Roulette Strategy

I love writing about roulette strategy, because the phrase itself is, in a sense, an oxymoron. Roulette is a completely random game with no decisions for the player to make, other than which bet to choose and how much to bet on it. All of the bets present a house edge that can’t be overcome. So no roulette strategy will ever help you win money at roulette more often. That hasn’t prevented people who either don’t understand math or who don’t believe in math from creating numerous roulette strategies. This page looks at a number of tactics aimed at winning the game, but it also dispels almost all of them. We consider this a public service.

The Martingale System for Roulette Players

The most common roulette strategy in use is the Martingale System, which is also sometimes just called the “doubling up” strategy. I covered how the Martingale system is supposed to work and why it doesn’t work on the homepage of this site, but I’ll cover it again here, albeit in an abbreviated manner.

The idea behind the Martingale System is that you double your bet after every loss, and that way, when you eventually win, you’ll have a net win of one unit for your gambling session. The reason this system doesn’t work is because long losing streaks are inevitable if you play long enough, and if you’re doubling a bet after every loss, it doesn’t take long at all to reach an astronomical bet size. Most roulette players don’t have the bankroll to withstand relatively common losing streaks, and even if they do, casinos usually have maximum betting amounts. Even if you do win a series of Martingale’s, you’re only guaranteed a net win of one unit after each progression, which is pretty paltry compared to what you’ll lose when you eventually hit a long losing streak.

The d’Alembert System for Roulette Players

The d’Alembert system follows similar thinking to the Martingale System, but in reverse. The Martingale System assumes that once you’ve lost a bet, your chances of winning the next bet go up. The d’Alembert system assumes that once you’ve won a bet, your chances of losing the next bet go up. So instead of increasing your bets as you lose, you should decrease your bets as you win.

How does this work in practice? You might start off by betting five chips on a certain spot. If you win, then you’d reduce your bet on the next spin by one chip, so you’d bet just four chips instead of five. If you lose, you’d increase your bet on the next spin by one chip. This might sound like a reasonable roulette strategy, but it’s probably about as reasonable as paying a witch doctor to cast a spell on your chips before making a bet.

Roulette spins are independent events. Whatever happened on previous events has no effect on the mathematical odds of what’s going to happen on this event. The percentage chance that a ball will land on 00 on a roulette wheel is 2.63%. That percentage doesn’t change because of what happened on the previous spin. Any betting system that assumes that previous events affect the chances of subsequent events has an inherent fallacy. A roulette wheel has no memory.

Cancellation Systems for Roulette Players

One of the more interesting strategies I’ve seen is the cancellation strategy. To put this roulette strategy into practice, write down a series of numbers. For example, you might write down 2 – 2 – 2. You total those numbers, and that provides you with your win goal, in units, for the session. Using this example, your win goal would be six units.

How much do you bet? You total the two numbers at the end of your sequence that you’ve written down, so in the above example, you’d bet four units.

If you lose, you write down the amount you just lost at the end of the sequence. That’s going to increase the amount you bet on the next spin.

If you win, you cross off the number on the end, and you bet the sum of the numbers that are left.

You continue this until you’ve reached your win goal.

This is really just a complicated variation of the Martingale System. You’re making increasingly larger bets in order to catch up with your losses, and once you hit the inevitable losing streak, you’ll be wiped out, just like if you were using the Martingale System. This system doesn’t even sound like fun to play, because you have to use a pen and paper to keep up with it.

Biased Wheel Detection for Roulette Players

One strategy that seems to make sense is to find a wheel that has a bias, and then take advantage of that bias when you’re betting. Since roulette wheels are physical objects with flaws, it’s possible that some wheels might be a little bit uneven, and they might come up with some numbers or groups of numbers more often than others.

How would you detect a biased wheel? You’d have to track which numbers came up winners over a tremendous number of spins before you could have any mathematical confidence that the wheel was really biased. A mathematical concept called “standard deviation” practically guarantees that you’ll see what looks like biased results in the short run, but that’s just an illusion. Most gamblers don’t understand that the long run is a lot longer than they think.

At an average roulette table, you might see 40 spins of the wheel per hour. That means that in 24 hours, you’d only see 960 spins of the wheel. That’s not nearly a large enough number for you to have any confidence in any bias that you detect. Besides that, who’s got 24 hours to spend sitting in a casino doing nothing but tracking what comes up on 960 roulette spins?
Another problem with trying to use a biased wheel to get an edge at roulette is that casinos move tables all the time. Since it’s impossible to watch the tables constantly for any serious length of time, it’s also impossible to be sure that the roulette table you spent 16 hours watching yesterday is in the same place it was when you watched it.

On top of that, you might spend dozens of hours watching a roulette wheel’s results and never find a bias. The theory behind this strategy assumes that some wheels have a bias. But not all roulette wheels will have one. What if you spent your time counting spins on the wheel that doesn’t have a bias?

Roulette strategy doesn’t exist, except in the sense that you should take an approach to the game that makes sense. That means playing just for fun, with money you can afford to lose. If you want to find a game where you can get advantage, learn to count cards, or read some poker strategy books. Video poker can sometimes be beat, and learning how to bet on sports might make sense too. I love roulette, but I don’t think I can beat it strategically, and neither should you.