Why You Can Never Win At Roulette
Roulette is a drain on your wallet simply because the game doesn’t pay what the bets are worth. With 38 numbers (1 to 36, plus 0 and 00), the true odds of hitting a single number on a straight-up bet are 37 to 1, but the house pays only 35 to 1 if you win! 2.1 These terms and conditions constitute a legally binding agreement between: 'You', the 'End User' or 'Player'; and Dazzletag Entertainment Limited ('We' or 'Us' or 'The Operator'). 2.2 PlaySunny is operated Why You Can Never Win At Roulette. If you bet $1 on a number and the ball lands on that number, you win a 35:1 payout, or $35 plus your original $1 bet. You can also split your bet between up to 6 numbers that are next to each other on the table. Outside bets, such as even/odd and red/black, are lower risk, but the payout is only 2:1 or 1:1. There are blocks labeled with various.
- Why You Can Never Win At Roulette Numbers
- Why You Can Never Win At Roulette Games
- Why You Can Never Win At Roulette Real Money
- Why You Never Win At Roulette
Every time I’m in the casino, it seems like the popularity of roulette is dying. Sometimes, there isn’t anyone at the table or there are only a few people playing. I’m sure that roulette is still popular in many places, but where I play most often, I’m surprised it’s still available.
'In some cases you can beat them quite significantly.' Of course, casinos tend to frown on precise measurements and computer simulations by their gamblers, so the researchers developed a simpler. The point is: roulette is a game where the expected value is negative — because the probabilities in it are designed in a way that you’ll lose in the long term. And it’s not that big of a secret, that every single game in a casino is designed with a negative expected value. And that’s why the house always wins.
I understand why roulette isn’t as popular as it once was. As you’re going to learn in the next section, there are many good reasons to stop playing the game. But there are also a few reasons why you should play roulette, which I’ll introduce in the later sections.
Why You Shouldn’t Play Roulette
I rarely play roulette because of the three reasons outlined below. I have a roulette system I developed years ago that I use from time to time, but it has the same problem as every other gambling system in existence. It produces a small profit most of the time, but when it fails, it creates a huge loss. It’s still fun to use, so I still play roulette every once in a while.
Roulette
1 – Terrible House Edge
The number one reason why you shouldn’t play roulette is the terrible house edge. In some casinos, the only available roulette wheel is called an American roulette wheel, and it has a house edge of 5.26%. This is a terrible house edge and almost every other table game in the casino offers a lower house edge.
When you make a bet on one of the even money spaces, like black, you win when the ball lands in one of the 18 black spaces on the wheel. You lose when the ball lands on one of the 18 red spaces or one of the two green spaces for zero and double zero.
This means that you win on 18 out of 38 spaces on an even money bet on an American roulette wheel. When you play on a European roulette wheel, which I cover next, you win on 18 out of 37 spaces. Of course, the casinos prefer you play on an American wheel, because they make more money when you do.
A European roulette wheel has a single zero space, but doesn’t have a double zero wheel. This lowers the house edge to 2.7%. This is still a high house edge when you compare it to many other table games. Most blackjack games have a house edge of less than 1%, with some coming in under 0.5%. The two best bets on baccarat come in at under 1.5%, the craps table has a few bets under 1.5%, and some video poker games have a house edge under 0.5%.
If you’re going to play roulette, always play on a wheel that doesn’t have the double zero space. But the best option is to play a game with a lower house edge.
2 – You Simply Can’t Win
I covered the large house edge that roulette carries in the last section. The truth is that every game in the casino is designed with a house edge. This is the way casinos make money. You can play a few games with particular strategies that give you a chance to overcome the house edge, but few people learn how to do it. If this is something that interests you, learn more about poker and blackjack.
When you play most casino games, you’re going to lose money in the long run. The higher the house edge, the faster you lose money. You also have a lower chance to win any particular playing session when you play high house edge games. When you play a game with a low house edge, like blackjack, you have a chance to leave many playing sessions ahead.
In the long run, you’re still going to lose more than you win, but you have some winning sessions. When you play a game with a higher house edge, like roulette, you lose more in the long run and you have a lower chance to win individual playing sessions as well.
