Roulette
If you’ve visited a casino, chances are you’ve seen a “down on their luck” roulette player walking away from the wheel and announcing that the game is rigged. In today’s blog post, we’ll address the known instances of when roulette wheels have been rigged and discuss whether the practice of scamming players (and sometimes even the casino) out of money by rigging roulette wheels still goes on.
Perhaps the most famous instance of a casino player taking advantage of a roulette wheel has to be the tale of Joseph Jagger. Born in 1830, Jagger began a career in mechanics and soon started to wonder whether roulette wheels could be unintentionally biased. In 1873 he hired six men to investigate the roulette wheels at the Beaux-Arts Casino in Monte Carlo. Jagger’s clerks found that one of the wheels had a clear bias towards certain numbers and in just a few days, Jagger managed to beat the casino out of £65,000. Whilst the roulette wheel in Jagger’s story isn’t rigged as such, he did pave the way for future roulette scammers.
In 2004, two Serbian men and a Hungarian woman were investigated by UK police after it was revealed that had won more than £1 million from the Ritz Casino in London. In a modern take on Jagger’s original biased roulette wheel find, the trio used a laser scanner, linked to a computer to predict which numbers the ball would land on. The BBC reported that they used the laser “to judge the speed of the ball on the roulette wheel and hence the number most likely to come up.” While the trio were arrested, police found that they hadn’t broken the law and they were allowed to keep their winnings.
Interestingly, while it’s relatively easy for players to spot and take advantage of biased roulette wheels, it’s incredibly difficult for casinos to rig wheels in order to cause players to lose. All legal casinos are governed by their jurisdiction’s gambling law, meaning that if the country they are regulated by states that all games must be fair, the casino must make sure they are, else they will lose their license. All of our featured casinos have Random Number Generators (RNGs) which are tested and accredited by third parties, meaning you don’t have to worry about roulette wheel rigging at these sites. Furthermore, every casino based in Nevada has to offer non-rigged games as part of their gaming license requirements. If you’re concerned about whether a roulette wheel is rigged in your area, simply contact your local Gaming Commission.
So it seems that the practice of roulette wheel rigging has been completely phased out. Of course, that won’t stop unlucky players from grumbling that the games are fixed, but thanks to gaming certificates and licenses, no casino worth their salt wouldn’t even consider rigging a roulette wheel.
