No 11. Beating the Wheel
Author……………………Russell Barnhart
Published……………….1992
Publishing Com……..Lyle Stuart
This is one of the older books on roulette and Russell Barnhart has produced something of a classic here. In fact for anyone who is keen to study roulette and how it can be beaten both by biased wheels and visual prediction then this book is for you.
I would rival it alongside Martin Jensen’s book. In this book Barnhart says that you probably cannot get rich playing roulette. A combination of dealers adjusting ball and rotor speeds on you while you are playing and casinos actually preventing you from playing full-stop will mean that huge sums of money may not be possible.
But casinos change losing dealers and wheels around for a reason because they know that under certain circumstances, punters can get an edge at this game if they are quick to spot the tell tale signs.
There are parts of Barnhart’s book that I do not agree with but rather than go into that, I would rather discuss how good this book really is. Barnhart gives a good account of how to detect biased wheels and also the historical section which discusses how roulette players in the past have set out to beat the game and did so for vast sums of money is worth the price of the book by itself.
There are many people within roulette who claim that what Barnhart calls the “Dealers Signature” and the practice of tracking dealer spins simply cannot be done. They claim that the frequency of dealer actions and the speed of the rotor cannot be as constant as what it needs to be in order to be able to achieve enough frequency to make the entire process viable.
My problem is that I cannot counter this argument mathematically because I am not a mathematician. But with experience ten years in gaming and another five years studying the game, I am firmly of the opinion that this can be done simply because I have seen too many punters succeed at this form of casino gambling too many times.
RATING……………9/10
see you soon
Carl