3 – Lack of Good Wheels
I touched on this earlier, but casinos want you to play American roulette wheels. They don’t want you playing single zero wheels. This is why many casinos don’t offer any European roulette wheels.
Many of the casinos that offer both types of wheels force you to play for higher stakes at the single zero wheels. The minimum bet is higher, and some casinos only have the better wheels in high roller areas.
If you play roulette online, you can find single zero wheels in most casinos. I understand why online casinos have double zero wheels, but I can’t understand why anyone ever plays them.
One thing that many gamblers don’t know is there’s actually a third type of roulette wheel. In a few places, you can play on a French roulette wheel, which looks like a European wheel. The difference is that a proper French wheel has a couple of rules that lower the house edge. The rules are La Partage and en prison.
Why You Should Play
Now that I’ve covered why you shouldn’t play roulette, there are a few reasons why you might still consider playing. If you’re going to play, look for a French roulette wheel. If you can’t find one, stick with European roulette. The house edge on an American wheel is simply too high to ever play.
1 – Even Money Betting Options
The even money betting options on roulette give you a good chance to double your bet. On a single zero wheel, when you make an even money wager, it’ll win 18 out of 37 times. This means that 48.65% of the time you make an even money bet, you double your bet.
While this still ends up losing more than you win in the long run, it’s one of the best available chances to double up in the casino. As a matter of fact, you have a better chance of leaving the casino by placing your entire session bankroll on an even money bet once than playing several hours with smaller bets.
2 – It’s Easy to Play
Roulette is one of the easiest games in the casino to play. You can put your money on one of the even money bets or pick a single number. Once you place your bet, the casino personnel takes care of everything else.
I recommend starting with one of the even money bets, which are red, black, odd, even, 1-18, and 19-36. These are called outside bets, and each has a space outside of the single numbers where you place your bet. Other bets pay out higher amounts, but all bets have the same house edge so it doesn’t matter what you choose to bet on.
3 – Roulette Is Slower Than Many Games
Casinos want their games to run as fast as possible because the more bets they take, the more money they make. Some games, like slot machines, can be played at a rate of over 500 spins per hour. Table games are slower, but they all run at different rates of speed.
When you’re gambling, you need to consider how fast the game plays. Games that play slower are usually better for your bankroll. Roulette plays slower than most other casino games, so even with a higher house edge, you might lose less because you’re risking less every hour.
Here’s an example of how much you can expect to lose per hour playing a few different casino games.
When you play roulette on a European wheel with bets of $10 at 50 spins per hour, your total amount wagered is $500 per hour. With a house edge of 2.7%, you can expect to lose an average of $13.50 per hour.
When you play a slot machine with a house edge of 8% with a $1 bet at 500 spins per hour, you can expect to lose $40.
Playing blackjack with a 1% house edge with $50 wagers at 75 hands per hour, your expected loss rate is $37.50.
Conclusion
Roulette isn’t a good casino game for players. It’s not even close to the top 10 casino games to play. The high house edge and lack of good wheels simply make it a bad choice. But it’s not the worst game to play if you’re looking for something simple and slow. The even money bets offer one of the best chances in the casino to double up on a single bet.
Roulette is one of the most popular table games in modern casinos. Although variations on the game have been around for several hundred years, there are now only 3 variations in American casinos.
You’re likely already familiar with American roulette and European roulette. The most recent addition to the table game inventory is Sands Roulette.
Which of these games should you play?
How should you bet on them?
What’s the smartest strategy for roulette betting?
I’ll explain all that in this post:
What Are the Differences between American, European, and Sands Roulette?
Although these games have a few other differences, the most significant distinction between the 3 versions of roulette are the number of green slots the wheels contain.
Every roulette wheel has at least 37 slots.
36 of those slots are always numbered 1 to 36, and they’re alternately colored RED or BLACK.
The additional slots are green.
In European roulette there is only one green slot, the “0”.
In American roulette there are two green slots: “0” and “00”.
In Sands roulette a third green slot, “S”, has been added to the wheel.
The green slots are there for one reason:
They make the game’s statistical probabilities uneven.
This is because of the way roulette bets are paid off. You can win anywhere from 35-to-1 (for betting on a single number) down to 1-to-1 (for betting on 18 slots at a time).
