Roulette: Playing to Win

by Brett Morton

Overview

Brett Morton wanted to prove the experts were wrong. "Win at roulette?" they scoffed. "Impossible." You could almost hear them say "Bah! Humbug!" So he set about learning how to play, observing why people won and lost. Over the past ten years, he has debated with casino staff, statisticians, mathematicians, friends and other experts. All bar one were convinced that the casino could not be beaten – or if it could, then not consistently. But Morton insists the experts are mistaken, something he has learned through sheer discipline, by keeping it simple and understanding that winning at roulette is a percentage game.

This book explains in plain language just how easy it is to win or lose at roulette. Winning occasionally is simple. His aim was to win consistently. Morton, after watching, playing and listening all over the world, distilled the information, working out why he too had been losing too often. From that base, Morton realised that winning every visit is impossible. Each spin of the wheel is a new and usually random event. Every spin is a fight against the casino's advantages. It was a challenge – to debunk the theorists, especially those who had never played. His research and hard work proved he was right: winning consistently is possible.

Morton proved that mathematical theory and clinical statistics, flawless in concept, blinker common sense and have no place in determining why people win and lose in casinos. After all, taking British casinos as a good example, the odds against the player can be as small as 1.31% - yet the casinos still expect to win between 20 and 30% from roulette players over a year. Enough said!

Despite the casino's edge and even playing with the American double-zero, roulette tackled with skill, discipline and experience is a game at which consistent winning is perfectly possible. But consistent winning does not mean that every casino visit ends with a celebration. It means winning most of the time and ensuring that losses on the horrific days are contained and do not destroy all the other good work. Morton explains the methods used, rates many of the well-known systems but above all brings a clear and refreshing vision to this tantalising game.

The pundits are wrong! This book unlocks the secrets. It explains how and why you can Win at Roulette.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781848397361
Publisher:	Summersdale Publishers Ltd
Publication date:	02/01/2004
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	270
File size:	280 KB

Read an Excerpt

Roulette Playing to Win

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By Brett Morton

Oldcastle Books

Copyright © 2004 Brett Morton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84344-020-8

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CHAPTER 1

Playing to Win

Play at roulette if you want. Ignore this book and save your time. If, however, you are seriously interested in winning, read on.

Roulette is fun. But it's more fun when winning. Losing hurts, sometimes real bad! Winning any competitive game doesn't come easily – ask any professional sportsman. Roulette is no different. Indeed, roulette is more difficult. At least professional sportsmen start a game with the scores level. Playing roulette, you have already conceded every advantage to the home team.

Playing to Win does not depend on advanced maths. Don't take your calculator to the casino. If you think it might help, take your lucky rabbit's foot. Casinos are full of superstitious people. Many Chinese players will avoid a casino whenever the Vietnamese are playing there. They believe they bring bad luck. Personally, I have no superstitions in casinos. I have no lucky tables, no lucky casinos, no lucky times, no lucky places at all. For every bad run, I believe there is a good run. My philosophy of winning is as simple as this: winning money is about not losing it!

Does that sound obvious? You think I am proving my insanity already? Let me put it another way: win more when you are winning than you lose when you are losing. If you are winning, don't chuck it all back!

Betting on even chances, the odds are close to 50–50. (A calculator would say not close enough to save you from long-term ruin!) On any visit, you will soon be up or down. The aim is to lose less when you go down than you win when you go up. Playing to Win is built round this simple idea.

Whether you are a beginner, a regular loser or an expert, I hope that you will find something helpful in my approach to winning.

What lies ahead

Part One of the book is full of background advice, essentials for the average player. Then Part Two examines How to Beat the Casino with fundamentals like the percentage game and money management. This is the dynamo of how I have won and the section closes with three outings with me to Las Vegas casinos.

Part Three examines some systems in detail and advanced play techniques, and advice on my Winning Ways; it also provides ratings of different systems tested in real life. The book concludes with background notes on casinos in many countries.

The beginner

If you have never played roulette, this book will help you. Don't be impatient. Don't walk before you can run. Finish the book before risking your money. Practise! Think about the game. Don't rush to the nearest casino, all fired up, after reading a chapter or two. Be patient! Patience is a vital quality in winning at roulette.

