Albert Einstein is reputed to have stated, "You cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it." This does not mean that you cannot win at a roulette table, but rather that more players will walk away with less money than their buy-in.

Over the years, many people have tried to beat the casino, and turn roulette - a game designed to turn a profit for the house - into one on which the player expects to win. Most of the time this comes down to the use of betting systems, strategies which say that the house edge can beaten by simply employing a special pattern of bets, often relying on the 'gambler's fallacy', the idea that past results are any guide to the future (for example, if a roulette wheel has come up 10 times in a row on red, that red on the next spin is any more or less likely than if the last spin was black).

All betting systems when employed on casino edge games will result, on average, in the player losing money.^[1] In practice, players employing betting systems may win, and may indeed win very large sums of money, but the losses (which, depending on the design of the betting system, may occur quite rarely) will outweigh the wins. Certain systems, such as the Martingale, described below, are extremely risky, because the worst case scenario (which is mathematically certain to happen, at some point) may see the player chasing losses with ever bigger bets until he runs out of money.

Notes

1. ^ http://wizardofodds.com/gambling/bettingsystems.html

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.