One of the better stories at Bloomberg: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...IQFnoECBUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2uOmSfkCRBYzc3cLOBjPu0 I just have one question that nags me: given the sheer intelligence of this guy, he must have surely considered different games and pursuits of chance before settling on roulette. Assuming he indeed never used a device to cheat at the table, I wonder whether he ever considered financial trading. His settling on the game of roulette itself suggests that he gained an unfair edge through a cheating device. Much lower hanging fruit in finance unless one resorts to cheating at casino games such as roulette.
Can’t you copy / past the article here ? There’s a paywall to read the article. Of course roulette is predictable, The ball is going to fall within a slot. 100%
38:43 One spring evening, two men and a woman walked into the Ritz Club casino, an upmarket establishment in London’s West End. Security officers in a back room logged their entry and watched a grainy CCTV feed as the trio strolled past high gilded arches and oil paintings of gentlemen posing in hats. Casino workers greeted them with hushed reverence. The security team paid particularly close attention to one of the three, their apparent leader. Niko Tosa, a Croatian with rimless glasses balanced on the narrow ridge of his nose, scanned the gaming floor, attentive as a hawk. He’d visited the Ritz half a dozen times over the previous two weeks, astounding staff with his knack for roulette and walking away with several thousand pounds each time. A manager would later say in a written statement that Tosa was the most successful player he’d witnessed in 25 years on the job. No one had any idea how Tosa did it. The casino inspected a wheel he’d played at for signs of tampering and found none. That night, March 15, 2004, the thin Croatian seemed to be looking for something. After a few minutes, he settled at a roulette table in the Carmen Room, set apart from the main playing area. He was flanked on either side by his companions: a Serbian businessman with deep bags under his eyes and a bottle-blond Hungarian woman. At the end of the table, the wheel spun silently, spotlighted by a golden chandelier. The trio bought chips and began to play. The Ritz Club casino in London in 2005. James Veysey/Camera Press/Redux The Ritz was typical of London’s top casinos in that it was members-only and attracted an eclectic mix of old money, new money and dubiously acquired money. Britain’s royals were regulars, as were Saudi heiresses, hedge fund tycoons and the actor Subscribe now. Photo Illustration: Irene Suosalo; Photo: Getty Images Then there was the win rate. Tosa’s crew didn’t hit the right number on every spin, but they did as often as not, in streaks that defied logic: eight in a row, or 10, or 13. Even with a dozen chips on the table at a total cost of £1,200 (about $2,200 at the time), the 35:1 payout meant they could more than double their money. Security staff watched nervously as their chip stack grew ever higher. Tosa and the Serbian, who did most of the gambling while their female companion ordered drinks, had started out with £30,000 and £60,000 worth of chips, respectively, and in no time both had broken six figures. Then they started to increase their bets, risking as much as £15,000 on a single spin. It was almost as if they could see the future. They didn’t react whether they won or lost; they simply played on. At one point, the Serbian threw down £10,000 in chips and looked away idly as the ball bounced around the numbered pockets. He wasn’t even watching when it landed and he lost. He was already walking off in the direction of the bar. tiny, increasingly powerful computing devices, capable of processing feats humans could only dream of. He was laughed off stage. Ridicule still ringing in his ears, he made it his business to learn everything he could about the subject. Thorp in 1964. Leigh Wiener Shannon in 1962. Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos/Trunk Archive Computer-assisted roulette was born in the 1960s, the progeny of rebellious academics at elite American universities. If scientists armed with microprocessors could predict the movement of the stars and planets, why not roulette? It was a matter of physics. American mathematician and gambling pioneer, made the first serious attempt, along with Claude Shannon, the MIT professor who more or less invented information theory. From their point of view, roulette wasn’t totally random. It was a spherical object traversing a circular path, subject to the effects of gravity, friction, air resistance and centripetal force. An equation could make sense of those. Modeling got tougher, though, once the ball moved in from the outer rim to the spinning central rotor, ricocheting off the metal slats and the sides of the numbered pocket dividers—a second, chaotic phase that scientific consensus held would scramble any prediction. Thorp and Shannon discovered, however, that by timing the speed of the ball and the rotor, they could calculate the ball’s likely