The roulette table is one of the most popular games in any casino for plenty of reasons. For one, the roulette table is easy to understand, which attracts new and old casino players. However, like most casino games, the issue of cheating is always there. In fact, you probably have asked the question “are roulette tables rigged?” In this article, we are going to answer that question.

• Are The Automated Roulette Tables Rigged
• Are Automatic Roulette Tables Rigged
• Are Automated Roulette Wheels Rigged

Online blackjack and roulette are not rigged. However, the games are set up in the house’s favour, which is something that you need to remember. For example, if you could bet on something that had a 50/50 outcome, like a coin toss, then the true odds for that bet would be even money or 2.00.

Do Casinos Rig Roulette Tables?

When it comes to money, some people will always find a way to cheat. In roulette, it may be the casino or the player. While there are instances in which casinos were caught rigging the roulette tables, but these are rare cases.

The truth is, opening and running a legal casino is not easy. In fact, just getting approval to run a legal casino is a big headache. Even after you get your approval, you are regularly checked to ensure that your games are not cheating. Now keep in mind running a casino means that odds are always in your favor.

In other words, statistically, casinos will not lose money on the tables in the long run as the odds are in their favor. Since the casino is going to win the money in the long run anyway, what’s the real incentive for rigging roulette tables or other games?

It seems the only casinos that would resort to cheating are the ones that are greedy or running an illegal operation. In most cases, even if the legal casino is greedy, the extra money they get from rigging the roulette table is not worth the risk of being caught. If a casino is caught cheating, it will severely tarnish their reputation which drives customers away. And, authorities will most likely shut them down.

If there’s a real cause for rigged roulette tables, then it’s when you are playing in illegal casinos. In illegal casinos, pretty much “anything goes” as there’s no authority that regulates and checks for fair play. Having said that, even an illegal casino has a reputation to protect. If players know that they are rigging the tables, then this will have a significant negative impact on the casino’s bottom line.

A Few Known Ways Of Rigging Roulette Tables

* Ball Tripping – a cheating method in which the ball is prematurely and forcefully dislodged in the attempt to control it to rest on the desired spot.

* Rigging The Wheel – there are many ways of rigging the wheel like opening/widening the pockets or the use of a trip pin.

* Magnets – this method involves the use of magnets or electromagnets in conjunction with a rigged ball that has metal inside. The magnet attempts to control where the ball might land.

The thing with rigging a roulette table is that it’s still a probability game. Most rigging methods will only attempt to control the ball. What is very difficult to do is accurately control the ball where it will rest. This means that even if the tables are rigged, it will only bump up the casino’s odds a few notches. For most casinos, the extra gains in odds are not enough to justify if they get caught doing it.

The Bottom Line

Saying that a rigged roulette table doesn’t exist is rather a false statement as cheaters will always exist. However, you can take comfort from the fact that rigged roulette tables are extremely rare. The incentive to rig the roulette tables are generally not enough to compensate for the risk of losing customers or being shut down. This holds true even for illegal casinos, and even more so for legal casinos.

Everyone who’s ever played roulette, either online or in a real casino, has probably wondered whether or not roulette games are rigged. The answer to this question is more complicated than a simple yes or no, because in one sense, roulette wheels are almost never rigged. But in another sense, all roulette wheels are rigged.

The difference is based on what you considered rigged.

Can Casinos Control Where the Ball Lands?

In any legitimate or licensed casino, the wheels are checked to make sure they’re balanced correctly on a regular basis. This is done for the protection of the players, but it’s also in the best interest of the casinos. Rigged games are a sure way to get a bad reputation and lose customers.

This type of checking goes on at Internet casinos, too. But most Internet gambling venues use a random number generator program instead of an actual roulette wheel. (Live dealer casinos are an exception.) Online casinos rely on a reputation for fairness even more than land-based casinos do. People are already comfortable with playing casino games in places like Las Vegas, but they’re still nervous about playing online.

