Roulette Machine Rigged
Roulette House Edge Explained. There are many different variants of roulette these days, but they are all played on either a European or an American roulette wheel. Therefore, you only need to know and remember the house edge for both of these wheels. American roulette has two zeros. The house edge is 5.26%. European roulette has one zero. Honestly, it’s not that different. Winning at electronic roulette is as likely to happen as at the land-based one. So, what’s the deal? Electronic roulette, unlike the live casino one, is powered by RNG software. RNG stands for Random Number Gener. Roulette: 2.7% on European Roulette. 5.26% on American Roulette. Slot Machines: Variable is 96% average. Up to 15% on progressive jackpot slots. Keno: Variable is 20% to 30% depending on variant. Video Poker: Variable depending on variant. Craps: Variable depending on bet. 0% for taking the odds, up to 13.89% for 2, 12, and hard hops.
Gambling is a form of entertainment where one plays against chance. Many love to gamble for the enjoyment they can find from it, as much as for the money that they can possibly make by putting their luck to the test. Gambling comes in so many varieties, but only a handful has come to prominence. Among these top games of chance is roulette, a game popular to casino gamblers worldwide.
More often than not, many people associate roulette in all its incarnations to online and offline casinos. Indeed, roulette is almost what you may call a signature game of these gambling establishments. However, the game is not limited to these sprawling casinos. It can also be played in betting shops run by bookmakers, who are more popularly known by the term “bookies”.
Who are These Bookies?
Bookies are people who take bets at odds they and the bettors have agreed upon. In other words, the probabilities are all fixed in such a way that the bookie profits regardless the case. Bookies straddle the grey line of legality however. These bookmakers’ betting shops have seen freedom and legality in the UK and many other countries, but are restricted or shunned as illegal dens of vice elsewhere.
While most bookies specialize on sports events like dog and horse racing, there are many who offer games of chance that are normally found only in online and offline casinos. Among the games featured in bookies’ betting shops is roulette. Roulette games offered in these shops, like many of their other bookies casino games, is played on fixed odds betting machines or FOBTs, popularly known as roulette machines.
The Bookies’ Roulette Machines
Roulette machines in bookies are popularly known to have been rigged in order to give maximum advantage to the bookmaker. Or are they? There are many people who are still in doubt about this as the story has quite a few sides to it.
Bookies who run betting shops will often claim that their machines are not rigged. Many of them will tell you that their roulette FOBTs are just the same as online roulette games. That is, they produce results according to the outcome of a random number generator program. This may be true in legal, highly visible betting shops, but doubts come to mind when speaking of obscure, shadier ones.
Players meanwhile will confidently claim that all roulette machines in bookies betting shops are totally rigged. Online roulette forums are abundant with topics asking whether or not roulette FOBTs are cheated to favor the bookies more. The common answer is yes, and that’s often coming from professional gamblers with first hand experiences on these machines. They’d often present anomalous spin results that’s evident of machine bias, and even suggests betting tactics that can supposedly beat the FOBTs. The most popular of these is sharking, a method we have discussed before.
In conclusion, are roulette machines in bookies rigged? We say not all machines are. You see, while there are so many shady bookies that are out for your money, there are also some who are highly visible and are strongly bound by the law. Such are those that can give you an honest roulette game. Look up roulette forums and websites to find such shops – you surely won’t fail to find one.
Other articles:
Magnetic Rigging
Roulette Machine Rigged Game
When it comes to using magnetics, one of the schemesincludes the replacement of some of the brass (non-magnetic) pocket separators with separators made of steel (a magnetic material).
The steel separators are manufactured with precision so that they appear identical to the ones made of brass. When a casino uses a roulette ball with a magnetic center, logically, it is drawn to the steel separators and gives preference to those ball pockets. Because the separators are permanently attached to the wheel, the preferred ball pockets need to be determined aforetime. In many cases casinos choose the single zero and the double zero as favored numbers.
Once the steel separators have been installed, the dealer is now able to decide whether to favor the above-mentioned pockets by putting the magnetic ball into or out of the play session.
During the 1940s and 1950s, the casino industry in Cuba developed by astute gamblers was aware that all the roulette wheels in the capital city of Havana were rigged. Many of these gamblers decided to go against casual players, as the ball usually settled into sections of the wheel where betting activity was low.
Back then a common way to gaff a Cuban wheel was by using electromagnets behind the ball track. One simple scheme employed four electromagnets, which were placed at an equal space inside the woodwork around the back side of the ball track. As the roulette balls had a core of steel, logically they reacted to the magnetic field. With a simple press of a button, a dealer was able to activate those electromagnets and force the ball off the track towards any of the four sections. Dealers had four sectors on the wheel to select from, thus, directing the ball to the desired area was not much of an effort, especially for a skilled dealer.
Other efforts for magnetic gaffing have been tested as well, but they proved to be not that successful.
There has been another scheme, which involved the placement of electromagnets in the wheelhead under pre-determined ball pockets, but it was quite difficult to maintain.
The major issue featured the electric current transfer to the spinning wheelhead. Several slip-ring contacts (one for every electromagnet) and a common return line were put to use. However, it was not a reliable method, because the frequent maintenance would eventually reveal to more people than what casino management could accept, that the wheel is rigged.
The Contemporary Way
As technology developed, the methods of rigging a roulette wheel became more complex.
The majority of older methods had the following relevant issue, the wires or levers needed to be run to and from the wheel, which tied the latter to the roulette table and made the rigging more exposed to players. Contemporary methods do not use buttons, levers or external wires, but instead all the mechanisms and wires are hidden entirely within the wheel.
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One of the modern methods, used by some casinos, features electrically-operated blocking pins at every ball pocket. A minuscule electrical solenoid is placed behind each of the pins inside the spinning wheelhead. Every solenoid will push the respective pin out whenever an electric current is applied. All 38 solenoids are connected to an electronic circuit board, which includes a radio receiver and digital control circuits. The board and the solenoids receive power from alkaline dry cells.
The specific moment is that the batteries, the wires and the circuit board are positioned under the cone of the wheelhead and rotate along with it. With the help of a remote control, similar to a TV set remote, a digitally-coded radio signal is sent to the circuit board. This signal ensures that one or more of the solenoid connections are selected and the electrical current necessary is applied.
Other Ways of Rigging a Wheel
Beating the Roulette Odds the Old Way
Other Old Roulette Schemes Used by Players
Beating the Roulette Odds by Computer Prediction
Digging Deeper into the Roulette Computer Prediction Method
The remote control is usually operated not by the dealer, but by an associate of his/hers. It can be set ahead of time, before the ball falls onto the wheelhead, to block the numbered pockets where the betting activity is high. When the ball falls off the track, the dealer’s associate will simply press the activating button and the blocking pins will be pushed out for as long as a few seconds, not allowing the ball to settle into the designated pockets.
This is a system, which requires no maintenance and is completely out of the players’ sight. As it is inside the wheelhead of the wheel, the latter can be rotated, leveled, and moved around, as if it is not rigged.
As casinos and other establishments have been using rigged roulette wheels and other casino devices of fraud for a while, the time has come for resourceful roulette players to respond. Therefore, they have invented a number of smart ways to overcome the odds.