destination. There were errors, but Thorp was delighted to find that their predictions were normally off by only a few pockets. A schematic for a roulette wheel and wearable computer, from Thorp’s papers. Edward O. Thorp Papers/Courtesy University of California, Irvine Special Collections and Archives An electrical diagram for a roulette device. Edward O. Thorp Papers/Courtesy University of California, Irvine Special Collections and Archives To run their equation, the two mathematicians built and programmed the world’s first wearable computer, a matchbox-size gadget wired to a timing switch hidden inside a shoe. Once Thorp had calibrated the device to adjust to a specific wheel’s dynamics, all he had to do was tap his foot twice to get speed readings. The system worked, at least in a laboratory setting—their Sixties-era wiring kept fritzing out when they tried it in a casino. Farmer at home outside Oxford in 2019. Carlotta Cardana A decade later, Colony Club casino, not far from the Ritz, and deposited two men who said they could prove it was possible to win at roulette without cheating. The police investigation had stalled. Despite numerous searches, they hadn’t found earpieces, wiring or timers. Police IT specialists had found evidence of data being deleted from the seized cellphones—suspiciously, some felt—but no sign of any roulette-beating software. Tosa and the other suspects had lawyered up and were refusing to answer any more questions. Instead, their attorney suggested, police should watch a demonstration showing how someone could conquer roulette without resorting to fraud. An executive at the Colony Club agreed to host and invited security chiefs from across the West End gambling scene. Tosa himself wouldn’t take part. Instead, the attorney put forth a grim-faced Croatian named Ratomir Jovanovic to give the demonstration alongside his Lebanese playing partner, Youssef Fadel. The two had made approximately £380,000 playing roulette at various London venues around the same time as Tosa, using the same distinctive late-betting style. Police already suspected, though they couldn’t prove it, that Jovanovic was part of a gambling syndicate run by Tosa. Jovanovic’s presence at the demo seemed to confirm their theory. Gambling Commission, Barnett invited audiences to try using a handheld clicker to time video footage of a moving wheel and ball precisely enough for the computer program to work its magic. Most could, and once they’d done it themselves, some of the mystery fell away. “To make money in roulette, all you need to do is rule out two numbers,” Barnett liked to say, flashing a gold Rolex and diamond encrusted ring as he held up his fingers. With two numbers eliminated, the odds became slightly better than even, flipping the house’s slender advantage. The Gambling Commission ordered a government laboratory to test Barnett’s system. The lab confirmed his thesis: Roulette computers did work, as long as certain conditions were present. Those conditions are, in effect, imperfections of one sort or another. On a perfect wheel, the ball would always fall in a random way. But over time, wheels develop flaws, which turn into patterns. A wheel that’s even marginally tilted could develop what Barnett called a “drop zone.” When the tilt forces the ball to climb a slope, the ball decelerates and falls from the outer rim at the same spot on almost every spin. A similar thing can happen on equipment worn from repeated use, or if a croupier’s hand lotion has left residue, or for a dizzying number of other reasons. A drop zone is the Achilles’ heel of roulette. That morsel of predictability is enough for software to overcome the random skidding and bouncing that happens after the drop. The Gambling Commission’s research on Barnett’s device confirmed it. The government’s report wasn’t released publicly after it was finished in September 2005; casinos made sure of that. But among industry figures, it gave an official imprimatur to a once-fanciful idea. The study also offered recommendations for how casinos could fight back: Shallower wheels. Smooth, low metal dividers between the number pockets. Or no dividers at all, only scalloped grooves for the ball to settle into. These design features increased the time a ball spent in the hard-to-predict second phase of its orbit, hopping around the pockets in such chaotic fashion that even a supercomputer couldn’t work out where it was headed. Most important, roulette wheels had to be balanced with extraordinary precision. A quick check with a level was no longer enough. Even a fraction of one degree off, and the ball might end up in Barnett’s drop zone. London casinos were some of the first to order new equipment to meet the specifications. The Ritz changed all its wheels within months. Word spread quickly. At an industry event in Las Vegas, Barnett asked an audience of gambling executives how many thought it was possible to predict roulette. Hardly anyone raised a hand. By the end of his presentation, when he asked again, almost everyone did. As the gaming industry began taking the threat more seriously, wheels were