Roulette Guide – the House Edge

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 Wouldn’t it bet great if one these many winning roulette strategies you find onlinelike the martingales system actually worked. Could you imagine instead of going to the bank or ATM you’d just pop into your local casino and win some cash for the weekend. Well there is one system that is actually very successful but unfortunately it’s being run by the casinos themselves. The system is based on an extremely simple concept known as the house edge.

 It’s not some complicated progression system, it’s based on a very simple statistical advantage that will always triumph in the long run. So what exactly is the house edge ? One good way of illustrating the advantage is as follows – suppose you placed a single chip on every number on a roulette wheel, that’s a total of 37 chips on 1-36 plus the zero. After the spin of the wheel, you would of course have selected the winning number and could collect your winnings. You would receive 35 chips plus your initial stake, so for a 37 chip bet you would receive 36 chips in return. Your loss would have been a single chip on that spin of the wheel.

This simple example illustrates the small but telling advantage that the casino has, the house edge. The numerical value of the house edge is equal to the probability of a single number being spun. The probability is 100 percent divided by the amount of numbers that are actually on the wheel. If we use a European roulette wheel this is expressed as 100/37 which equals 2.7%.

So that’s it, doesn’t sound much does it. The casino advantage in a game is only 2.7 percent, but despite being small it is the advantage that has help create all those fabulous casinos across the world.  Obviously this in built advantage is most often amplified by your average gambler , overconfidence, being drunk or just being a reckless gambler can further alter this advantage!

But the small statistical advantage is what makes roulette appeal to many professional gamblers , the odds are only minimally in the houses favour. This is what the various gambling strategies seek to exploit , by using a system to minimize this advantage and progressively accumulate small wins. The other tactic which is also often combined with one of these systems is that of identifying a bias in a particular roulette wheel. There are in fact thousands of gambling stories, where a bias in a particular has been identified. It actually doesn’t take much of a bias to tip the odds back in favour of the punter.

 Just for example say you identified a bias in a particular wheel, where two numbers didn’t get selected in a period of time. Just by eliminating two numbers and betting accordingly, you would turn the house edge around, to a 2.7% punter edge! Of course spotting a real bias against a perceived bias are two completely different things.

 

One things for certain, if you’re playing for fun make sure there isn’t a programmed bias as well. If you’re play online roulette, try to use an live online casino rather than a computer generated one.

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