Roulette Strategy

Roulette is a fairly structured game, and because of this fact, it’s often difficult to develop a decent roulette strategy for the long run. The fact that each bet on the table is negative expectation doesn’t offer us much in the way of starting points. In fact, the roulette systems you see advertised around the world are mathematically improbable. By that we mean, the simple math of roulette makes it impossible to beat in the long run using a structured or systematic betting method. If we can’t win with a system, we’re left to develop the best strategy we can.

There are two approaches to this task. One involves betting across the board in a way that if one bet loses, a different bet wins. This is called hedge betting, and often seems to make a lot of sense. In the long run the true effect of hedging is more subtle. If you are a hedge better, it won’t affect weather you win or lose, but it will affect how much you win or lose. Playing with hedges drastically reduces the ‘volatility’ of the game in front of you. This means that if you are winning at the table with a hedging strategy, you would also be winning without it, but you would be winning more! Hedges consistently take away a bit of your winnings, as you have to have extra money down that will inevitable be towards a losing bet.

A better stance to take in developing a roulette strategy is one of pure logic. The logical approach has two sides itself: bankroll management and advantage seeking. We will discuss roulette bankroll strategies on it’s own page, and talk a bit about advantage seeking here.

Again, two ways exist to seek an advantage when it comes to roulette. You can go the clean route, where you look for tables offering certain favorable rules , or you can go the not so clean route and try to find some patters where there should be no patterns. Those patterns are called dealer signatures, and we will discuss the concept at length on it’s own page.

The rules we want to look for to help us out include the obvious, seeking a European single zero roulette wheel, to the not so obvious, which you likely will not have heard of before.

The first and most important rule change is of course, moving from a double zero American roulette wheel, to a single zero roulette wheel. This single handedly drops the house edge from 5.26% to 2.70%.

The second most valuable rule you can come across, which can be found on some American roulette wheels, is called surrender. Surrender is a rule whereby outside, even-money bets, are not lost instantly on a zero or a double zero hit. When a green pocket comes up you only lose half of your bet. Since those zeros play a large role in the edge, this rule plays a large counter-role. With this rule in effect, the house edge on outside even-money bets is dropped right down to 2.63%.

If you’re lucky enough to have found a single zero roulette wheel, take it a step further and find out if the table also offers a rule called ‘En Prison’ (which translates simple from French as ‘In Prison’). This beneficial rule is also only applicable to outside even money bets, and works like this: If a zero is hit your outside even money bets won’t be swept away, but will remain on the table to have their fate decided by the next spin. If the next spin wins for your outside bet you have your bet returned, but you receive no extra winnings. If the next spin was a loss for your bet, it gets swept away.

This opportunity to regain your bet on a zero has a direct effect on the house edge. On European tables offering En Prison as a rule, your outside even money bets can drop to a house edge of just 1.35%. As you may be able to tell by now, that’s quite a good advantage for roulette.

The basis of this page was to let you learn that the development of a roulette strategy can come from a number of different directions. One prominent source of a better game is advantage seeking for tables offering better rules. Another method of gaining an advantage is to search for something called dealer’s signatures.

One of the most important parts of your roulette strategy will be your ability to keep track of your own bankroll.
If you ever tire of roulette you can play other games such as Online Keno.