Statistics and Chaos in Roulette

There are many professional players that base their strategy on statistics. In the past years, although I think it still happens, there were people getting paid to keep track of the outcome of certain roulettes, from the time the game started till the time their employer would come in to begin his betting day. Then he would take their notes and mark the numbers that lagged in appearance. Here, I should explain that although the roulette has 37 numbers in reality and for all playing purposes are considerably less. According to my estimation the “playing” numbers are between 23 and 28.

Lets make a small detour so that the freshmen can grasp this notion. If we spin a roulette for 37 times the chance of all 37 individual numbers appearing are hundreds of times less likely, than the chance of you getting hit by a lightning right now, on the spot. It is not entirely unlikely but this belongs to the realm of Chaos Theory, with which we will concern ourselves later on.

Getting back in our story, having the employer noted the numbers in delay, he would start chasing them until he had earned the day’s pay. One secret for this kind of play is that you never chase all numbers in delay because you may ruin yourself. Perhaps three, four or five numbers may never appear. You keep on chasing until you make a profit and then off you go.

All in all this is a good old technique but there a couple of drawbacks. First of all it does not guarantee a profit every time a player wants. Also, in a certain day you may need more than the calculated capital resulting in a negative outcome.

Now, let us examine the same story from a different point of view, mixing together a bit of Chaos Theory, Quantum Physics and pure coincidence. According to statistics, every time the dealer spins the wheel the chances of each individual number appearing are exactly the same with all the other numbers. Let us assume that number 17 has appeared three times successively. Are you going to play 17 again? The chances appearing again are exactly the same with the rest of pack. But what are you going to do?

If you are in the heat of the game or if you play following logic and not habit then most probably you will not. Or you may do it, because you are a gambler and you feel obliged to pay in order to live a daring moment. But what is the right thing to do?

At this point we should introduce a notable Greek researcher Christos Markopoulos, who at his book the Dominance of Firsts concludes that when from a given set of equally probably outcomes the first results appear then they get “prioritized” and tend to appear more often in the future than the rest possibilities.

Therefore, if number 17 belongs in that group of first appearances then one way or another we should go after it, either if it already appeared 4 ties in succession or not if it belongs in the delayed group mentioned above. In any case, it is always memorable that we witnessed such a rare event and it will not harm us at all to see it appearing for a fifth time even if we have not place a bet. Thus, even if we lost an opportunity to get paid we won an opportunity to become real players and not gamblers.

Concluding I have to say that statistics alone cannot beat the roulette, neither chaos theory nor mathematics. You need all of the above in order to gain an advantaged position against the casino but they don’t beat convincingly the roulette.