Roulette - what are my odds?

There are different types of roulette, differentiated by the number of zeros on the board. American roulette has two zeros and European roulette just one. There are now on-line casinos that offer a roulette game with no zero at all, taking away the house edge. What are my odds when there is no house edge? Do I stand a chance of beating the casino and does it turn my game into less of a gamble?

After simulating hundreds of thousands of routelle games on a computer, playing all three versions of the game, we came to the following conclusion.

With two zeros (Las Vegas style), not surprisingly, the house edge is in excess of 5%. Which means that even if you are right every second time, and yield a 50% success rate on, say red, you will still hit one of the zeros once in a while and slowly but surely your investment shrinks. Over time your money fliters through to the casino because of the zeros you hit from time to time.

With European Roulette, the chances of hitting a zero is slimmer than in Vegas but the same rule applies. Over time the initial investment shrinks as the zero is hit.

Now the interesting one. With no zero, as is offered by some on-line casinos, you should stand a real chance of winning money, right?

When we examined the computer results we found that it is most often not the one or two zeros that slowly but surely erode away your money. The game is most often ended by a catastrophic streak of bad luck - such as red not being hit for eighteen times in a row, while you're feverishly betting on it because you believe that "the odds are getting better and better".

The computer simulation suggests that your chance of being wiped out, after an unexpected streak of successive losses, is your real enemy when playing roulette - not the house edge. Casinos offering no-zero roulette must have run similar simulations before taking the leap. The house edge turns out to be nothing more than a small but reliable source of recurring income - letting money trickle out of your account into that of the casino. Their real trump card, however, is the fact that somewhere along the line, if you're playing long enough, an unfortunate sequence of losses will wipe you out and they will get your money anyway.

There is an informative article about one of the more popular roulette strategies here

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