:
Real-life roulette exploits
- In 1873, Briton Joseph Jaggers made the first famous biased roulette wheel exploit. By taking advantage of this flaw they managed to win over $325,000, an astronomical sum in 1873.[19]
- In the summer of 1891 at the Monte Carlo casino, a part-time swindler and petty crook from London named Charles Wells ‘broke the bank’ at each table he played over a period of several days. Breaking the bank meant he won all the available money in the table bank that day, and a black cloth would be placed over the table until the bank was replenished. In song and life, he was celebrated as “The Man That Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo”.
- In 2004, Ashley Revell of London sold all of his possessions, clothing included, and placed his entire net worth of US$135,300 on red at the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas. The ball landed on “Red 7” and Revell walked away with $270,600. [a neat example of the power of intuition?]
- On 2 October 2009, Derren Brown (as part of his controversial “The Events” series) bet £5000 of a member of the public’s money on a single number of a roulette wheel somewhere in Europe. This was shown live across the UK using a camera hidden in Brown’s sleeve. His plan was to use the laws of physics to predict where the ball would end up, based upon the speed of the wheel and the ball. Brown took approximately three seconds after the wheel started spinning to place his £5000 bet on the number 8, only to see it land on 30 – just one number out. [is this educated intuition or based on a system?]
In film
- In the 1942 film Casablanca, Rick’s Café Americain has a trick roulette wheel. Rick (played by Humphrey Bogart) uncharacteristically takes pity on a young Bulgarian refugee couple. The husband has lost most of his money at roulette, trying to win enough to bribe police captain Renault. Rick suggests the man bet on 22. After the number comes up, Rick tells him to let it all ride. He does, and wins again. Rick tells him to cash in his winnings … and never come back.
- In the 1971 Western comedy Support Your Local Gunfighter, James Garner’s character has a gambling addiction – he cannot stop betting everything he has on a single roulette spin. He loses several times, but finally wins at the very end.
- Near the beginning of the 1973 film The Sting, Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) takes his share of the money conned from a numbers runner and loses nearly all of it on a single bet against a rigged roulette wheel.
- In the third part of the 1998 film Run, Lola, Run, Lola (Franka Potente) uses all her money to buy a 100-mark chip. (She is actually just short of 100 marks, but gains the sympathy of a casino employee who gives her the chip for what money she has.) She bets her single chip on 20 and wins. She lets her winnings ride on 20 and wins again, making her total winnings 129,600 marks (29,600 more than her smuggler boyfriend owed his boss, Ronnie). The odds of two consecutive wins on a European roulette wheel are exactly 1368-to-1 against. [and one of my favourite films of all time, btw]
- In the 2011 film Fast Five, Don Omar and Tego Calderon play roulette and each bet their millions on red or black. The ball lands on green.
So where do you stand on this? Maybe you have a favourite online casino site you use to play – does this mean you have a different set of strategies than in the traditional casino gaming environment where different factors come into play? Certainly online casinos don’t face the kind of issues that real world casino owners faced in the past, as the randomness of the spin is 100% true. So what do you use to beat the house, when you play online, maybe just some plain old fashioned ‘lady luck’?
