In the last few years of the nineteenth century, a young man graduated from the University of Illinois by the name of William Nelson Darnborough and this man would eventually go down into roulette folklore. Darnborough drifted from job to job after leaving university but one thing remained…his intense fascination with roulette.

What attracted William to the game or fascinated him so greatly is not known but what is known about him is that he purchased his very own roulette wheel and studied the mechanics of it and its motion for considerable lengths of time. It is also known that he actually travelled across America taking on all comers winning considerable amounts of money from drifters and losing gamblers.

But the event that was to catapult Darnborough into the public eye was to happen in Monte Carlo. It was here that he won a reported £83,000 playing roulette which for that era was a staggering amount of money. This event happened in 1904 when Darnborough was in his mid thirties. There are accounts on record that were recorded by eye witnesses that were actually there.

All of them report that Darnborough moved with alarming speed when placing his bets and that he only started to place his bets after the dealer had spun the ball. What makes this event all the more remarkable was that Darnborough was far from being a one hit wonder and continued to hit the casinos very hard for a good number of years.

It is also reported that Darnborough did not play the same numbers from spin to spin which totally rules out that he may be playing lucky numbers or that he may have detected a biased wheel. At his peak Darnborough was reported to have won in the region of half a million from the casinos in Monte Carlo. A figure that would be the equivalent of tens upon tens of millions in today’s money.

I would have loved to have been there in person and watched the man in action but it seems ludicrous to me to try and explain this away “as just one of those things”. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever that what we have here is perhaps the first recorded case of a punter actually reading the spin. This was easier to do in the old days with the design of the casino roulette wheels at that time. They nearly all had deeper slots which meant that wherever a ball dropped, it tended to stay in that general area.

Darnborough was at it again in Monte Carlo in 1911 where he once again won a “very considerable sum of money”. The event that seemed to end Darnborough’s run was not anything done by the casino or the fact that he lost it back. He met and married an English girl named Frances who loathed gambling and she made William promise never to go back to that life ever again despite his success. Darnborough died in 1958 aged 90 never once telling anyone about just how he had managed to win this money that had made him so rich. Look out for part two on this remarkable person coming soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Author – “Killer Roulette”

Roulette is one of the most glamorous of casino games, and is one of the first that springs to mind when one thinks of playing and betting on casino games. This is in no way diminished when gamers play online roulette, even if the on-site glamour of the land-based casino may be lacking. Whichever type you decide to play, there are a number of tips that may help you to perform better and maybe win a little more money. Remember though, roulette is a game of chance, and, unlike a game such as poker, skill cannot really help you too much here.

Firstly, there is no strategy that can 100% promise you constant winning streaks, no matter how plausible the strategy may sound. Therefore, the first tip is to be careful which tips you listen to! If it sounds too good to be true, it probably will be. The number that the ball alights on is purely random, and the previous number can in no way influence or affect the ones to come. Remember also that roulette is played with two distinct types of wheel, the American wheel and the European wheel. Where you are in a casino with these two different wheels, be certain to choose the European wheel. The reason is simple: Roulette is a hard enough game to win at as it is, and with the American table, the house has an even greater edge – around twice that as with the European table due to the extra double zero (00) number. In this way, then, your choice of the European wheel, whilst not guaranteeing you success, will at least lower the house edge and tilt the odds a little in your favor.

It is just as well to also remember that the odds of winning at roulette are 35-1 for a very good reason: it is very hard to predict which number will win, and therefore, most people will lose most of the time. Perhaps the best is to begin with even money bets, and then try the odd two to one bets, where you can place a couple of your chips on either the four or six numbers. By doing so, if you win on any of the bigger bets (the four or 6) you will recoup your previous losses and will also win yourself a few extra chips. Also, try to bet only on outside table positions, whether red or black, odd or even, columns or dozens or high or low, whichever you prefer.

Watch the table carefully making sure you gauge which numbers have come up previously. Whilst you generally cannot predict accurately what will happen, it can help you to make your choice. As an example, if you have counted 15 red numbers come up in a row, you might think about placing a bet on black to come up next. This tip tends to form the center of many basic roulette betting tips and is worth heeding. Finally, pocket all of your winnings, and play simply with your original bankroll. This way, you stand to come out ahead, but if not, certainly not come out behind.

