Roulette Hints
People searching for roulette hints are probably looking for ways to beat
the casino at roulette. I wish I could tell you that you'll find a system to
beat the experts at casino gambling, but it's not going to
happen--especially in roulette.
Since I don't want to sound like a broken record, I want to discuss a few specific common fallacies that roulette players sometimes assume. The big roulette hint is that the house has an edge of 5%, so you're not going to find a betting strategy that beats that edge. But let's discuss more specific betting strategies people often use.
Betting Two of the Third Bets
A
common betting strategy I've seen roulette gamblers use over the years is to
bet on two of the three thirds bets. You might be two of the three 12-number
columns. You might be two of the three thirds bets: 1st 12, 2nd 12, and 3rd
12.
In either case, you're betting on two-thirds of the numbers on the roulette layout. On most hands, that means you're winning. Sometimes, you'll win both bets, increasing the perception that your betting scheme is working. Occasionally, both numbers will be in the third column and you'll lose both wagers.
But the idea is, on a $1 bet apiece, that you wager $2 and collect $2 per win. Since you are collecting 2/3rds of the time, and those wins recoup the price of losing a third time, that you're getting ahead. Actually, making two bets instead of one just puts you further behind.
0 and 00 Factor - Roulette Tips
That's because people tend to forget about the 0-factor in all roulette, and the 00-factor in double-zero or American roulette. You aren't getting a 66% chance of winning, because the 0 and the 00 lower your odds of winning any spin.
Over the course of 38 spins wagering one dollar, you can expect to win 12 bets for $24 (paying 2-to-1). You'll lose 24 of those bets straight out on the other red and black numbers, which offsets your $24 in winnings. But you'll also lose two more times, on the 0 and 00, which means you lose an average of $2 every 38 spins on single-dollar roulette bets.
When you decide to make two bets--the thirds bets in the example above--that just accelerates the numbers. You're betting $2 on every spin, and expected to win 24 of those bets for $48. You'll expect to lose 48 of those bets, which come up on the red and black numbers you didn't select, though, for an average loss of $48. Factor in the four additional slots that should come up, for two hits on the 0 and two hits on the 00, and you lose $4 every 38 spins, when you bet twice the money.
Roulette Variance
Variance plays havoc with a gambler's calculations. That's because, despite the expectation they're going to lose $2 on every 38-spin cycle, the math isn't going to come out so tidy in practice. Some thirty-eight spin mini-sessions are going to see you up $10. Other are going to see you down $14, accounting for that $4 average. Or you might be down $20 or $30 or who knows.
When you're betting and the deviation from expected payback is wildly different (in either direction), you try to find answers to explain that. One fallacy gamblers often fall prey to is they remember their big wins, while dismissing their big losses as bad luck. When they win, they didn't get lucky, but the system worked. When they lose, it just wasn't their night.
Then there's the big gambler's fallacy, the one that takes the title.
Gambler's Fallacy
Since the first roulette machine was built by Blaise Pascal, roulette gamblers have fallen into the fallacy that the spins are somehow connected. I can't say whether Blaise Pascal's roulette machines were flawed and unbalanced, but throughout most of the history of roulette gambling (especially the past 50 years), casinos have had the time, resources, and the money incentive to make certain that's not the case.
In the age of the random number generator, all assumptions about the mechanical flaws of roulette gaming go out the window. The random number generator is not unbalanced. It's not likely to turn up the number 34 more than the number 35. It's truly random.
Even if there were some loop to the number, the nature of electronic computing would allow that theoretical loop of numbers to be in the millions, without any appreciable lag-time in the few seconds to pull out a random number on the loop. Even if that were the case (and I'm not saying it is), there is no way you or anyone else could find the pattern in a few dozen, or even a few hundred, spins of the roulette wheel.
