Finding good roulette strategies online is like trying to find a good
buffet in Vegas, there are plenty of options, but most of them have a
strange smell. A stink in fact, the kind of stink that makes you feel
as though, if you were to take advantage of the good buffet, or described
roulette strategies, you may end up sick, or broke, or both.
My goal here is to describe to you not only why most of those roulette strategies are bogus, but also to show you how you can see the good in them, and learn to ignore the bad (hey kinda like a buffet again! Avoid the fish, go for the chicken). So in this smorgasbord of online strategies, how are you to differentiate? How are you to find the value? Starting with logic is always a good idea, and there is a very logical way to look at the game of roulette. Roulette has what is known as a 'static house edge', meaning the house advantage on each and every bet available at the table never changes. In fact, the remarkable thing about roulette is, the house edge is exactly the same for every bet and combination of bets! A game like craps has a static house edge for each bet too, but each of the bets has its own value, and they are all different. With this in mind roulette strategies have some work cut out for them, how are they supposed to improve your game at all?
The house edge for American (double zero) roulette is 5.26%. This stands for all bets except the five number bet, which has a slightly higher house edge at 7%. This number is static and unchangeable unless the rules of the game are changed. No combination of bets or hedges will reduce this number. This knowledge is essential for anyone wishing to differentiate between good roulette strategies and bad roulette strategies. Simply put, bad roulette strategies are any ones that claim to lower the house edge, or to make the game beatable, or consistently produces profit, or allow you to win consistently. All of these notions are against the rules of the house edge. Any person who tries to convince you to play roulette as a business instead of a game, any person who tells you to take it seriously and be studious about it to increase your odds, is probably in the business of making money of off unsuspecting gamblers like us.
The smartest roulette strategies are ones which allow you to keep good track of your money (money management skills really), don't let you aggregate your bets together (which would be silly anyway because one spin on the wheel does not affect the next), and doesn't let you build up a great amount of loss while chasing a big win.