Roulette is one of the classic casino table games, and along with it is that air of excitement and glamour. The main object of the game is to, before the roulette wheel is spun, correctly guess the color and number of the slot into which the ball will fall into after the wheel has been spun. Players can also decide whether or not to bet on such variables, as whether it will land in a red or black slot, and whether or not it will be an odd or an even number.

The first thing for players to take into account is the fact that there are two different types of the roulette wheel – the European wheel, which has 37 slots that are numbered from 0 to 36, and the American wheel that has 38 numbers due to the fact that it houses an extra double zero slot (00). The house edge with a casino using a European wheel stands at 2.63, whilst the addition of the extra double zero number on the American wheel nudges the house edge up to 5.26%. Therefore, it is easy to see why players are recommended to play roulette at a casino using a European wheel if at all possible!

When playing roulette, players must buy in to the game by buying special roulette chips and this must be done before players sit down at the table to play. In order to prevent any arguments, each player is given a different color chip and the chips are only to be used at the particular table at which you are sat and must be cashed in once you finish playing. It is not permissible to cash your roulette chips in whilst you are at the cage. You will also note that every table has a minimum and a maximum bet, and players cannot combine an inside and outside bet in order to make up the table minimum bet. For instance, if the minimum bet at your table stands at $10, you must bet $10 on the inside and $10 on the outside, you cannot simply bet $5 on the outside and then $5 on the outside.

Concerning inside bets, there are number of things you can do. First, you can either bet a straight number or you can straddle the line between numbers, and by doing so choose a combination of numbers.

If you choose a straight number bet, you simply bet on a single number, which pays 35-1. You can also make a split bet, whereby you bet on two numbers. This type of bet pays 17-1. In order to do this, you simply put your chip in such a way that it straddles the line between two numbers, as stated. You may also place outside bets, which can be made in the boxes that surround the numbers.  Always remember that roulette comes with a high house edge, so by playing at a highly populated table, you will normally only see roughly 30 spins of the wheel per hour, and this will decrease the amount of time that your bets are tested by the house edge.

Remember, that you may also place your bet after the dealer has spun the wheel, as the dealer will let you know when to stop.

Roulette is a game of chance and as such, no strategy can help you get the winning odds. Einstein was right when he said, “You cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it.”

Nevertheless, you can keep these simple rules in mind to increase your chances at winning at roulette.

• Bet small. Try to bet the smallest possible amount in roulette. This goes for novices as well as expert players. Roulette is a game of chance and you may not have a win for a very long time.

• Place bets on colors, odds and evens, and number groups rather than actual numbers. This is just common sense. The wider the range of outcomes you bet on, the more likely it would be to get a hit.

• When playing at an online casino, keep an eye on the pattern of outcomes. Even though the online casinos claim to use a random number generator for the game, you might be able to place informed bets if you study the pattern of outcomes. For example, if you see a pattern of 3, 19, 31,10,17,33, you might make an informed guess that the next number will belong to the first 12 group and you can place an informed bet on First 12 counter on the table.

• Use the surrender rule. This rule will let you retain half of the bet should the ball land on zero, if you bet odd/even.

• If you know of a betting strategy such as Lambouchere or Martingale, try it with caution. There are no sure-fire strategies to win at games of chance such as roulette or slots. If you are looking to play a game that involves both skill and luck, try poker. Alternatively, you could play craps as that involves less skill.

• Do not gamble when you are tipsy. You might end up betting indiscriminately and losing a fortune on a night that was supposed to be a fun affair.

• Money Management. If you can’t manage your money, don’t go to a casino. If can’t put a check on your gambling urge, you might end up broke or worse – in a rehab for gamblers.

• I recommend practicing roulette on the many fun websites that let you play for fun money before you bet real money on it. In addition, you could also ask a pro (if you are acquainted with one) to give you a few pointers about the game.

Finally, don’t be disheartened by what you’ve just read. Remember, gambling is originally about fun and all that matters is that you have fun on your trip.

Legend has it that a Joseph Jaggers made a famous $325,000 roulette win in 1873 based on biased wheel attack strategy. Mr. Jaggers made his play with a team of six clerks and clocked all the wheels running at the Monte Carlo casino, finding one wheel to show significant bias towards a specific number. Therefore, despite what people say, (and what logic dictates,) people do win at roulette. Moreover, you could be one of them!

