Inevitable Improbability

Thousands of players have tried and will try to discover the secret of roulette, find the rule of numbers falling out and use it to ensure winning. We have considered three examples in which this "secret" was obvious over 19 spins. Here is another chain of 17 consecutive results of the game on red-black. Ч Ч К К Ч Ч Ч Ч Ч Ч Ч Ч К К К Will you find a pattern in it, using which you can win 16 times in a row?.. And it is there. But to see it, you need to... at least for a short time forget that the roulette wheel has no memory, and previous results do not affect the next ones.

Let's return to our examples. 1. K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K 2. K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K 3. K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K 4. K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K-K In the second sequence, there is not a single red on 20 blacks, and this creates the corresponding expectation in the player. In the third and fourth chains, there are an equal number of red and black events, but these chains also do not seem random to us. Why? Because these sequences show obvious winning algorithms. In the third case, you need to bet on the same event as the previous one, and as a result, you will win 18 bets out of 19, starting with the second one. In the fourth case, you need to bet on the opposite event to the previous one, and you will win 19 bets out of 19. The collective experience of players and probability theory claim that there are no stable patterns in roulette. And following this experience is the second expectation of the player: if the player sees a pattern in the previous results of the game, he expects that the new results will not correspond to this pattern.

So, we have an idea of the first expectation of the player. The player expects to see the implementation of all possible events that he considers probable during the time of his observation of the game. And vice versa, he does not expect to witness the "incredible". For example, like this:  2-7 black (or red, or even, etc.) in a row are ordinary events;  10-15 are infrequent events;  18-23 are rare events;  26 is an extremely rare event. More than a hundred years have passed, and everyone still remembers that incident;  30 and more - do you know at least one player who personally saw this? The numbers are subjective. If 10-15 events of the same name in a row seem like an ordinary result to you, shift the above system of expectations by 3-5 moves towards higher values. Or vice versa, until the numbers coincide with your personal ideas about the probable and the improbable. The most popular method of using martingale is based on this expectation – choosing the moment to enter the game depending on the results that have fallen out earlier. Here is how this method is described in the book by B. Akunin “The Death of Achilles”. Life was pleasant. Periods of tension alternated with periods of rest, when the eye was pleased by the green cloth, the ear – by the rouletted clatter of the roulette wheel. Passions concentrated by the scale of time boiled around: respectable gentlemen turned pale and blushed, ladies fainted, someone with trembling hands shook the last gold coin out of his wallet. Achimas never got tired of watching this exciting spectacle. He himself never lost, because he had a System. The System was so simple and obvious that it was amazing how others did not use it. They simply did not have enough patience, endurance, the ability to control emotions – everything that Achimas had in abundance. All you had to do was bet on the same sector, constantly doubling your bet. If you have a lot of money, sooner or later you'll get back everything you've lost and win some. That's the whole secret. Only you don't have to bet on a single number, but on a large sector. Achimas usually preferred a third. He went to the table where they played without limiting the bets, waited until the win bypassed one of the thirds six times in a row, and then began the game…

Mathematicians say that the roulette wheel has no memory. They say that the probability of winning does not depend on the numbers that have come up before. Expecting red after twenty black numbers in a row is called by mathematicians "the gambler's fallacy"; you might as well expect another black. That is why mathematicians do not give advice on where to bet. Red or black, more or less, even or odd? On which dozen, column, street, corner and number... It would seem that it does not matter where, since the probabilities of winning and losing are known in advance, and no decision by the player will change them. But few people will be satisfied with such an answer, because with each bet the player is forced to make a choice, and the argument "it doesn't matter where" is unacceptable to a person. People want to make an informed choice, not a random one.

On August 18, 1913, black came up 26 times in a row in the Monte Carlo casino. Players crowded around the table and bet more and more on red: it seemed to them that the chances of red in the next round were higher, because roulette had to somehow "correct" the series of incredible coincidences. As a result, the casino won millions of francs.