One way it is possible to beat the roulette wheel is to use physical methods. Mathematically, it can be shown that now in the long run, all roulette systems are doomed to failure in the long run.

The mathematical models assume that the wheel is perfectly balanced and there is no bias, say the 12 comes up more often than any other number. If thats the case, then it probably would be possible to beat the roulette table by just betting on 12 all the time. All that needs to happen is that something to overcome the house edge of 2.70%.

This can happen if there are imperfections in the wheel. The video below tells the story of one such team that used a bias wheel to make hundreds of thousands of dollars playing roulette.

Breaking Vegas: “The Roulette Assault”

In the early 90s Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo worked out that wheels were not always perfect. Slight imperfections in the wheel, could cause a number to come up more often than it should. A player with this knowledge could use this to his advantage and Gonzalo did.

He spent time studying the wheels at Casino de Madrid in Madrid and depending on who you believe won over €1,000,000 just from Madrid. He went on to conquer Vegas using his techniques. Eventually, he was caught and sued by the casinos but had enough money to fight them off.

At the end of the day he didn’t tamper with the wheels in anyway. All he did was use his brain and a computer to help him predict where the ball would land. In 2004, he finally won a decade long course case in Spain. The Supreme Court ruled that banning him from the casino was illegal because he had not cheated.

Biased wheels are hard to detect as you need to record thousands of spins before you can be sure of a bias wheel. No doubt casinos do their own monitoring nowadays so the chances of finding one are slim.