Can You Really Win at Roulette?
In the long term, probably not. The house edge is designed so that the casino, over the course of days/weeks/months/years/decades, makes a profit from roulette. But this does not mean that you cannot get good winnings from roulette. In fact, roulette is one of the games where you can make huge profits in a short time. You can also lose very quickly, but there are not many casino games (except those based on poker) that can pay you up to 35-1 on a bet.
Although 35-1 is not the real price for hitting a single number, there is a great feeling when you hit that number and your balance increases much more than when you win a blackjack hand. But isn't this like saying you can win at roulette? I'd like to share a couple of stories that show you can win, albeit in the short term.
First, I was playing a long session of poker at the casino and the game finally ended at 6:00am. On our way out of the casino, a few of us stopped at a roulette wheel for one last game before the night was over (yeah, absolutely EV-ish, but we liked doing it). Now, one of the players, let's call him Hugo, went to the table, put a couple of chips on a number because he "had a feeling". Lo and behold, his number drops and adds almost 1k to his poker winnings. Hugo collects his chips and does the same with another number, this being his last bet. Well, I'm sure you can guess that his number drops again and Hugo adds another 1k to his winnings. To be honest I was shocked, I had never witnessed anything like it before. Yes, I had seen guys win big, but they had other bets on the table.
This happened recently in a similar situation. I was playing poker this time and there was a drunk guy who had lost some hundred bills. He was donating money at the table like it was some kind of charity, which was really cool. However, he normally took a 20-minute walk from time to time. Once he came back and it cost us that he hated Casino War, even though he had even won during his last session. So the next time he disappeared, he dropped the equivalent of 1k in black chips on the table and told us about how lucky he was at roulette. Needless to say, the eyes of everyone at the table widened.
Likewise, I could also write about other times I've seen players lose and other times I've seen players walk away with the same money, or some small win. But this proves that you can really win playing roulette, even if it's only in the short term. I know first hand that Hugo had a great weekend with his roulette winnings and I also know that our poker player left a good amount of money on the table at the end of the night.