Playing roulette for nothing on the Internet is now easy. Online casinos are now appearing in their thousands. You can play for money or play for fun. What an advantage! You can practise at no financial risk. You can get used to placing the bets and testing out different betting strategies.

I'm not recommending any particular website to use when playing with money because there have been some frauds by online casinos. It's bad enough losing without being mugged when you win! But there are online casinos where you will get your winnings. But take care: there are plenty of horror stories of credit card abuse, fixing the random element in the games so you cannot win and of disappearing websites.

For free play, check on the web under "Casino" or www. findthecasino.com. Use the Internet as the nursery before risking your own money. Here you can practise money management. Here too, you can test the differences between the American roulette wheel and those used in most of the rest of the world. The difference is fundamental and I will explain it later.

Free play is valuable experience. Find out a bit about yourself. Are you impatient? Are you reckless? Are you cautious, an optimist or a pessimist? You must know yourself. Without self-knowledge, you will not be able to achieve the vital quality of discipline. A friendly pit boss in a big casino told me: "I can see why you win. It's not that you're a better player or have a perfect system – it's because you've got discipline. Nothing beats that." And despite knowing that I was taking money from them, that casino was generous with meals, trips to the theatre or days at the racetrack.

Free play on the Internet soon gets boring. There's no edge to it! It's like a blow-up doll against a cuddly blonde. Take your pick! But don't be impatient! You will play better, win more if you experiment longer at no risk and save up your money for the real thing.

Tip:Winning at roulette is all about planning, laying down procedures for different situations and sticking to them – being disciplined and being patient.

The regular loser?

You've been playing and losing and so you have decided to buy this book? Together, we can change your fortunes. You'll have to be hard on yourself. Admit your mistakes! If you asked me to guess why you had usually lost, I'd expect you to say: stacking up the chips during a losing streak and still losing; betting after too much alcohol, impatience and greed. Why do I say that? Because I've been there too!

Buying this book is only a first step. Reading it properly is the second but winning your own battle with yourself is the most important.

Tip:Only by learning from my mistakes and from watching and listening have I become able to win consistently.

The experienced player

I hope that even experienced players can pick up some new ideas with improved results. I hope that some of my ideas provoke inspiration, leading to greater success.

A magic bullet?

Everyone wants to know whether I have an infallible winning system. The answer is no. There is no magic bullet, no secret formula that makes success inevitable. But I do win! And I know others who win consistently as well. I know this from talking to people in the casino business and from my own observations ... but for every regular winner, there are thousands of losers.

I have succeeded using different systems. Some systems are better than others. Some are just plain dumb! You'd do better to burn your money – at least you'd keep warm! All too often, systems involve:

• rapid increase of stakes when losing; or

• betting using the law of averages.

Roulette is not like that. Roulette is not a forgiving game. Cunning university professors, obsessed accountants, mad Italian counts and many others with infallible systems based on increasing stakes have come to grief. Sure, you need a plan – call it a system if you want – but without vital additives, these plans can be ruinous – a self-destruct button to Skid Row.

Whatever the system, regular success can only come with self-discipline and a proper bank balance.

Chips

Because many of you will be familiar with different currencies, I have generally referred throughout the book to chips. In examples of real life situations, I refer to real currencies. Generally, when I move into the practical aspects of how to play, you will find chips easier to understand. They could be dollars, pounds, Australian dollars, or even the euro. Whatever currencies you play in, the secrets of success are the same. Whether a chip represents £1 or $1 or £10 or $10 or even £10,000 or $10,000, you must work out the logic of what those chips mean in the casino where you are playing.

The challenge I had set myself was to turn 100 chips into 4,000 chips. With no spectacular effort, no undue risks, I achieved this, at my first attempt. To prove to myself that I wasn't dreaming, I did it again using a different approach. I then did it again, and again, with new variations. The price of success was self-knowledge and self-discipline. The methods used, the Winning Ways, are described in Chapter 26. Deliberately, they are near the end of the book. This is so that, by then, you will have learned enough about roulette and my philosophy, to judge those four different techniques for yourself.