The payoffs, called “odds”, are not as fair to you as the actual estimated probabilities of the roulette ball landing on any given slot. This is how the casino makes its money.
In a game of roulette the house should keep at least 2.70% of all the bets players make over time. The casino has no need to cheat the players. In fact, the players often make really bad bets that improve the “house edge”, as that casino profit is called.
One of the other differences between European roulette and both American and Sands roulette is that the European roulette table has an additional betting area. This secondary betting area is used to place specially designed bets. They are more complicated than the normal bets made in American and Sands roulette. I’m going to ignore this section of the table, because I’m going to show you how to place bets that have the best chances of paying off.
Is There a Winning System for Roulette?
Everyone who gets into roulette sooner or later starts to think about how they can “beat the system”.
I’m going to be honest here:
There is no way to do that.
The green slots on the wheel make it impossible for anyone, anywhere, to ever design a betting system that is guaranteed to win. If you really want to guarantee yourself a win every time, then put a chip on each of the 2-to-1 outside bets and on each of the green number bets.
That’s the only way you’ll be paid money every time the wheel spins.
You’ll also go broke.
You may have heard about a system called the Martingale System. It’s a popular betting system with new roulette players.
Experienced roulette players just turn their heads and roll their eyes when someone mentions the Martingale System. The only way you can make money with the Martingale System is to write a book about it and get people to buy your book.
Even that’s a gamble, though, because most people now know that the Martingale System promises more than it delivers.
Here’s how this system works:
You start out betting the minimum. If you lose, you double your bet. If you win on your doubled bet, you go back to betting the table minimum. If you lose again, you double the size of your bet again.
This sounds great to inexperienced bettors but the problem is that you’ll either run out of money or hit the table limit before you can recoup your losses as they add up.
The Martingale System is a sucker bet, plain and simple.
Every betting system in every form of gambling tries to leverage probability theory. The Martingale System and other roulette betting strategies also rely on probability estimates.
But there’s a flaw in the thinking behind these systems. If you account for the flaw you’ll be okay. You won’t always win but your expectations will be more reasonable.
The secret to not going broke when you gamble is to set reasonable expectations and maintain your self-discipline. You should never drink or take drugs when you gamble. They lower your inhibitions and impair your judgment.
You might as well just hand your money over to the casino at the cashier window and say “keep it” if you’re going to drink or do drugs when you gamble.
How Do Probabilities Work in Roulette?
Probability theory came out of statistics. It tries to give us rules by which to guess what happens next in any situation. The guesses are seldom accurate predictions. Sometimes the guesses work out, and sometimes they don’t. Gamblers love probability theory because they think it helps them pick the best betting strategies.
You’re actually more likely to double your money during a roulette session if you put all your money on a single bet. The more bets you place, the less likely it becomes to double your money.
That’s because every bet brings you close to the long term expectations. The closer you are to the short term, the more likely you are to get better than expected results.
In roulette, the probabilities are simple. The dealer spins the wheel and releases a ball that whirls around the outside of the wheel and finally settles in a slot. With only 37 slots on a European roulette wheel you have a 1-in-37 probability of the ball landing on a specific slot.
This probability never changes.
This probability is calculated on the basis of all the known possibilities.
What probability theory cannot do, however, is predict where the ball will stop.
Nor can it predict whether the ball will land on red, black, or green any number of times over the next 100 spins.
Nonetheless, a lot of gambling guides tell you that you have the best chances of winning if you do this because of such-and-such probabilities. And many of these guides warn you that there is no way to predict the future, but by setting the expectation that the ball will land on red about 47% of the time, these guides are making predictions and promises they cannot keep.
They’ll even back up their claims by talking about how to run computer simulations for 1 million spins of the wheel so that you see how often the ball lands on red, black, or green.
In the real world the Probability Fairy is always on vacation. She’ll never be there to wave her magic wand to make things happen the way experts say they should. The ball could land on red over the next 20 spins. Or it could land on black or green or some random mix of color combinations.
You have no way of knowing how many of the next [X] spins will turn out a certain way. Talking about probabilities in this way is just dishonest.
What you can do is look at the wheel and ask yourself how much it costs to bet on the largest possible set of numbers. The idea here is to get as much coverage as you can without losing money too fast.
