5 Myths About Roulette
Roulette is one of the world’s most popular casino games, and it has developed some myths through the years that we will attempt to debunk below.
September 15, 2020
5 Myths About Roulette
5 Myths About Roulette
Possibly because it has been around for centuries or because it’s always surrounded by an image of glamour, roulette has garnered some major misconceptions about how to play (and how to win). This might hold back some inexperienced players from trying out the game to its fullest potential or keep you from getting the most out of it.
We’ve found five popular myths about roulette that need some serious debunking. Keep these in mind as you try your luck at the casino or while playing online roulette.
Myth #1: You Need To Stick With One Type of Bet
Players might believe that if they’ve been winning with one roulette betting style that they should stick with that one. The fact is that there are so many betting styles you can try, and one isn’t automatically better than the others.
Honestly, it might be in your best interest to use all of the options available instead of doggedly staying with one to get the best return on investment of your time. Instead of focusing on patterns that don’t really exist, find the roulette betting styles that you enjoy the most.
Myth #2: You Can Hedge the Board
Conversely, once some players have worked through various roulette betting styles, they think they can hedge the board by playing several different bets spread out across the board during every round.
Of course, if you place a bet on a specific number or other high-risk spaces, you do have a higher chance of taking in a bigger win. But no matter how much you spread out your bets, you’ll never have enough coverage of the layout to beat the fact that the house will still have a built-in advantage. This “spray and pray” approach is more like playing multiple spins at once.
If you want to try this strategy, it’s best to try it on just a couple of spins rather than relying on it as a long-term plan.
Myth #3: You Can Beat the House Edge
No matter how many times you play and irrespective of which version of roulette you’re playing, there will always be a house edge. With roulette, this is built into the wheel itself. On a French wheel, you’ll always have the single 0 to contend with, and on the American wheel, you’re facing both the 0 and 00 as house advantages.
You can at least lower the house edge that you’re playing against by choosing a French-style wheel, which lowers the edge from 5.26% to 2.7%. You can also ensure that you’re playing in a casino that follows the La Partage and En Prison rules to lower the house edge further to 1.3% on certain plays. But, in the end, you’ll only win big if you keep what you’ve won and walk away.
Myth #4: The Gambler’s Fallacy
This is one that many of us probably believe in some capacity but didn’t realize it has a name. You know how, when you’re flipping a coin and it has come up tails five times in a row, you think that it’s bound to come up heads at any time now? This is the Gambler’s Fallacy.
This fallacy is based on the idea that prior outcomes have an impact on future outcomes — but they don’t when it comes to statistical likelihoods in games of chance.
While yes, if you give a roulette wheel a thousand or even a million spins, the times it lands on black and the times it lands on red will be very similar. But if you’re working on a smaller scale, this won’t really pan out.
Every spin of the wheel is its own discrete exercise in randomness and doesn’t affect any of the results after it. There will always be a 50% chance that the roulette wheel lands on black and a 50% chance that it lands on red (mostly — this excludes the green zeroes). If you’ve spun the roulette wheel 20 times and it has landed on red every time, what are the chances that it will land on black for the 21st spin? Still 50%.
If you’re dealing with betting on single numbers, the same logic still applies. Some gamblers will bet on “cold numbers” that haven’t been hit for a while. Every number on the wheel has a one in 37 chance (or one in 38 chance on an American wheel) of coming up on a spin as long as the roulette table gets regularly maintained and calibrated.
No matter what happens before the current round, the odds are the same for every spin. You can’t calculate overall probabilities in a single game, so thinking that one number is “due” is a mistake that has burned a lot of gamblers. This is true in live roulette as well as online roulette.
Myth #5: Online Roulette Wheels Are Rigged
Because players aren’t sitting in front of a live dealer, folks might believe that online casinos like the ones in New Jersey are rigged in the house’s favor.
First off, a rigged system would mean terrible publicity for an online casino. Any complaints of unfair results have the potential to go viral, and that could mean death for a business in such a highly competitive space.
Second, the companies that create casino software spend thousands of dollars designing their games for randomness and even more money on auditing the software for accuracy and reliability. Many online casinos visibly share their audit grades or even provide game history for players to check the algorithms for randomness.
If you’re still unconvinced, you can try playing live dealer roulette at online casinos like Golden Nugget NJ Online Casino. This way you get the ability to play roulette online but have the knowledge that you’re working with a real person spinning the wheel instead of a random number generator.
Stay Educated About Roulette
If you play smart and don’t let the misconceptions misguide you, roulette can be a terrific casino game, whether you’re playing in a brick-and-mortar casino or with one of the many online casinos available.
What myths have you heard about how to play roulette? Next time you hear one, dig a little deeper and see if it’s really coming from the facts or from superstition.