Tip:Avoid the temptation to read that chapter first! Studying that chapter in isolation will not ensure success for you. The real tips are in the rest of the book.

Ratings

Later in the book, when describing staking and playing systems that I have tested, I have rated them out of 10. No system has yet scored 10 – I am still looking for that magic bullet! Meantime, I'm happy to be a winner using a fallible system.

Discipline

Do not think that you can simply take on the casino with just 100 chips and within a few days or weeks automatically achieve the same success. When many casinos expect a 5 chip minimum bet on even chances, 100 chips is a small number to use. You could lose the lot in a mere 20 consecutive spins. Yes ... even on a near 50–50 chance, you can be wrong 20 times in a row ... and sometimes more! I had saved up my cash for a Fighting-Fund of 1,000 chips. It was there, a sleeping giant, available if I had perpetual runs of misfortune. I never needed the 1,000 chips because I started with tiny bets, fighting to protect my 100 chips. Later, I shall set out the essentials of how much you need and why.

You may be able to follow the suggestions in this book and impatiently start with 100 chips with nothing in reserve and get away with it. I don't recommend it. One of the many reasons why people lose is because they have too little money to see them through the bad runs. Casinos have bad runs too. The difference? They have the cash reserves to ride the storm.

My rules have developed not simply from playing and watching in casinos as far apart as Sydney, Las Vegas, Puerto Rico, Biloxi, London, Glasgow, Monte Carlo, the Bahamas and the riverboats south of Chicago. They have developed from watching big winners and even bigger losers, from listening to casino staff, casino managers and talking to other players whether at the bar or at the tables. The rules I put forward have been fine-tuned like a Formula One racing car by listening to wise counsel and by ignoring the drunken boasts of occasional winners or by the curses of the perpetual loser.

Some of the most important lessons are set out in the next chapter. They are all true accounts of real casino experience. From each one, a lesson can be learned. They do not even all involve roulette ... but the lessons are the same. These incidents from around the globe all helped to shape my thinking. Study them carefully. Some of you may even recognise yourselves!

Tip:No tip is more important than self-discipline.

CHAPTER 2

Watch, Listen and Learn

In this chapter, I will set out examples of real life incidents. They demonstrate why people lose and expose some of the myths about why people win. You will also read about the hard knock, my own personal disaster, as I started to learn the difference between playing and winning.

Sydney, Australia

The temporary casino on the Sydney quayside was, by its own standards, not yet busy. It was early on a Saturday evening. Soon the tables would be thronged but at this time, placing a bet was easy. Dinner upstairs in the Chinese restaurant looking out over the harbour was a pleasure ahead. For now, it was an opportunity to try to win a few dollars.

I was playing the even chance bets (Black v. Red, Odd v. Even, High v. Low). These form the outside part of the table. (Don't worry – I shall explain all this later.) There were four others playing – two Vietnamese and a young couple from Sydney. My, oh my! Those two locals, she with a shiny gold ring on her finger, were hell-bent on having a good time!

As the wheel spun, as the ball danced over the slots before eventually settling, I watched what was going on. The Vietnamese were scattering their chips across the green baize of the layout, covering many numbers in different combinations with reckless abandon. In contrast, the young couple, standing hand in hand were watching intently. They were placing their solitary A$10 chip on a single number. Perhaps they were choosing family birthdays or other lucky numbers because they weren't watching the wheel to follow the way the dealer was spinning.

They had changed A$100 and as they lost ten of them for the seventh time, I could see the look of resignation in their eyes. Their good night out was getting off to a bad start.

"Place it on 2, Phil," she suggested and he duly put out $10 on the number. Clackety-clack. The plastic ball slowed to a destination.

"2. Black. Even," said the dealer sweeping away all the losing chips. Moments later came their winnings paid at 35 to 1 — A$350 for the A$10 that they had bet.

I wondered what they would do next. Cash in and walk away? They were A$280 ahead – enough to pay for dinner, a spot of partying afterwards and plenty left. With 37 numbers on the wheel and thus 36 losing numbers to one winner, the young couple had struck oil. On their eighth spin, they had been successful. It was by no means certain that the number would appear once in 37 spins. Nothing in roulette is certain (except that most people will lose and that most winners will go on to lose their winnings).

