Ever since the little metal ball started spinning around the numbered roulette wheel, people have been trying to come up with a system to beat chance and make some easy money. The classic example is the Martingale system, which was developed in a effort to ensure that a flip of the coin could be made profitable.

The Martingale system states, if you have a fifty percent chance of winning, all you have to do is double your bet at each loss until you win. Eventually you will win back double your original bet. The practical flaws of this system are readily apparent. A player might not have unlimited funds to continue doubling his bet, if the string of losses stretches long enough. And casinos do not consciously leave the odds even on their games. They stack them in their own favor.

But from the humble simplicity of the Martingale system, tactics and strategies for winning at Roulette have developed. These range from the more or less licit, such as monitoring the functioning of a roulette wheel in actual practice where it does not necessarily conform to the ideal notions of mathematical probability, but can have an idiosyncratic personality of its own that affects probability or developing in depth mathematical models in the hopes of cracking roulette’s code.

The most famous person to crack the code, mechanical or mathematical, of a roulette wheel was the Englishman Joseph Jagger. Jagger was an engineer who speculated that the individual construction of each roulette wheel would affect the frequency of the numbers it would produce. Jagger and some friends went to Monte Carlo and found that he had speculated correctly. Jagger went on to win handsomely, and became known as the Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.

Others have tried to devise a purely mathematical system to plan their bets. These models can be extremely difficult for a layperson to grasp, and often are quite intricate, demanding that you bet a certain number of spins on a specific colour and keeping track of the spin results, all the while adjusting your strategy accordingly. Betting only on red, for instance, can be broken down probabilistically and the odds measured. Since there are the 0 slots on the roulette wheel, the odds of the ball landing on red are slightly less than half they are 47.83 percent over a long enough time span it can be difficult to profit by betting only on red.

With the advent of online casinos, new dynamics come into play that are roughly akin to the mechanical operations of wheels in real life casinos. Online casinos often give away a certain amount of bonus cash for newcomers to play with, and other promotions abound. A savvy roulette player today must take all of this into consideration when placing bets if he wants to increase his odds of winning.