Using the Mechanics of the Roulette Wheel

Roulette gets its name from a French word that means, "little wheel." The game is quite well known, and it is one of the most popular casino games in the world. In fact, roulette is often called the "king of casino games," because of its association with the glitz and glamour of the casinos of Monte Carlo, where Europe's elite gambled, during much of the 19th and 20th Century, and up to this day.

A roulette wheel can have either thirty-seven (European roulette wheel) or thirty-eight (American roulette wheel) numbered pockets. Both American and European wheels have thirty-six alternating black and red pockets, numbered from one to thirty-six. In American roulette, the wheel also has two green pockets, marked zero, and double zero. On the other hand, European roulette wheels only have one green zero pocket. In a single spin, the winning number is determined when a small, white ball lands inside a numbered pocket. The casino employee spins the wheel in one direction, sets a roulette ball on the tilted track of the wheel, and sends the ball spinning in the opposite direction. Momentum causes the ball to stop spinning, and the ball eventually drops into a particular pocket in the roulette wheel.

There are a lot of ways to exploit the mechanics of the roulette wheel. In fact, if the tilt of the wheel and the speed of the spins are constant, anyone who remembers and knows how to apply their high school physics can calculate where the ball is likely to land. This, of course, considerably lowers the odds against winning, for anyone who might be privy to this information. In fact, this sort of roulette strategy has been around since the 19th Century.

Joseph Jagger, in Monte Carlo, had employed this technique in 1873. Arguably, there has even been a "wearable computer," built in around 1961 by computer scientist and mathematician, Claude Shannon, made to calculate where a roulette ball is likeliest to land. Nowadays though, casinos are well aware of the possibility that someone can increase their chances of winning by exploiting the mechanical predictability of a spinning roulette wheel. In order to prevent people from gaining an unfair advantage in doing this, casinos of today regularly realign and rebalance their roulette wheels, to ensure that every spin remains as random as possible. This not only ensures the continued randomness of a roulette wheel's spin, but because of the regular upkeep that such repeated rebalancing and realignment requires, it also ensures that the wheel is well maintained.