Roulette System in an Online Casino

Ever since its invention, roulette has attracted many gamblers, who tried to devise various methods and systems to defeat the game and walk away as winners. Nowadays many people still play roulette either online or in brick-and-mortar casinos using one or other method that promises to turn the odds in their favor. If you are interested in taking your chances at online roulette, first of all you need to know the facts behind the game and these systems, only then can you decide whether or not it is worth using them.

Roulette is played with wheel divided into 37 or 38 equal slots, numbered from 1 to 36. The American version of the game has two green slots, one marked with zero and the other with double zero, while European roulette has a single zero. These slots practically give the house its advantage or edge. This is a significant factor to take into consideration, since the larger the house edge, the fewer chances you have to win. In the case of European roulette, the house edge is 2,7%, while in the double zero version this goes up to 5,26%. This places roulette among the casino games with the highest house edge, and it also means that on the long run, the casino will always have the upper hand. This doesn't mean that you cannot win at all, you have the chance to walk away a winner from time to time, but this is not a game where you could expect a consistent profit over time. In fact, mathematicians who studied roulette arrived to the conclusion that it is an unbeatable game. Online casino sites use random number generators, and this piece of software guarantees that the number the ball will land on depends entirely on chance. Moreover, the game of roulette has no memory, which means that the result of each spin is independent of the previous ones. People tend to believe in winning and losing streaks, and to rely on their intuition that says it's their lucky night, but in practice, there's no way to predict what the result will be. In other words, if you want to play roulette, the only thing you can really rely on is luck.

In spite of this, many gamblers still use a variety of systems in an attempt to beat the game. One of the oldest such betting methods is the Martingale, which has been around since the eighteenth century, and surprisingly enough still has many fans. The method is fairly simple: you start betting with a certain amount, and you double this each time you lose. In case you win, you will return to the original amount. This system is used for even money bets, so you will have to place your money on either red or black, or choose between odd and even numbers. Although this sounds reasonable at first, the Martingale actually raises several problems. To begin with, you cannot really win large amounts of money. You will have to start with a small initial bet to be able to outlast a longer loosing streak, and every time you win, you will be ahead with exactly the amount of the original bet. As an example, if your initial bet is $5, and you loose three spins and win the fourth one, you will have only made another $5, because the rest will cover the losses you had so far (5+10+20+40-80=5). The other problem comes up when you loose several times in a row. Using the previous example, if you start with $5 and lose seven times in a row, you will have to make a $640 bet to cover your losses, and win five bucks. A long loosing streak is not impossible, and even in case you are willing to place such a large bet while chasing your $5, one of two things will happen: you either run out of money, or the table limits will prevent you from making the bet. In both cases, you end up losing a lot of money in an attempt to gain a small sum, so the whole system is about chasing your losses and digging yourself a deeper hole each time you lose. If you want to use such a betting method, doing the opposite – doubling your bets each time you win and risking the original amount after every lost spin – is probably much safer, since you will be able to limit your losses and in the case of a longer winning sequence, make some money as well. Again, this is not something that will make you a guaranteed winner, but it is perhaps less risky than the previous approach.

There are many other gambling systems devised for roulette and the internet is full of people selling so-called unbeatable methods. Do not waste your money on these, as they are just scams that will cost you more than the money you payed for buying them. In the past, gamblers have even tried to find biased wheels that had a mechanical flaw, and some have succeeded to win after clocking the wheel and determining on which numbers the ball is more likely to land. These days land based casinos often check the wheels and replace the faulty ones, so it is unlikely that any biased wheels are still in operation. Of course, this is not a possibility in online gambling where numbers are generated by software. People like to use various systems because it gives them more sense of security and control than just betting randomly. As long as you keep in mind the facts and that when playing roulette Lady Luck is your best ally, you will probably have a great time playing this online casino game.