Is Roulette All About Luck?
Roulette has been the staple of casinos around the world forever. It makes a casino look classy and entertaining and fun. It also helps the casino make money — since the house has an advantage.
Or does it?
With the introduction of online casinos and such things as bitcoin roulette — could the odds be more in your favor? Or more in the house’s favor?
Roulette — Strategies and Luck
How Stuff Works discusses the luck involved with traditional roulette like this:
“Roulette is a game of pure chance, and barring exceptional circumstances, no strategy can overcome the built-in house percentage. Play your birthday, your anniversary, last week’s winning lottery numbers — in the long run, it makes no difference. Either you get lucky or you don’t. For most players, roulette has no element of skill.
That being said, rare exceptions do exist. Sometimes a bored longtime dealer gets in a groove and releases the ball at exactly the same angle and velocity nearly every time. A very small number of players can spot what numbers are passing as the dealer releases the ball. With that knowledge, they can predict at a better-than-chance rate approximately where the ball will fall. The player then either bets or signals a partner to bet accordingly.”
In such traditional roulette the house has a slightly better chance of winning then you. How does that translate to online roulette? After all, you can’t find a ‘bored dealer’ or a table where the ‘wheel is slightly off balance and spins a certain way every time.’
Instead, when you’re playing roulette at an online casino then you might want to brush up on your strategies.
One of them is called the Martingale, and it’s where the player doubles his bet after each loss. When a win eventually comes, it leaves the player with a profit equal to his original bet. That is, if the player bets $5 on black and loses, he then bets $10; if that loses, he bets $20, and so on. A win at the $20 level overcomes the $5 and $10 losses and leaves the player with a $5 profit. The player then goes back to the original bet level.”
This strategy isn’t perfect and perhaps requires either a lot of practice or something else — but at least it’s something to keep in mind.
Roulette Luck — Is it Fair?
There’s something else to keep in mind, however, when dealing with online casinos and their games of roulette…you need to make sure they are provably fair.
Online roulette does not have the advantage of a physical ball and table and wheel and the laws of chance and chaos. Instead, online roulette needs to manufacture those random numbers and chances.
For some people they might be able to dig into the code that an online casino uses and see how that code operates — maybe even try to reverse engineer it and see if they can exploit it somehow to skew the odds in their favor.
But for the rest of us who don’t know how to hack and code like that, we need to make sure that the online casino itself isn’t doing that!
After all, an online casino could skew the randomization code into their favor. Maybe not by much, but an amount that will give them more profit over the long run with lots of volume.
This, of course, means that you will be playing against odds that are less fair than going to an actual roulette table at a physical casino.
How can you combat this? How can you put more luck in your favor?
At least make sure that the online casino you are playing at shows you how provably fair it is.
Provably fair is defined as:
“In a provably fair gambling system, a player places bets on games offered by the service operator. The service operator will publish a method for verifying each transaction in the game. This is usually by using open source algorithms for random seed generation, hashing, and for the random number generator. Once a game has been played, the player can use these algorithms to test the game’s response to his in-game decisions and evaluate the outcome by only using the published algorithms, the seeds, hashes, and the events which transpired during the game.”
And all that aside, if you really want more luck on your team, then you could consider betting on things like sports, Nascar, and other games where you might know a bit more of the statistics and chances that your favorite team will win and by how much.
In the end, luck seems to boil down to who has the most knowledge. If you’re the online casino then you’ll have more knowledge on how to tweak your systems to be better for the house — if you’re a coder or a sports fan than you might have more knowledge on how to spin the odds in your favor.
The more you know — the luckier you are.
