Ways to get the edge of Roulette

May 12, 2023

There are three ways to get a real edge at roulette: finding biased wheels, finding dealers who have signatures, and visually tracking the ball and accurately predicting where it will land.

The first one, finding biased wheels, has been used since the early part of the 1900s when wheels weren't quite as perfect as they are today. In short, if a wheel is "off," certain numbers will come up more often than probability dictates. A wheel watcher will record thousands of spins, analyze the results, and if the wheel has been hitting a truly disproportionate group of numbers, he will bet those numbers. Some of the greatest wins in Monte Carlo and Vegas are attributed to wheel watchers.

Unfortunately, while biased wheels do exist in the modern casinos, they are much harder to find. Today's wheels are tested extensively to prevent them from becoming biased. Most of the wheels also have much more shallow pockets than wheels did in the past and the roulette ball tends to bounce much more than in the past - making it harder for a wheel to develop a bias in the first place. So while biased wheels exist, they are more on the order of Bigfoot than they are on the order of, say, a pigeon.

The dealer signature is a controversial area of advantage play at roulette, which means that some gaming writers believe it is real and some don't. In a nutshell it is said that some dealers either consciously or unconsciously spin the ball in such a way that the ball lands a certain number of pockets away from the last pocket hit. A dealer who lands the ball in such a fashion has a "signature" that can be read by an astute roulette player who will then bet the numbers in the area where the ball will most likely land after the next spin.

Of course, any slight change in how the dealer delivers the ball will end his signature and return the game to its normal randomness.