Pascal was trying to build a perpetual-motion machine and accidentally built the most elegant tax in Europe. Every bet on the layout — a single number, red, a column, a corner — costs exactly the same, because they all pay as if the zero weren't there. The house edge isn't in the bet; it's in the green pocket. Count the green pockets and you know the price.
A ball is spun around a wheel with numbered pockets — 1 to 36 in red and black, plus one green zero (European), a zero and a double zero (American), or three zeros (the newest tourist-room special). You bet on where it lands: a single number at 35:1, a split at 17:1, a corner at 8:1, a dozen or column at 2:1, red/black or odd/even or high/low at even money. Every payout is set as though there were 36 pockets. There are 37, 38 or 39. That gap is the edge, and it's identical on every bet on the felt except one.
There is no decision to make except which table to sit at. A single-zero wheel costs 2.70%. A double-zero wheel costs 5.26% — nearly double, for the same game, often in the same room. A triple-zero wheel costs 7.69%, and it was introduced precisely because people don't look. If the table offers la partage or en prison (you lose only half, or your bet stays up, when zero hits on an even-money bet), the even-money bets drop to 1.35%. That's a better bet than anything at the craps table except the odds.
| Wheel / bet | House edge |
|---|---|
| Single zero, even-money bets with la partage / en prison | 1.35% |
| Single zero (European / French), all other bets | 2.70% |
| Double zero (American), all bets | 5.26% |
| Double zero, even-money with "surrender" (rare) | 2.63% |
| Triple zero, all bets | 7.69% |
| Five-number bet (0-00-1-2-3), American wheel | 7.89% |
Pick a bet, a unit and a number of bets. The simulator plays 1,000 sessions from the bet's actual outcome table — not a normal approximation — and shows the spread, the drawdowns, and how long it takes before the house edge stops hiding behind luck. Same bet, three wheels. Run even money on single zero, double zero and triple zero and watch the median line steepen.
How it works. Three historical routes. Wheel bias: a physically imperfect wheel (a loose fret, a worn pocket, a slight tilt) favours certain numbers; a patient player clocks thousands of spins, finds the bias, and bets it. An English engineer did it in Monte Carlo in 1873 and a Spanish family did it across Europe in the 1990s, both for six-figure-plus sums. Visual ballistics: a trained eye estimates where the ball will drop from its speed relative to the wheel and bets late, in the few seconds before "no more bets". Computers: a hidden device does the ballistics for you. A group of physics students built one in a shoe in the late 1970s and proved it worked; in 2004 a trio using a laser scanner and a phone won about £1.3 million from a London casino in two nights.
Legality. Wheel bias and visual ballistics are legal — you're observing a public event. Devices are not: Nevada made it a felony in 1985 and most jurisdictions followed. The 2004 London trio were arrested and released without charge because UK law at the time had no such offence; it does now.
Acceptance. Modern wheels are precision-machined, levelled daily and swapped between tables, and casinos log every spin to detect bias before you can. Dealers are trained to call "no more bets" earlier if anyone bets late with suspicious accuracy. The realistic status is: historically real, practically closed. A wonderful set of stories, not a plan.