Play Roulette

Most of you must have heard of the story of the tortoise and the hare. The plodder beat the sprinter fair and square. But does this also apply to casino gambling? Are you capable to make better bets at the low end of the uncertainty scale with definite small returns or the high end with huge rate of payoffs?

There’s no definite answer to this as it all depends on your definition of “fare better.” You may mean to gain any profit at all but you figure you can always get your hands on – say about $100 or $200, so you’ll go all the way to shoot for a decent sum. Or, possibly, your main aim may be staying a long term at a table or machine, win or lose but not to go bankrupt.

Consider the alternatives of $10 wagers on Red or on a single number at the European roulette game. These choices have the feature that house advantage and rounds spun each hour are equal in both cases so they don’t confuse the two. However, similar factors apply to short and long term odds and the number of propositions within and across other games.

On the average, for great numbers of solid citizens over longer periods of time, results would be the same both ways. But people rarely think about averages. They concentrate on certain gaming sessions or on casino visits that involve small numbers of trials.

Just pretend that you will play for an hour. Roulette offers you about 45 spins in this same period of time with either of the sample bets, your maximum loss is $450. On the red numbers, this is also the maximum you can win. On a single spot, you can go as far as $15,750. The chance is higher with the former bet, but both are small.

Computer simulation of a more than thousand 45-spin sessions shows what you can actually expect from the game. Wagering $10 on red numbers or the possibility of breaking even or earning a profit is 42.8%. The distribution between these is about 38.1 % for $100 bets, 4.6% between $100 and $200, and 0.1% between $200 and $300 bets. On the other hand, the overall chance of you losing is 57.2%. This contains 47.8 % for $100 bets, 9.2 % between $100 and $200, and 0.2 % between $200 and $300.