Some roulette wheels, due to a combination of manufacturing defects and uneven wear, present imperfections that favor the selection of some numbers, betting on which one would obtain an advantage.
The first speculator of defective roulette wheels that we know of (but there were certainly also players in earlier times who obtained, in relative anonymity, great advantages from biased wheels) managed to achieve strong profits from defective roulette wheels, biased wheels and became famous (he was there are also some songs dedicated to it).
We are talking about Joseph Jagger , an English engineer who won a huge sum in Monte Carlo, apparently equal to around $330,000. In 1873, in fact, Joseph, with a team of some people (it seems there were six) dedicated a period of a few weeks to observing roulette, monitoring the winning numbers. Once he found the roulette that met his requirements, he went on a raid over the next few weeks. Obviously at the time the defects were very marked.
In the greats of the past section there is a dedicated article.
Other teams followed one another but, for brevity's sake, I won't tell the story which is otherwise very similar:
Even in San Remo (Italy) a team operated very successfully: we are talking about the team of Richard Jarecki , a wealthy professor of Polish origins. Between 1968 and 1969 he obtained winnings of just under one billion lire, forcing the casino administration to consider restrictive measures against him.
Obviously, as in all other cases, the group leader made use of a group of collaborators who incessantly recorded the hits made at the tables.
To my memory (and knowledge), the team that obtained the best results in recent times was that of Willy Walters who, between Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe and Atlantic City, closed the business in 1989 with a profit exceeding 5 million of dollars! Walter's (recent and therefore not mythologized) story is extremely interesting, instructive and preparatory for any aspiring team.
It is widely believed that currently roulette wheels are built so carefully and that the controls are so thorough that faulty roulette wheels no longer exist. This opinion is, fortunately, wrong. Obviously the roulette wheels from Jagger 's time no longer exist (unfortunately!) but the world is full of roulette wheels with exploitable flaws: it's all about finding them!
The opinion of the non-existence of exploitable defects was also in vogue at the end of the 80s (it wasn't prehistory!) and, in spite of this hypothesis, the Willy Walters team achieved, by exploiting defects, the greatest win of all time (for Luckily they didn't give in to widespread opinions!)
Nowadays, dozens of people (including me) profit from this technique. In Northern France, for example, there is a "perfect" casino. Don't ask us to direct you to the right casinos: it would be like working against myself. But, I will enable you to understand, mathematically, whether a roulette wheel is (or at least seems to be so with very high probability) defective or not.
We have created a treatise dedicated to faulty roulette wheels .
Below are some of the topics examined.
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