The Mechanics of the Roulette Wheel
All over the internet people are searching for easy ways to make money and of course gambling and roulette tactics and strategies are obviously high on many people’s radar. For example for my favorite game – roulette, you’ll see thousands of plausible and complicated strategies that apparently will guarantee your success. Throughout this site you’ll find details and explanations of many of these systems – but it’s best to remember none of them guarantee anything at all.
For this post though, let’s just focus on the primary focus of a game of roulette – the wheel. The roulette wheel is made of two main parts -
- rotor – the revolving inner part
- stator – the stationary outer part
The croupier spins the rotor in one direction whilst chucking the ball into the stator which travels in the opposite direction. When first spun the speed means that the centrifugal force presses it against the vertical rim of the stator. But slowly the momentum falls and the ball drops into the sloped part. The ball is in a kind of decaying orbit and it is falling inwards in a spiral trajectory.
Within the Stator you can probably make out the small metal shaped dividers which are known as deflectors or vanes. These are normally diamond shaped and have a huge affect on the trajectory of the ball mainly because if their diamond shape. If it hits a vane then ball will career off in a different trajectory, notice though that very often it slips between these and carries on in the same direction.
Finally you’ll see the ball, spirals down into the rotor which is spinning in the opposite direction. It is at this point that the ball first encounters the numbered pockets. There are yet more dividers here between the different numbered pockets, these are normally known as frets and these also can radically alter the balls trajectory as it falls in speed.
Eventually though the ball will settle in a single pockets and we will have a result. Imagine the huge number of forces and impacts involved in determining it’s final location – the speeds of spin, the ball, the various frets and the huge number of different collisions and angles required to determine it’s trajectory. Taking even a minute to watch and absorb these will make you think twice about dealer tracking.
In the next post I will cover some of the efforts of a mathematician called Ed Thorp and his efforts to analyse these forces with a view to producing an infallible roulette system.
£33,000 Has Been Stolen From a Small Number of London Casinos
Nimesh Bhagat and Andrew Ashley worked by day as IT problem analysts for a large casino group. They were successful IT contractors however they used their technical knowledge to devise a way to steal thousands from casinos by forging winning betting slips.
The two analysts stole at least £33,000 before they were caught by accessing software which was used to control the remote betting machines at four London casinos.The pair both admitted the theft which took place between July and September 2007. Due to their guilty pleas the pair escaped with suspended sentences of 12 months each. This scam was concerned with the betting terminals you can find at casinos, these are used to allow punters to place bets on roulette wheels without actually being at the tables. The pair used their knowledge of these systems to print out winning tickets without the win actually taking place. The tickets where then cashed for the winnings.
It was actually quite simple for them to use their their knowledge to ensure that the machine printed out a winning ticket whatever the result of the bet placed. In fact the only reason they were caught was a combination of carelessness and greed. A cashier noticed that a winning ticket contained an impossible payout of 600, the wager had been a 10 pound bet at odds of 35-1 !! Officials where then able to trace back a string of suspicious wins back to the two individuals who were both employed as problems analysts by the casino group.
Both pleaded guilty to theft under the 1968 Theft act. The court sentenced them to serve 200 hours of community service in addition to the suspended sentences. They were also ordered to pay back approximately 16000 pounds each to their ex employers.
Det Insp Ann-Marie Waller said:
These men not only used their intimate knowledge of two complex systems to break the law and make these fraudulent claims, they also breached the trust of their employers.
The convictions are surprisingly, probably the first where individuals have been caught manipulating the extensive computer systems that run the UKs thriving gaming industry. The use of technology to enhance our gaming experiences obviously brings risks of games being manipulated. To see a proper live roulette wheel – have a look here.
There are many instance of ‘Poker bots’ being used to play online poker games for cash and the manipulation of online roulette games is obviously very easily achieved by quick change of code in a Random number generator for instance! My distrust of these computer simulated wheels only grows when I read stories like this, although to be fair even live roulette could easily be faked – I’d like to see the Dublin Bet live video stream cut to the clock in the casino occasionally, although to be honest when I’ve visited the Fitzwilliam Street casino I don’t actually remember ever seeing one!
