How to Beat Roulette: Tips That Work

Albert Einstein had once said that the only way to beat a roulette table is to distract a croupier and steal the money. Many other scientists after him said the same thing, and they were partially right, but there’s always one thing that messes up all studies, and it’s the human factor. In this article, we’ll provide you with a real guide on how to beat Roulette in a long perspective, and debunk the common myths about Roulette which do more harm than good to players.

What Is Roulette?

To understand how to beat something, you should learn what it is and how it works, and with Roulette, it’s not that hard to figure out. First of all, one should realize that the house always wins. It’s not a law but rather a principle upon which all casino games are based. We’ve seen major casinos going broke allowing perfectly fair no-limit games to high-rollers, and seen other casinos reporting an outcome percentage that by much exceeds the given house edge. The thing with house edge is that you are most likely to lose when you play any game of chance, including Roulette. And yet there are people who consider themselves professional roulette players, and they do win more often than lose!

Roulette is a game that, depending on the rules, bears a house edge of 5.26% for an American version and 2.7% for a European one. Many other rules may affect the house edge in one way or another, but we won’t focus on details, we’re not here for that. For your and our mutual convenience, we’ll describe the American Roulette in this article, since the principles are literally the same, and the game rules don’t affect our way of winning. The wheel of Roulette consists of 38 pockets: numbers from 1 to 36, 0, and 00. A croupier spins the wheel, throws a ball in the opposite direction, and lets the Lady Luck make her choice.

You can make many kinds of bets in Roulette, and they can be divided by many factors, but they’re basically divided into two groups: inside bets and outside bets. Inside bets are the ones offering the highest payouts and the lowest odds of winning:

• Bet on a single number (straight-up);
• Bet on two adjacent numbers (split);
• Bet on three numbers (street);
• Trio bets (either on 0, 1, and 2 or 00, 2, and 3)
• Bet on four numbers in a square layout (corner or square)
• Bet on six numbers, which is basically two adjacent street bets combined in one (six line).

These are the most unstable, and although they are pretty tempting, they are the most unlikely to hit. Outside bets pay less, but your chances to win in a separate game round are much higher:

• Dozen bets (bets on ranges of 12 numbers).
  • 1-12;
  • 13-24;
  • 25-36;
• High-low bets (on ranges of 18 numbers).
  • 1-18;
  • 19-36;
• Odd-even bets.
• Red-black bets.
• Column Bets (the bets on numbers from three columns of the Roulette layout).

High-low, odd-even, and red-black bets pay even money and are the most likely to hit. That’s roulette in a nutshell for you.

How Does Roulette Work?

The outcome of each bet in Roulette is calculated in a way to make it perfectly fit into the system and deliver equal payouts depending on the odds that you take. In other words, without zero and double zero pockets, Roulette would be a perfect game, and casinos would go broke soon due to their inability to cover their expenses. This is unlikely to happen, of course, so we’ll have to go with what we’ve got. 0 and 00 pockets on a roulette wheel are the ones that bring profits to a casino because they don’t fit into any of the betting patterns offered by a layout. Zeros are not red, black, odd, even, high, or low: they’re just zeros, and therefore if the ball lands on any of zeros, all bets lose, except for the ones made directly on zero, or that include zero (“trio” and “first five” bets). Two losing pockets out of 38 provide casinos with a house edge, allowing them to run the games.

Can You Beat Roulette by Skill or Strategy?

The Internet is teeming with articles that explain how to beat roulette. People develop complex betting strategies and sell them to gullible players, promising that their win rate will skyrocket as soon as they implement a miraculous roulette system. The only thing that all these people miss is that Roulette is a perfectly balanced system, driven by randomness. There are no skills in Roulette, and no matter how experienced you are, you cannot predict a sequence of random events. The game of roulette is already a system developed to make a profit for the casino, and this system cannot be beaten by either math or skill.

Let’s dive a bit into betting strategies to figure out how they are supposed to work. All these strategies look reliable enough when their authors try to convince you that you sooner or later you will win. Most of them are based on changing the size of the bet so that you can win back everything you’ve lost by hitting at least one win. The most popular system is called the Martingale strategy, and it’s very simple. It says that you should double your bet each time you lose. Indeed, you need only one win to get back everything you’ve lost since your last win (or since you’ve started playing if you’ve lost every round). The problem is that to implement this strategy properly, you should play with an infinite bankroll at a no-limit table, which is very unlikely to happen.

Other systems are similar, and some of them are based on sequential raising or decreasing your bet, which gives you an illusion of control over the situation, while you have none. The problem with all these systems is that people believe in them, and having a portion of their money lost, they hope that the system will eventually sort thing out. If you’re playing with a roulette strategy, you can sometimes win, but it will occur with the same frequency as if you were playing with no strategy at all. So, can you somehow influence your wins at roulette?

The Human Factor is What Matters

When you’re playing a totally random game, your only chance to win is to develop a supernatural ability of farseeing the result of the game round or to beat the game in another way, finding the weak link. Everything we’ve just said about randomness is valid in a perfect environment, but croupiers are alive and therefore prone to making mistakes. When your job is to spin the wheel and throw the ball, the habit develops, and sooner or later you will start doing it all mechanically, with the same force. By watching the croupier’s actions, you might notice that you can predict where the ball will land if you look close enough. This won’t help you win a one-number bet unless you’re a Superman, but mere human precision will be enough to figure out approximately on which part of the wheel the ball lands and therefore – on which numbers you should bet.

Roulette physics is quite simple. Each roulette wheel is fitted with deflectors, also called diamonds, placed around the wheel. Their function is to break the ball’s movement as soon as it moves out of the ball track. There are vertical and horizontal deflectors, and vertical ones cause more impact on the ball, and they’re the target for us. You should pay attention to each case of a ball hitting a vertical deflector and see how many pockets it comes through before stopping. Remember the number and place bets according to it.

Basically, your task is to figure out the force with which a croupier throws the ball and to estimate the number of revolutions left for the ball to go, depending on its speed. It might take up to 50 game rounds to figure this out, and during these rounds, a casino might replace a croupier, so be cautious! The best way to use this method is to wait until the new croupier joins the table, and then start counting.

Does This Method Work in Online Roulette?

There are two types of roulette available at online casinos: an RNG-based digital roulette and a live-dealer game. The Live Dealer Roulette is basically the same game you can play in any land-based casino but run in a separate studio with cameras that film it from convenient angles. The system will work with this type of roulette, but you might have troubles detecting the movements of the ball since you won’t be able to observe it closely. With a digital roulette – the things are different.

When you’re playing a digital roulette, there is no human factor whatsoever. There is no ball, no wheel, no deflectors, and physics does not affect the outcome of game rounds. It’s basically a slot machine powered by a random number generator, but instead of the spinning reels, you have the animation of a spinning wheel. You might be able to predict the outcome of a digital roulette by hacking a casino software, but that will require much more funds than you can expect to win until you get caught.

Summary

Roulette is absolutely beatable if you play it on a real wheel, with a real ball, and a live dealer. If you’re still wondering about online roulette tricks and ways to beat a roulette machine – there are none! The house edge of the game is pretty low, and to beat it you have to slightly increase the accuracy of your predictions, and with our method, you’ll be able to do so. Let the Lady Luck smile upon you!