STONES of PHILLY

There are many people that like to gamble on roulette. But the question remains, how can we get more people to like roulette?

Roulette is a gamble with fairly low odds for winning. And when you compare it to other games like black jack, it becomes apparent that roulette is not the best game to play for gambling, especially not if you are looking for a way to make money. That being said, there is one thing about roulette which makes it interesting: its lack of success rates. The house edge on most casino games is around 1-2%. This means that if you bet $10 at these casinos and play only once per hour, you will lose $0.10-$0.20 every hour. Compare this to roulette which can have a house edge of up to 4.3% on European roulette tables, and you can see that roulette suddenly becomes an interesting game to play.

However, there are problems with playing the game in most casinos because the odds aren’t good enough for people to like or play it because the chances of winning are too small. This is because the casino can see and track all player strategies, and can easily adjust the game in order to exploit these strategies. So it’s not just an issue of the odds being low, there are other factors which make it very attractive for casinos to keep that 4.3% house edge, even if in some cases one of these factors would be slightly lowering the odds against a particular strategy.

In order to increase the popularity of such games I’d like to propose a solution: make an art project out of roulette.

While this may sound like an odd idea, it has already been done. In 2010, the Norwegian artist Thomas Vilhelm Eckersberg designed a roulette game called “One Day In Roulette”. This game is played on a table where players bet on certain numbers, and then watch the results unfold in front of them. The player then paints whatever artefact or object they see in that result.

In this single game, there are several interesting questions about the game which I’d like to introduce in my next few sections.

How can the casino not see your strategy, and still make money off of your bets?

How can you play roulette without knowing how to read a wheel?

How do you know if you’ve won if you’ve only ever won once?

How would you know when you should quit playing the game?

I’ll start with the last question first: How would we know when a particular strategy is no longer profitable? This is where the art approach comes into play.

This is a very interesting problem to solve because we’re dealing with probabilities, yet the casino is strictly mathematically manipulating them in their favour. How would you know when your strategy no longer pays off?

This would be a great way to say that casinos can’t see more than one outcome for each roulette game. However, they probably take note of other strategies such as losing streaks and large bets that have already paid off. They may also take note of previously played games for which the bettor has won.