Anyone who has played serious roulette knows that number 2 is just as likely to come up twice running as not to come up once in 37 spins. Or in 70 spins. Or even 200 spins. Some days, certain numbers just never come up. It's as if they are not on the wheel!

Tip:In the short term, the law of averages has no place in roulette. But what is the short term? I will expand on this in Chapter 3.

"Shall we go?" she suggested to him. But Phil, the moustachioed macho-man now had the glint of success in his eye. Shaking his head, he left their A$10 chip on 2 while I stood this one out. Seconds later, the ball landed in the same slot! They had won again! Another A$350 came their way. I knew then that there would be no stopping them.

"It won't land in 2 three times running," he said with all the unreal authority of a magazine astrologer. "I'm putting it on 17, Jeannie" Who was she to argue? Her eyes were wild with joy as he switched their bet to 17. Meanwhile, I placed my own chip on the high numbers of 19 to 36 – a near 50–50 even chance bet compared to their high -risk strategy.

As the ball slowed, I showed only passing interest, having seen the last waltzing dance thousands of times before. However, the young couple craned forward anxious to see whether lightning would strike for a third time. It did!

"17. Black. Odd." The three words meant that this young couple had won another A$350. In three spins, their A$30 staked had topped A$1,000. The odds of predicting (on the single zero wheel) the precise number coming up on three consecutive spins are around 50,000 to 1! If the wheel had contained double-zero as is mainly the norm in Las Vegas and the rest of the USA, then the odds would have been even more impressive.

Phil and Jeannie had almost defied gravity! But it happens. Not often. But it happens, just as someone can win a lottery by choosing six correct numbers out of 49. The odds against winning that are over 13 million to 1 and yet people still win.

Phil and Jeannie had no idea just how lucky they had been. They could have done even better. Good players would have doubled up their original bet each time they'd won. The initial bet of 10 would have been 20 after the first win and 40 after the second. Instead of being just over A$1,000 ahead they would have been A$2,450 up. My sensible bet on 19 to 36 had a near 50–50 chance of winning rather than 50,000 to 1. I had lost. They had won! I was delighted for them. They had now won enough for a holiday up on the Gold Coast with snorkelling, scuba diving and parties with beer every night.

"Come on Phil," she clasped his arm. "Let's keep the thousand and play with the rest," she suggested. She was dismissed with a flourish. "No," he said. "I can feel it. This is our day. I'm leaving it on 17." Anticipating success they clasped the edge of the table and watched anxiously once again as the ball pursued its random journey.

"36. Red. Even." They had lost their $10.

"Come on. Let's go." Her voice was slightly more anxious but again he shrugged her aside.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Roulette Playing to Win by Brett Morton. Copyright © 2004 Brett Morton. Excerpted by permission of Oldcastle Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword,
Introduction,
Part One – Getting Ready to Win,
1 Playing to Win,
2 Watch, Listen and Learn,
3 The Perfect System,
4 The Enemy in the Casino,
5 Know the Game,
6 The Two Laws,
7 Las Vegas Vacation,
Part Two – How to Beat the Casino,
8 The Percentage Game – the Solution for Small-Budget Players,
9 Fund Management – the Fighting Fund,
10 Fund Management – Targets,
11 Playing Systems – an Overview,
12 Playing with or against the Wheel,
13 Even Chances – Some Staking Systems,
14 The Gaming Record Card,
15 Follow Me to the Casino,
16 Checklist to Success or Where Did I Go Wrong?,
Part Three – Systems and Advanced Play,
17 Footprints – Love thy Neighbour!,
18 Martingale and Seductive Friends,
19 Even Chances – Other Progression Systems,
20 The Fibonacci System,
21 The Parlay System,
22 The Labouchère System,
23 The Reverse Labouchère,
24 The Tandem System,
25 Layout and Other Bets,
26 The Winning Ways,
27 Ratings – Passes and Fails,
28 My Systems Today,
29 Comping,
30 Casinos around the World,
Copyright,