Remember Doyne Farmer? We recently wrote about his mathematical theories on how to gain the advantage in roulette. He’s the roulette whiz that caught the attention of the gaming world in the 1970s when he dissected the roulette wheel and managed to turn the odds of the game against the house. Only, he never revealed his secret to the rest of the slavering gaming world desperate to know how he did it.
That is, until now. Recently, Farmer published a paper in the scientific journal Chaos. Where can you get it? You can order your own copy online. How soon can you start raking in the chips? Not so fast buddy.
Farmer’s odd-beating strategy isn’t as simple as making a few calculations. Maybe for Farmer — who now teaches at Oxford University — but for most of us, the calculations require the help of a small computer or a smartphone programmed with the calculations in Farmer’s paper.
If you can manage to lug out your phone or computer and the automated camera required to engage in that type of wheel monitoring without alerting the floor master that something’s up then you’re off to a good first start. The rest is simply a series of calculations divided into two parts.
The first part of the formula tracks the highly predictable path that a roulette ball takes when it rolls around the rim of a roulette wheel. The second part of the formula tackles the tougher part: the less predictable path that the ball will take once it starts bouncing around the slots.
Once the formula is plugged in, users can predict which half of the roulette wheel the roulette ball will fall in roughly 13 out of 22 rolls. Roughly 3 times in 22 the formula predicts the exact slot the roulette ball falls into.
Sounds like a far stretch? Well, it is. But if you’re playing the long odds, you can change your odds of winning from the 2.7% norm to 18% and that’s not too shabby.
