Casino Odyssey III: The Little Wheel is Now Really Little

13 February 2024

By Frank Scoblete

Craps and roulette are probably the two oldest casino games. Craps goes all the way back to early people rolling the bleached bones of sheep and other people, thankfully dead, to assess the will of the gods and whether to enslave the denizens of the tribe on the other side of the mountain.

That’s why you will hear many craps players talking about rolling “dem bones.” The statement has historical accuracy but I doubt many craps players know its origins.

Roulette might be somewhat newer, at least in its present form, as it was discovered (meaning invented) by scientist, philosopher, mathematician, theologian and researcher, the great Blaise Pascal who when looking to create a perpetual motion machine wound up creating the gambling game called the “little wheel,” meaning roulette.

Poor Pascal didn’t discover the perpetual motion machine (no one has yet been so lucky as to do so) but his new gambling game ultimately took the casino world by storm in the late 1600s. It has continued its success right up until today.

In 1990, when I first played roulette in Atlantic City, the game had two zero numbers (0, 00) and 36 numbers from 1 through 36. The 1-36 numbers alternated between black and red colors and the zeroes were usually green, although sometimes blue.

A player had a one in 38 chance of guessing which pocket the ball would fall into and settle, and thus a player had a one in 38 chance of winning a single-number wager. That made the odds of a win 37-to-1. But the casino paid off a winning bet at 35-to-1 establishing its edge of 5.26 percent. If the casino paid off the true value of the win (37-to-1), it could not make a profit and then, shortly, that casino would be out of business.

An edge of 5.26 percent meant the casino stood to win $5.26 per $100 wagered at the game. That is a pretty big edge but luckily roulette is a relatively relaxed game without a huge number of decisions every hour or so.

Unless a player could find a wheel that was biased and not actually operating randomly (my wife the Beautiful AP and I accidentally found one in the early 1990s in Las Vegas) players are destined to lose the longer they played the game.

[Please note: The European/French version of the game only had one zero (0) and the edge fell to 2.70 – much, much better than the American version that was so rife in the 1990s.]

Now, we are some 30 years after I first played roulette and what has happened to the game? Armageddon!

The newest form of roulette is starting to take over the casino world. It has three green zeroes (0, 00, 000) with the edge against the players going all the way up to 7.69 percent. Okay, seriously, that is awful. It is an edge at the slot machine level.

So, since I first learned to play roulette until this very moment, the game is heading downhill at a faster rate than the wheel spins!

If you are an avid roulette player, there is only one way to keep the edge against you down to something almost reasonable – and that is to only play (maybe) 50 percent of the decisions. If you normally play two hours just continue to play those two hours but by cutting the number of bets you make in half (or thereabouts) your expected losses will be about the same as they were on the original game. Otherwise, why play this inferior version of the “little wheel?”

Time has taken away whatever shine the game of roulette once had but such a fate has happened to many other standard casino games as well.

All the best in and out of the casinos!

Frank Scoblete’s web site is www.frankscoblete.com. His books are available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Kindle, e-books, libraries, and bookstores.