developed with laser sensors and built-in inclinometers to detect even a hair’s breadth of tilt. The stakes were rising, as gambling moved online and millions of people around the world began to wager on livestreams from their home computers or cellphones. One of the biggest livestreamers was annual report in which it also warned that its adversaries were getting more sophisticated with every passing year. (Asked for comment, a company spokesman said, “Evolution works hard to protect game integrity and it is a prerequisite for our business.”) According to Barnett, there’s a new generation of online roulette sharps who no longer need human-operated switches to time the ball and wheel. Instead, they deploy software that scans the video feed and does it for them, all from a home computer with no security guards in sight. Gambling firms are fighting back with innovations like random rotor speed, or RRS, technology, using software to algorithmically slow the wheel differently on each spin. There’s one surefire way casinos could stop prediction: calling “no more bets” before the ball is in motion. But they won’t. That would cut into profits by limiting the amount of play and deterring casual gamblers. Instead, the industry seems willing to pay a toll to a select few who know the secret, while trying to design out the flaws that make the game vulnerable. Walk into a casino anywhere in the world today. Look at the depth of the pockets, the height of the wheelhead, the curvature of the bowl, and you can see how Tosa and his counterparts have reshaped roulette. Follow the Bouncing Ball: Silicon vs Roulette, said in an interview. “At some point all this stuff comes together. You look at the wheel. You just know.” Casinos call it “cerebral” clocking. All that’s needed is a drop zone and a potent, well-trained mind. Wootten and Barnett debate the point to this day. A roulette computer was a neat explanation for casino staff, who didn’t want to look too closely at their shoddy equipment, and for Wootten, who wanted to prove a point to all the executives who’d laughed at him. But when I spoke to Barnett, he argued that the wheel at the Ritz was so old and predictable that Tosa wouldn’t have needed a computer to defeat it. “Blind Freddie could beat the wheel they played,” he said. Back then, he’d wanted to believe, too. “I wanted to ride into Scotland Yard on my white horse and expose the M.O.,” he recalled. “The problem was there was not the slightest shred of evidence.” Without that, Barnett said, there was only one thing left to do: “The only way we’ll really know is if you talk to Niko.” I figured Tosa would be hard to track down. He’s spent most of his career trying not to be found. Sure enough, there was no record of him in company or property registries, or in news reports or on social media. I managed to get hold of a list of his playing partners and worked my way through it, but they all turned into dead ends. Business associates of his Ritz companions, Pilisi and Marjanovic, ignored calls and emails and blocked my number when I texted. I did find one Serbian businessman who seemed to know them both, but he said he’d lost touch years ago and was trying to find them himself. When pressed, he grew irate. “What part don’t you understand?” he asked. I thought I’d caught a break when one of Tosa’s more recent partners listed an address near my home in West London, but the man’s ex-wife answered the door and said he’d moved back to Montenegro when they separated. So it went. Eventually, I realized the different addresses Tosa had given casinos over the years were clustered along the same stretch of Croatian coast, south of Dubrovnik. They were tiny villages, mostly. I hoped someone might have heard of him, so I sent a colleague to ask around. After striking out a few times, he found a former neighbor and showed him Tosa’s photograph. He has a holiday villa nearby, the neighbor said, just up the road from the local convenience store. Try him there. My colleague found Tosa outside the house, working on an SUV. He was friendly enough, though he said he didn’t talk to reporters. He offered a phone number but didn’t answer it the numerous times I called. In November, I flew to Dubrovnik, the picturesque medieval fort city that was one of the main backdrops for Game of Thrones. The day I arrived, a storm blew in off the Adriatic, slamming sheets of rain against the cliffs and sending the few off-season tourists scurrying for their hotels. Tosa’s villa was an hour’s drive down a winding coastal road. There was a solid iron gate blocking the entrance to his front door and no one home, so I folded a note into a plastic folder to keep out the rain and slid it under the gate. A village in the region of Croatia where Tosa is from. Kit Chellel The town’s only cafe was open and full of chain-smoking locals in sweatsuits. It was an unpretentious place decorated with Godfather posters. I ordered a coffee and struck up a conversation with the barman. Did he know that probably the world’s most successful roulette player had a place around the corner? No, he said—he never gambled. He