Small says knowing where the ball starts bouncing and which deflector it hits is key to narrowing down which of the 36 squares (in a casino-grade European roulette wheel) it will eventually come to rest in. In the game of roulette, a ball spins around on the rim of a wheel in the opposite direction to the direction the wheel is spinning.Įventually it rolls out of the rim, hits one of a number of deflectors and starts chaotically bouncing about. 'What's interesting is showing it can be done and the extent to which you can make a profit from it.'
'It's a fairly simple model that we're using and the result we get is the one you would expect to get,' says lead author, mathematician Professor Michael Small of the University of Western Australia. Shortening the odds Thinking like a physicist can improve your chances of winning at roulette, say researchers.Ī paper in a recent issue of the journal Chaos shows how a computer program can be used to give an expected return of at least 18 per cent, instead of the usual -2.7 per cent.
