Can you beat Roulette using maths?

Mensanator

YOUR winnings? There was no such claim. The claim is that the house winnings are 0.

Get it yet?

robert Ihnot

One method of cheating is called, "post posting." The player waits until the ball is about to land and then place his bet, preferrably when the dealer is watching the ball land.

Today in Vegas, they are very careful about all these things--having learned, probably, the hard way. The roulette table is alway manned by two people. After a certain time, the dealer waves his hand over the machine and everyone is expected to keep his hands completely out of that area.

One writer claimed to have "won"/collected a lot by conceling "chocolate chips," worth $1000 each in his hand. If his bet was successful, when he went to collect his winning he would slip the chocolate chips under his, usually irregular pile, and then turn to the dealer and claim to have been underpaid! The dealer's eyes would roll in amazement when he now realized that a pile of $1 white chips, also contained thousand dollar chips underneath.

Of course today, the cameras watch everyting and 20 or so minutes would be spend unstairs going over that play!

matticus

say you go to the casino every week with $127 and play a game that pays 1:1. You start by betting a dollar, double your bet with every loss, and start back at a dollar with every win. So, you would need to win 127 times without hitting a streak of seven losses. What would your probability of winning on any given round have to be to make this a profitable strategy? I have taken several higher math classes, but have stayed away from probability and statistics courses, and I have no idea how to solve such a problem.

Mensanator

Bets that pay 1:1 aren't 1:1.

robert Ihnot

I think this might have an easy answer. 127 wins and 6 losses = 133 plays. This to win you want the probability of p = 127/133, (or better). If you play 133 games, using binominal simulation, you will win 127 times.

skeptic2

About six years ago I read the book 'The Eudaemonic Pie' by Thomas A. Bass. It's premise, as I recall, is that the roulette tables are not perfectly level and the ball will tend to fall when it is on the high side of the wheel. A team of college students built small computers to help them calculate the initial speed and position of the ball and indicate the likely number it will fall into.

This book is very engaging and although the author claimed the method actually works, it seems to me it has a fatal flaw. The error in determining the position and speed of the ball over a short interval at the beginning of the roll, is magnified by the ratio of the total roll time divided by that short measurement interval. The error always works out to be so great as to make the initial measurement useless.

dilletante

That would be true if they only clocked one revolution of the ball, but errors are minimized by clocking every revolution as it slows down and betting as late as possible. Some computer groups made substantial money on roulette, but Farmer wasn't one of them.

skeptic2

I don't have a copy of the book and my memory is a little vague after so much time but I believe they did collect data on how fast the speed of the ball decayed. The error was in pushing a button at the exact instance the ball passed each of two points on the table. Even an error of a few hundredths of a second, after being magnified by the total roll time, is enough to prevent an accurate determination of exactly when or where the ball is going to fall.

dilletante

I am not quite sure what your point is. If your point is that Farmer's group had problems and did not make money, I have already stated that. If your point is that no one could successfully use such a system to gain an advantage at roulette, you are misinformed. I personally know people who played around the world and were quite successful.

peppies

There are a number of different betting systems that you can use with any type of gambling game: http://www.lolblackjack.com/blackjack/betting-systems/

Although, all of them are futile as I have learned. They only work best with games that pay out even odds (1:1) but the actual odds will be less (because the casino needs to make a profit). The only way you can really win is through questionable techniques like card counting for blackjack and dice setting for craps. Those are the only two ways I know of where you can gain a skill and win (except for poker of course).

Hurkyl

I once read an article on betting systems, where:

• You start with X money
• You are trying to get Y money

and the problem is to maximize the likelihood of reaching your target.

IIRC, the best method turns to be to make the maximum bet possible until you either reach your target or you go broke.

(Where the game is a typical game where the odds slightly favor the casino)

DaveC426913

This occurred to me independently last time I was in a Casino.

It seems to me, the way to win at Blackjack is, not to bet like Scrooge and ultimately fritter away your money, but to go to the table and put all the money you planned to spend that evening on your first hand. You win or lose. Your chances of winning this one hand are better than your chances of winning over the next 20 or 50 subsequent deals.

mgb_phys

With maths - no
with physics - yes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eudaemonic_Pie
with statistics - yes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Jagger

crimsonaaron

Correct me if I'm wrong but there are 37 spots in a roulette wheel with equal chances for the ball to land in each one. The payout for a single number is 35:1. This means that overall you would be losing money. If you use progression of betting an additional dollar every time ($1 the first time $2 the second $3 the third and so on) then the payout for any given spin can be modeled by y=35x while the amount that you have paid could be modeled by y=x(x+1)/2. So the amount of net gain would be modeled by y=35x-x(x+1)/2. The x-intercepts for this equation(where your net gain would be 0) are 0 and 69. So if the first time you won was on your 69th spin then you made make back all that you spent. Considering the odds are 1 in 37 for any given number, you should easily be able to do this unless you are extremely unlucky. Anything before that and you would be winning money. Once you win then reset the cycle back with just $1. It is slow but I think it works. If the payout is too small then you could up it by doing higher intervals(for example 5, 10, 15...) but not starting from higher spot. I have seen people say that progression does not work which I assumed was this, but if so why doesn't this work?

SteveL27

This is a pretty old thread ... I seem to remember posting this once before, but evidently not in this thread.

Some physics grad students in the 1970's built a system for beating roulette. It worked. It's based on the idea that the wheel is a mechanical system, subject to biases. They carefully tracked the behavior of the wheel, and when they spotted a bias, they made money off it.

They used primitive wearable computers to calculate everything. Very interesting story. They had to shut the experiment down when one of the students got badly burned by a short in the wearable computer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaemons

scepticus

The answer to the question as put is YES.
We"Can" but that does not mean that we will ,only that it is possible
The House has an Edge ( in 37 numbers ) of 2.75 but that's it !It is the gambler's aim to beat that edge.By using maths we can, but this is all theoretical as each spin is Random and therefore unknowable until "after the Event ".It is nonsense to claim either that we are certain to win or certain to lose- unless you claim to be a clairvoyant !
For example.
Combining two ideas we can claim a mathematical advantage in roulette but an advantage does not mean certainty only that we are more likely to win than lose .
If we choose to bet only RED/ODD numbers plus BLACK/EVEN numbers we bet 20 numbers which means that we should win 20 times in every 37 spins.
If we chose to bet one dozen and one column we are betting twenty numbers so we should win 20 times over 37 spins.
Combining these two- and betting only those which they have in common- we have two sets of 20 over 37 which , multiplied together gives 400 over 1369 which gives the bettor an advantage if betting 10 or fewer numbers- and this does occur in some pairings.
The key to winning at betting is Bet Selection .All gambling involves uncertainty so why this bias against roulette ? Gambling is gambling is gambling .

Mentallic

Sorry scepticus, but you're way off base. The contents of this thread was mainly about discussing if the Roulette wheel has any uneven bias that would cause the randomness of a number to appear to not be completely random afterall - thus allowing someone to beat Roulette.

I'm feeling optimistic that the users on this Math forum can understand the definition randomness and its relationship to gambling.