thought it was a good way to lose money. I showed him a picture of Tosa. He said he didn’t recognize the man, though he was curious how I’d found the photo. After a while, I left a tip, said goodbye and walked off, defeated, in the direction of my car. The barman came running out into the downpour. “I just called him,” he said. “He is my good friend. I wanted to check with him first. He is in Dubrovnik.” Tosa phoned me a few hours later, and we arranged to meet at a fish restaurant in the old harbor. In person, he was even taller and more birdlike than I’d expected. He spotted me in the street outside and pulled me into an awkward embrace under his umbrella, saying, “Oh oh oh oh.” Inside, he introduced me to a friend and a younger relative who both spoke good English and would translate when needed. Niko Tosa, they explained, wasn’t his real name. I agreed not to publish the actual one, because they said he had enemies who were less forgiving than John Wootten. Tosa was by turns enigmatic, jovial, prickly, paranoid, frank. Also generous—he insisted on buying a round of single malt whiskies. He readily admitted to playing roulette using fake identity documents and to disguising himself with a wig and fake beard. “What’s wrong with that?” he asked. He had no problem referring to some of his former playing partners as criminals. One of them had been gunned down in Belgrade in 2018, killed in an apparent Balkan-mafia feud. Tosa had fallen out with others over money. But he was adamant that he’d never used a roulette computer. The idea was like something from James Bond, he said with a laugh, adding, “We are peasants.” As I pressed him about computers, he threw up his hands in exasperation and started to argue with his friend. Is he angry, I asked. “No, that’s just how he talks,” the friend replied. “He’s asking how he can make you understand.” I began to suspect that Tosa had agreed to talk to me specifically to make this point. Between glasses of white wine and plates of locally caught squid, he burst out, “You can call me Nikola Tesla if I have such a device!” So how did Tosa do it, then? Practice, he said. They showed me a video clip of a glistening roulette wheel Tosa kept in his house to train his brain. How had he learned? A friend taught him—Ratomir Jovanovic, the Croatian who’d given the disastrous demonstration at the Colony Club. London police had been right that the two were working together. now a professor at the University of Oxford. He compared cerebral clocking to musical talent, suggesting it might activate similar parts of the brain, those dedicated to sound and rhythm. Then again, if Tosa had concealed a tiny contraption, I don’t think he’d have told me. It seemed to me an uncomfortable life, traveling the world in search of casinos where he wouldn’t be recognized, waiting for security teams monitoring closed-circuit cameras to realize he was too good. Tosa said he’d been beaten up by casino thugs more than once. Sitting at the table in Dubrovnik, I asked him if he ever felt hunted. He looked baffled by the question. “Why would I?” The casinos were the prey; he was the hunter. His young relative said he could remember the day, years back, when Tosa first pulled up in a Ferrari. Their hometown in the foothills of the Dinaric Alps isn’t rich by Croatian standards, though Tosa is from a prominent family. He seemed to share traits I’ve seen in other professional gamblers: an aversion to the grind of nine-to-five and a need to live on his own terms, whatever the risks. Ultimately, what set him apart from other roulette predictors was his willingness to go big. Most players only dare win a few thousand dollars at a time, for fear of being discovered. “Like squirrels,” Tosa said with contempt. If he hadn’t been arrested at the Ritz, he claimed, he would have gone back the next night and made £10 million. He felt the casino had gotten off lightly. Toward the end of our encounter, Tosa asked exactly when my story would be published. Why did he want to know? He was planning his next international trip, he said, smiling. He didn’t want me to blow his cover. —With Vladimir Otasevic, Daryna Krasnolutska, Peter Laca and Misha Savic Read more: The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code
This is called more than you make in a year. Hit the 3/5 column/quad bet and progressively hedge until hedge meets payout and return to opening bet. My sesh hit rate is literally 100% over 25-30 trials. Up about 65K since Mar 1.
That is impressive. But will you inform us all if you lose the Roulette bankroll? We just want honesty, man.
I'm not going to lose it as I treat the two opening spins as Don't Pass wagers. I walk if I lose either of the first two spins. It simply hasn't happened yet. It's a shtty sim as they donk your unhedged so you'll watch their videos. 11 minutes starting with $2,500.
You’re still according credibility to bullshitman ? You can’t beat the roulette by hedging. Hedging a sucker bet with another sucker bet doesn’t give you an edge. You’re just splitting your bankroll over negative expectation outcomes. Your net EV is negative