But even if you cover every number on the wheel you’ll lose money.
So the only way to win in roulette–and this is completely random, never guaranteed–is to bet on less than all the numbers on the wheel.
You also want to play bets that pay better than even money. You can place a variety of bets, but most of them aren’t worthwhile.
Betting on single numbers is a bad idea. You can place bets on the lines between the numbers (these are called “street bets”) and on lines at the corners of numbers (these are called “corner bets”).
But even though you get pretty good odds (payoff) you’re still covering too few numbers.
How Bets Work in Roulette
Divide the bets into two groups:
- Inside bets
- Outside bets
Inside bets are based on individual numbers or small groups of numbers. When you see players betting on the lines, corners, and individual numbers on the table they are making inside bets.
Outside bets are based on pre-selected groups of numbers on the wheel. The “2-to-1” bets cover 12 numbers each: 1 to 12, 13 to 24, and 25 to 36. The “1-to-1” or “even money” bets cover 18 numbers each:
- Odd
- Even
- Black
- Red
- 1 to 18
- 19 to 36
Why You Can Never Win At Roulette Numbers
The bets more likely to pay are the even money bets.
But unless you can win 5 times out of 9 on even money bets you’ll lose your stake. That’s the problem with roulette. You always have to win at least 1 more time than you lose no matter how you place your bets.
The “2 to 1” bets pay better than the “1 to 1” bets because they cover fewer numbers. You have less of a chance of winning.
There are 6 types of “2 to 1” bets:
- 3 kinds of dozens bets: (1 to 12, 13 to 24, and 25 to 36)
- 3 kinds of columns bets: ([1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19, 22, 25, 28, 31, 34], [2, 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 20, 23, 26, 29, 32, 35], [3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, 30, 33, 36]).
You can make a bet by betting on any two of the “2 to 1” groups. That means that instead of covering only 18 numbers you’ll be covering 24 numbers.
This type of bet is often called the “double dozen” bet. It’s popular among gamblers who like to hedge their bets. They have a better chance (all other things considered) of scoring a win with a “double dozen” than with one of the standard even money bets. If you’re playing it safe and going for even money odds, you should always play a double dozen bet.
If you want to bet more aggressively, then instead of betting more money on your double dozen, you can cover all 36 of the red and black numbers. Leave the green numbers alone. Yes, they’ll come in every now and then, and you’ll lose money.
Why You Can Never Win At Roulette Games
But there’s a way to keep your losses low.
How to Bet on Columns or Dozens Aggressively
Take 6 chips and distribute them across EITHER the three dozen bets or the three column bets.
Place 3 chips on 1, 2 chips on the 2nd, and 1 chip on the 3rd. If the ball lands on a green number you’ll lose your entire bet, so always play the table minimum with this aggressive style.
If the ball lands on any number with your single chip bet, you’ll win 2 chips and lose 5–for a net loss of 3 chips (half your bet).
That’s the safest way to bet aggressively on the table.
If the ball lands on any number in your 2 chip bet you’ll win 4 chips and lose 4 for no loss. This keeps you in the game.
If the ball lands on any number in your 3chip bet, you’ll win 6 chips and lose 3 for a net gain of 3 chips. This will offset 1 single chip win.
The way this betting strategy works out, your money can grow substantially and still take some big hits. Where the strategy will fail you is when the ball lands on green or if the ball lands on the single chip bet more often than it lands on the 3 chip bet.
Why You Can Never Win At Roulette Real Money
Sorry, but there’s no way to prevent that from happening.
There Is No Guaranteed Way to Win in Roulette
I can’t say this often enough:
Why You Never Win At Roulette
You can’t win at roulette in the long run.
I think roulette is a fun game to play. It’s exciting because you don’t know where the ball will land. You take an active role in making your wagers.
And you’ll find there are a lot of different betting systems to experiment with. The only thing that is guaranteed in roulette is that the casino will make a profit. What you hope for is that they make their profit at someone else’s expense.
Players who try to improve their luck by making big bets do sometimes win, but most often the people who come out ahead are the patient players who use conservative betting strategies and take money off the table. If you only walk away with your beginning stake you’ll be luckier than most gamblers.
And you can take that to the bank.