Over the years, I have encountered more than my fair share of roulette wheels. From the older high profile wheels to the new John Huxley “Saturn” design with built in bias detection software and electronic readouts.
In my experience, whilst every possible precaution is made by the actual manufacturers themselves to make the wheels unbiased, bias is actually inevitable. Some years ago I was exploring the possibility of bias appearing intermittently and then disappearing again.
I felt that certain atmospheric conditions could contribute towards bias in some instances but I have never been able to properly fathom why this could be the case. Wheels are moved frequently so in the process of moving them then bias can appear.
On several wheels that I have worked on in the past, the diamond shaped canoes have become loose or in some instances the metal pocket dividers that separate the actual numbers have become loose. What happens in these instances is that when the roulette ball makes contact with metal that is loose then the movement of the metal absorbs the energy of the moving roulette ball.
What this means is that the ball is then attracted to a certain area of the wheel and is less likely to be thrown into another area. This type of reaction may seem trivial but when you consider that the house edge at single zero roulette is a mere 1.35% then you can see the effect of a bias and how that can possibly lead to advantages being secured in certain types of situation where you can perhaps ascertain that certain numbers will not arrive on a certain spin.
Think about this for a moment because if you know for instance that given the dynamics of the situation that two numbers will not arrive during this spin then what this means in essence is that you could in theory back all the other 35 numbers where the pay-off is 35-1.
This means that you would return 36 chips and win 1 chip at whatever the chip denomination was. It gets a little more technical than this but this is how you can manufacture an edge at roulette and take advantage of it.
Carl