In either case, casinos have no real incentive to physically rig their roulette games. That’s because the math behind the game, in a sense, has already rigged the game in the casino’s favor.

The House Edge in Roulette Could Be Considered “Rigged”

All casino games provide the casino with a mathematical edge over the player. They don’t do this by rigging roulette wheels to have certain numbers come up more often than others. They don’t rig their blackjack decks or use loaded dice in craps, either. They just offer payouts on their bets that offer lower odds than the odds of winning.

Mathematically, over the long run, on almost every casino game, the casino is guaranteed to win a certain percentage of every bet. This percentage is called the house edge. Here’s how it works in roulette.

A standard American roulette wheel has 38 numbers on it. There’s a 0, a 00, and the numbers 1-36. Your chances of landing on any one of those numbers is 1 in 38, or 37 to 1. If you bet on a single number, then you win 35 to 1. The difference between your 37 to 1 chance of winning a 35 to 1 payout is the house edge.

Suppose you made 38 bets on a single number, and suppose you saw mathematically perfect results. You’d win one bet and lose 37 bets, right? On each of those bets you lost, you’d lose one unit, so you’d be down 37 units. On the one bet that you won, you’d be up 35 units, for a net loss of 2 units.

Does that mean the game is rigged? In a sense, yes. Mathematically, the game is unbeatable in the long run. Of course, in the short term, people can and do win at roulette, which is what keeps people coming back.

What about the Other Bets?

All of the gets on a roulette table exhibit this same phenomenon. Take the other end of the game, where you bet on red or black and get an even money payout. Suppose you bet red for 38 spins a row. Again, this is a mathematically perfect simulation, so you land on every single slot once.

You’ll hit red 18 times, black 18 times, and green twice. You’ll lose 20 bets and win 18 bets. Since you’re being paid off at even money on the 18 bets you won, you’ll be up 18 units, but when you subtract the 20 units you lost on the other bets, you’re down 2 units—just like you were down 2 units in the previous example.

The 0 and 00 are where the roulette table is “rigged”. The casino doesn’t have to have a button hidden on the croupier’s side of the table that controls the outcome. (You might have seen that in the movie Casablanca.) The casino makes plenty of profit over time on a roulette wheel.

The house edge is 5.26% on an American roulette wheel. If you owned a small casino with a single roulette table, and it had an average of 3 players playing 24 hours a day on it, you could predict (with a small degree of error based on variance) how much money that table would earn your business over time.

With 3 players at the table, you’ll probably see an average of 60 spins per hour on a roulette table. If those players are wagering an average of $10 per spin, you’re seeing $600 per hour per player in action, or $1800 per hour. After 24 hours, you’ll have seen $43,200 of action, of which the casino expects to win about $2272. (That’s 5.26% of $43,200.)

As you can see, the casino has no reason to rig the mechanical aspects of the game, because the math ensures their winnings over the long run.

What about Online Roulette Games? Are They Rigged?

Are The Automated Roulette Tables Rigged

No one can say for sure that no online roulette games are rigged. But most Internet casinos are licensed and regulated somewhere, which means their random number generators and software are audited. Since we’ve already demonstrated that the casino has a very profitable game already without rigging the results, it’s hard to imagine that a casino would bother to rig their roulette games.

Are Automatic Roulette Tables Rigged

Of more concern to an Internet gambler should be how quickly the casino pays out winnings. The Internet has way more horror stories about players who couldn’t get paid than it has about players who didn’t win or lose as often as they expected to mathematically.

The main point to remember is that all casino games are mathematically going to favor the house. That’s the nature of the game. If you play any negative expectation game long enough, you’ll eventually lose all of your money. That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun trying to win in the short run, though. In fact, that’s the whole point of casino gambling.

Are Automated Roulette Wheels Rigged

So play roulette without fear that the wheel or the ball are somehow rigged. They don’t need to be rigged for the casino to show a tremendous profit over time.