Can You Beat Online Roulette?

Is it possible to consistently win money?

Beating Online Roulette

No, I'm afraid not.

Unfortunately for those of you looking to find a gem of information on how to beat online roulette, I can't offer anything to help you, and neither can anyone else. So instead, I will lay down a few facts about how the roulette wheel works, and why it can't be beaten.

Hopefully this will save you from ever buying any "winning roulette system" in the future, which should help make up for your disappointment.

What are the odds?

Basically, online roulette has the same odds as the roulette found in live casinos, which means the odds are always in favor of the house.

So if you want to "beat" the casino in some way, choose European over American roulette. But you're still expected to lose over the long run.

Can you predict the results?

Online roulette uses a Random Number Generator (RNG) to randomly pick where the ball is going to land. There's no physics here to provide the random results, so the casino has to uses computer-generated random numbers instead.

PHP code for generating 1000 random numbers

Computers can generate random numbers very quickly. This is a basic example using PHP.

This means that there will be no biases or recurring patterns in the way numbers come out (or there shouldn't be if the casino is using a secure enough RNG), as everything will appear perfectly random from a mathematical point of view.

If anything, the presence of this RNG makes online roulette wheels almost too perfect.

Whilst in some live casinos there may be the chance that a wheel has a mechanical imperfection (see Joseph Jagger), or a dealer gets into a rhythm and spins the ball in to some sections of the wheel more than others, these kind of exploitable situations do not arise when playing online.

So unfortunately, your Martingale, Fibonacci, d'Alembert or any other betting system you intend on using isn't going to hold up against an online roulette wheel.

Chart showing results of making the same roulette bet over 2000 spins for 8 simulations.

No matter how you play online roulette, your results will always trend downwards over time.

Are there any strategies that work?

There are a handful of offline strategies to help you predict where the ball will land in live casinos, but there is nothing you can do to help you when playing online.

The best you can hope for is a glitch in the system, which probably isn't going to happen. And if it did, the casino wouldn't pay you your winnings if they found out about it.

Still, for those of you interested in the offline strategies, there is a pretty interesting book on them called Get the Edge at Roulette: How to Predict Where the Ball Will Land! by Christopher Pawlicki.

Has anyone ever beaten an online casino?

Not that I know of.

Some players have won large amounts of money by hitting jackpots, but I don't know of anyone who has actually consistently beaten an online casino by turning the odds in their favor.

As I say, the games are designed to give the casino a small edge, so short of hacking in to their software and manipulating the results, there's not much you can do.

However, it is possible to consistently win money from playing online poker. This is because you are playing against other people and not directly against the house, so you just have to outplay other people to win money. In these games the casino makes their money by taking a small percentage of each pot instead (which is called the "rake").

So if you want to make money from online gambling, poker is the game you're looking for.

Note: It's also possible to win money from sportsbetting, but this is still a tricky business because you're taking money directly from the online casino/sportsbook again, so you might find yourself getting banned from a few places as you go. I don't know enough about this business to give advice, but I do know that online poker is a real alternative that won't get you banned.

Conclusion

There is no strategy for beating online roulette.

The best thing you can do when playing roulette is to forget about trying to "beat the system", and just enjoy yourself whilst you play.

You could spend hours searching around the web for some new killer strategy that is guaranteed to win you thousands, but you will only end up wasting your time and your money. So let me save you the hassle and tell you they don't exist.

And if anyone tells you that they do, they are lying.

Sorry to disappoint, but it's better to know the truth now rather than chasing after the impossible. I'm sure there are plenty of money-making schemes out there on the Internet, but roulette isn't one of them.

Further reading.