Following on from part three and suddenly it clicked into place why Walter’s had not played on the much better single zero roulette wheels. It wasn’t because he was a dummy but because there was something wrong with the wheel that he had been playing on. Billy Walters was ruthlessly exploiting what is known as a biased wheel and he was exploiting it to the full.

A biased wheel is one where for whatever reason, the near randomness of the outcome has been interrupted. This can be manufactured by an individual but most of the time it is caused by constant repetitive wear and tear. But the misinformation that was put out by the casino bosses was just another example of them not wanting the truth to be known.

The fact of the matter is that even the best roulette wheels in the world like John Huxley for instance are still subject to that same wear and tear. It is just that certain types of wheels are more susceptible to going wrong than others. The Huxley wheels are without doubt the Rolls Royce’s of the roulette wheel industry but even Roll’s Royce’s break down if they are used often enough.

So why did the casino stand for Walter’s action for so long before calling time. Well firstly no one had ever been hit to that scale before with biased wheel play. Secondly, Walter’s history as being a known big hitter and a losing gambler to boot gave him the perfect cover for his coup. When it became apparent what was happening then it was too late. But when a punter like Billy Walters asks to deposit $2,000,000 with you and he gets ahead by $500,000 then do you really want to risk offending him when you perceive that he will lose it all back and the 2 million on top.

As it later turned out, Walters had a team of wheel clockers touring the casino’s in AC doing nothing else but take down numbers. He already had the data at his disposal and all he needed to know was how to interpret the data correctly to see if a bias actually existed. This process of identifying real bias and not imaginary patterns is an area that is not well understood by the casino managers. This is an area where I have worked on over many years and is information that I pass on to any team that is interested in attacking roulette in this way.

Mathematicians have actually calculated that the probability that Walters win was purely down to luck as being in the region of 2% which when converted to odds is 49-1. When you couple this statistic with the story about the teams of wheel clockers then you cannot dismiss this as chance. This shows that anyone with enough imagination and creativity can take the casinos for an awful lot of money indeed.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson Author of Killer Roulette

We fast forward in time now to 1986 to hear about the incredible story of Billy Walters. He was a used car salesman and a known big hitter in Las Vegas and regularly won and lost huge amounts of money. But in 1986, Billy Walters hit the casinos in Atlantic City on roulette in a big way. Only this time he was doing something different….a lot different.

What Billy Walters did was to make a proposition never seen or heard before in Atlantic City. He offered to deposit a sum believed to be $2,000,000 with a casino in return for them increasing their maximum wagers on roulette. A casino called the Golden Nugget accepted the offer and Billy flew in from Las Vegas to start his date with destiny.

This is where Walters methods varied drastically from Darnborough’s because he bet $2000 per number on five numbers and never once varied his bet. What initially struck the casino staff as being odd was that Walters insisted on playing on double zero roulette instead of single zero. It is here where the edge for the house dramatically increases to a whopping 5.26%.

Instead of fearing that they were being set up, the casino gaming staff just took Walters as another impulsive gambler who did not have a clue about what he was doing. After all they knew full well about his reputation for losing big sums of money in Las Vegas which meant that they were more than happy to accommodate him.

Walters played five numbers and these numbers were 7,10,20,27 and 36. For the benefit of European readers, 7 and 20 and 10 and 27 are situated next to each other on a double zero American wheel. Walters and an associate of his played for hour after hour and it was soon evident to all present that the casino management were worried.

A procession of worried telephone calls and huddled meetings told everyone that the big chiefs at the Golden Nugget were far from happy. On and on he played, relentlessly playing the same numbers. Sometimes Walters would go for a break and it would be his associate who would hold the fort and continue the action. Every time that Walters hit one of his five numbers, the payout was $70,000 less the $8000 that he lost on the other four numbers leaving him with a win of $62,000.

With action totalling $10,000 per spin, Walter’s actual expectation per spin was minus $526 so it was no wonder that the casino welcomed his action at the outset. But after almost forty hours of continual play and Walter’s being $4,000,000 ahead, the casino bigwigs terminated the game. They also tried to circulate stories in the local newspapers that Walter’s had just gotten lucky. The truth was that this was not down to luck and the casino management knew it as well.

