8. Billy Walters
In 1986, a man called Billy Walters flew into Atlantic City and proceeded to place bets on certain numbers of a double zero roulette wheel. He was betting $2000 per number on five numbers so his total action was $10,000 per spin.
He started to amass winnings but the casino management felt that due to the fact that he was operating on a double zero wheel which had an even greater house edge that this wasn’t going to be a problem. However it soon became apparent that it was a problem and Walters eventually ran up winnings believed to be around $3 million.
But what the casino did not know was that Walters had hired a team of wheel clockers to watch the wheels in this casino and report the findings back to him. What they found was that one particular wheel was exhibiting a very strong bias towards these five numbers. Even when the casino inspected the wheel, they still found nothing.
This of course is normal for biased wheels as the ways that they can become biased are often invisible. So in a way, this was not too dissimilar to what Joseph Jagger did all those years earlier. This event came in 1986 when the casino wheels were far more sophisticated than what they were back in the days of Joseph Jagger.
But this has always been my point with biased wheels. Often the causes are invisible and I have even looked at atmospheric conditions in the past as being potential reasons for bias. If a reason for bias was only present for a short while then not only would it be almost impossible to detect but it would also be almost impossible to fix.
