I saw a roulette system advertised on television one night. What a joke! It was nothing more than a money management system. It isn't a bad idea to manage your bets and your bankroll when you gamble, but if that is all you are doing, you just slow your losses or rearrange them. After ten years working in a casino and running a roulette table, I can tell you that money management systems do not make you a profit in the long run.

There is a roulette system that works, however. It takes some careful planning and a fair amount of work. In fact, you may have to spend days or even weeks tediously "charting" roulette wheels, which means writing down the numbers that come up on each spin.

This work is boring, which explains why not many people are willing to use this system. That's a good thing, by the way. Any system that is is too easy will be over-used, and so stopped by the casinos. For example, while working at a casino, I watched a man make $80,000 over a period of months using this simple system, and management didn't seem to care. Laziness, I guess, or they were making enough money on the other players to lose a few thousand back to this man every month.

On the other hand, after I quit my job and came in to gamble, the wheels were repaired and re-calibrated to eliminate any bias. More than one regular winner apparently would have been too much for them. You can see why systems which are more difficult and therefore less-used can work for a longer time, and why you should keep a low profile and not tell others what you are doing.

A Better Roulette System

Here is the system: Write down the results of 5,000 spins. See if there are any numbers that came up more than 151 times. If so, start betting on that number every spin. If not, try another wheel. That's pretty much the whole plan.

Here is why it works. Roulette wheels sometimes have biases, meaning a number or numbers come up more often that they should by chance. Sometimes a number is spun frequently enough to make money. If 18 is showing up one in 30 spins, for example, and you bet $10 on it each time, you get paid 35 to one when it hits, plus you keep your $10 bet.

You would win $350 once for every 30 spins, on average, and lose $290 on the other 29 $10-bets. This would result in a profit of $60 for every 30 spins, or about $80-per-hour on a "fast" table (40 spins per hour). It is boring betting the same number every time, and a good "average" doesn't mean you won't have nights where you lose hundreds of dollars. I saw that gentleman who won $80,000 lose $500 some nights, but he stuck with it and made his money.

It is important that the bias is great enough. This particular player would play number only if it was coming up 1-in-33 spins or more often (151 out of 5,000 spins). His best number on one wheel came up once in every 29 spins, making him as much as $100 per hour for his time, depending on the pace of the game each night (with a $10 bet each time).

Why do roulette wheels have biases? Possibly manufacturing imperfections, like a divider between pockets which is higher than others, and so "catches" the ball, causing it to fall on certain numbers more often than it should. A loose divider could absorb the "hit" of the ball causing it to drop right there rather than bounce off of it as it might normally do.

There are other reasons for biased roulette wheels. Fortunately, you don't have to know why a wheel has a bias for this roulette system to work. You just have to know the bias is statistically significant. That's why you track the results of at least 5,000 spins, and possibly more. Any less and you may be betting on a false-bias. Without getting into the mathematics, think of it this way: Any ten coin tosses can result in seven heads or tails, but an unbiased coin won't ever come up heads 7,000 out of 10,000 tosses.

Of course, if you do notice temporary reasons for biases, like a sticky pocket that had a few drops of someone's drink splashed into it, you may want to watch to see if the wheel is cleaned. The reason most biases remain for a while is that they are unknown or their cause is unknown, and replacing roulette wheels is expensive. Cleaning isn't.

Switching a couple wheels around is a cheap solution some casinos use to thwart "wheel charters" as well, so memorize the wood-grain pattern of the wheel. That way you'll know if it was moved or replaced. This roulette system works only on specific wheels (those with specific biases), so you need to know you are playing on the same wheel each time.