To read about the second and concluding part of Billy Walters then go to part four.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson Author – Killer Roulette

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Over the past one hundred years or so, there have been certain individuals who have won huge amounts of money on roulette….and not by chance either or in some online casino! The characters that you are about to read about are real people and not fictitious movie characters. The reason why I have included them is mainly because firstly I wanted you to be aware of them and secondly, to make you aware that what I am saying is true because what these people did has been documented and so have the amounts.

If there was ever to be a roulette roll of honour then every single one of these talented and knowledgeable individuals would be on it and I salute them all because they were my inspiration.

The American Adventurer

In the last few years of the nineteenth century, a young man graduated from the University of Illinois by the name of William Nelson Darnborough and this man would eventually go down into roulette folklore. Darnborough drifted from job to job after leaving university but one thing remained…his intense fascination with roulette.

What attracted William to the game or fascinated him so greatly is not known but what is known about him is that he purchased his very own roulette wheel and studied the mechanics of it and its motion for considerable lengths of time. It is also known that he actually travelled across America taking on all comers winning considerable amounts of money from drifters and losing gamblers.

But the event that was to catapult Darnborough into the public eye was to happen in Monte Carlo. It was here that he won a reported £83,000 playing roulette which for that era was a staggering amount of money. This event happened in 1904 when Darnborough was in his mid thirties. There are accounts on record that were recorded by eye witnesses that were actually there.

All of them report that Darnborough moved with alarming speed when placing his bets and that he only started to place his bets after the dealer had spun the ball. What makes this event all the more remarkable was that Darnborough was far from being a one hit wonder and continued to hit the casinos very hard for a good number of years.

It is also reported that Darnborough did not play the same numbers from spin to spin which totally rules out that he may be playing lucky numbers or that he may have detected a biased wheel. At his peak Darnborough was reported to have won in the region of half a million from the casinos in Monte Carlo. A figure that would be the equivalent of tens upon tens of millions in today’s money.

I would have loved to have been there in person and watched the man in action but it seems ludicrous to me to try and explain this away “as just one of those things”.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever that what we have here is perhaps the first recorded case of a punter actually reading the spin. This was easier to do in the old days with the design of the roulette wheels at that time. They nearly all had deeper slots which meant that wherever a ball dropped, it tended to stay in that general area. Look out for the second part of this article elsewhere on the site.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson – Author of Killer Roulette

No doubt you will have read that roulette cannot be beaten. Well it’s kind of funny because the vast majority of people who play online poker also think that this form of casino gambling cannot be beaten. In fact this lack of knowledge is so striking that the law courts have even decreed that poker is a game of pure luck.

Of course it is great that they think that because it keeps them off the backs of numerous players who either play the game for a living or they use the game as a serious second income stream. Anyway the point of this article is to show how roulette can be beaten. But I first became aware of this years ago when I worked as a croupier.

It was one night when I really tried to aim for certain numbers using a methodical system. The genesis of my idea was that if I could spin the ball at the same speed from the same location with the same rotor speed then I could achieve the same result. It was only years later that I discovered that the very methods that I had stumbled upon on that night were being used by punters, croupiers and professional roulette players the world over.

On this one particular night, I aimed for number one and hit it three times in succession. This was on one of the older high profile roulette wheels so the ball bounce was almost zero. These wheels are mainly no longer in existence now but with a fourth dynamic then ball prediction can still be profitable. I call this the fourth dimension (for want of a catchy title).

Firstly the release point of the ball is the first criteria that you need to look for. Secondly the speed of the ball as this will indicate the drop off point. Then the rotor speed needs to be constant for this to work optimally. But even when the speed is the same from spin to spin then that speed needs to not only be constant but also below a certain speed as well. If it isn’t then the metal ball deflectors will ricochet the ball far more violently.

There are other factors at work as well, the roulette ball composition for instance can be a large factor in how much bounce there will be when the ball leaves the ball track. Also the wheel mechanism has an effect as well as a wheel that slows down too rapidly will present you with another problem when it comes to roulette prediction.

But when you think about this for a minute, the dealer is in charge of making sure that most of these criteria are met. They can control the ball speed, they can also control the rotor speed and they can also manipulate the ball release point. So when a dealer is attempting to do this and also has a roulette ball of a certain composition and a nice healthy wheel then they can hit sections or spin out of sections with a frequency that is higher than randomness would suggest. This then makes roulette one of the best casino games of all when attacked in a certain way.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson