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It is almost impossible to summon up an image of a casino in your mind’s eye and not include a roulette wheel. Even more than dice or cards, roulette and casinos are synonymous. Roulette wheels capture the excitement, unpredictability, and glamour that a night out at a casino offers. After all, in the days before online casinos, while card and dice games could be set up and played anywhere, roulette could only be played in a casino. Admittedly, some wealthy individuals might have had their own at-home setups, and online casinos now offer a great selection of top-rated roulette games for US players. However, back in the early 2000s, for most people, playing roulette meant a visit to Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, or an exclusive London Casino like the Ritz Club.
The Ritz in London is the epitome of casino glamour, where royals and rockstars can be seen playing alongside each other under the glittering chandeliers and gilded ceilings. As with most top London casinos, it is a members-only kind of place. On a typical evening, those members might include a Saudi heiress or two, some hedge fund managers, members of the British royal family, Hollywood actors like Johnny Depp and Matt Damon, touring musicians Drake or 50Cent, socialites, and others just out for a good time. On the night of March 15th, 2004, the usual crowd was joined by a small group of gamblers headed up by a thin Croatian businessman.
What happened that night
The night in question goes down in history as the night the masterminds beat the roulette. However, that is not strictly true. The Croatian businessman known as Nico Tosa (not his real name) and his fellow gamblers had been visiting the Ritz Club for a while. They had been visiting and winning at roulette. Over their six or so visits in the past two weeks, the trio had walked away with several thousand pounds in winning. On that March night, security was keeping a special eye on them. The regularity with which they won had brought them to the attention of the casino’s management. Casinos are happy when their members win but not when they keep winning big. The general consensus was that the team must be cheating somehow. Security just needed to prove their suspicions.
The general guidance on roulette, whether on a physical wheel or a virtual version, is that it is purely a game of chance. Unlike poker, it does not involve skill, just pure random probability. You can blow on your chips, summon Lady Luck, or even wear your lucky charm, but it is just that: a game of luck. However, Tosa’s team seemed to be getting an unusual run of luck, and this made them suspicious. No one had any idea how they did it. In fact, one of the casino’s managers later testified that Tosa was the most successful player he had ever seen take on the roulette wheel. It did not seem to matter which wheel he played at either, and, on inspection, there was no evidence of tampering.
By the time Tosa and his friends left the club in the early hours of the morning, he had converted his £30,00 worth of casino chips into £310,00 worth of cash, and one of his partners turned £60,000 into £684,000. All in all, over two weeks, the groups had won about £1.3 million from the club, and Tosa informed the staff he ‘would be back’.
What happened next
Unsurprisingly, the level of success made the Ritz’s security chief very suspicious. Rather like the MIT students in the movie 21, it was assumed that Tosa and his companions were in some way ‘counting’. But how could you ‘count’ at roulette when the probability was entirely different than for cards? With roulette, the following number the ball lands on is not determined by what has gone before – it is purely random. However, it was assumed that Tosa used a computer to predict what the wheel would do next. It was even suggested that the ‘gang’ was bringing tiny computers into the casinos.
While we carry tiny computers with us all the time now in the form of iPhones, watches, and peripheries, this all happened in the age before smart devices, so the idea of ‘tiny computers’ seemed fanciful. Regardless, the security chief, Jon Wooten, reported his concerns to the police, and Tosa and his companions were arrested. After nine months, London’s police were unable to uncover any concrete evidence of cheating, and all the charges were dropped.
How did they do it?
How the team racked up their extraordinary winnings remains a mystery. There were theories of lasers and computers, but Tosa maintains he did not use a computer. However, they certainly had a pattern of behavior that was closely observed.
In the past, players have invented complex mathematical systems to beat the roulette wheel:
- The Martingale
This system involves placing even money bets and doubling after losses
- Oscars Grind
Named after a gambler called Oscar, this system is similar to the Martingale but without the same level of risks
- The D’Alembert
The D’Almbert system is described as a negative progressive system and involves chasing down losses until you win. This seems to be a somewhat risky strategy and one that would require bottomless pockets until your luck turned.
- Betting on Black or Red
This strategy is primarily a game of which color is perceived as the ‘luckiest.’
Understandably, casino owners do not diss these strategies as not working because they can make a considerable amount of money by people theorizing and strategizing on how to beat random probability. For the owners of the Ritz (and a host of casinos around the world), the infuriating thing about Tosa’s team is that they did not stick to a known strategy.
Tosa’s team in action
While no one knows how they did it, here is what they were observed doing in the Ritz twenty years ago. It was remembered because it stood out as weird. They did not place their bets immediately. In fact, they delayed placing their bets until they were ‘just in time’. They would wait until after the ball had been launched and the wheel had started to slow before all moving forward together to lay their bets just before betting closed. They would place their chips to cover as many as fifteen numbers in one go. Observing them, one witness claimed that they moved so quickly and cohesively that they appeared to have moved ‘on a starting gun.
They were playing on a standard European model wheel with thirty-seven red and black numbered segments and a single green 0 (where the house wins). The red and black sections are randomly numbered 32,15, 19,4 – that is how they are. Even if we have not been to a casino ourselves, we are aware from movies of players piling their chips onto the green baize and moving piles of chips around and placing them on ‘black’ or ‘red’ betting zones. However, there are more sections to bet on than just the colors, and this is where Tosa’s bets were focused.
His crew played on an area of the betting table reserved for special wagers for pie-sliced sections of the wheel rather than the alternate red and black sections. They could choose sections called orphans (orphelins) or a third of the wheel (le tiers du cylinder). Each time, they piled their chips onto what is known as ‘neighbor’ bets, where you choose one number and two on either side. So, their odds were spread across five of the number segments.
Of course, they did not win on every spin but they won more frequently than would be expected. Their ‘luck came in’ as often as it did not, and the patterns defied logic and probability. They won eight, ten, and up to thirteen times in a row. They were gambling about £1,200 worth of chips (over $2,000) at a time, and these repeated payouts meant they were rapidly doubling their money. They quickly broke into six-figure wins and sometimes bet up to £15,000 on a single spin. While Tosa and a Serbian companion did most of the gambling, their female companion ordered drinks and kept a lower profile.
Seeing into the future
People who observed the play said it was as though the pair could see into the future. They remained implacably calm throughout. Whether they won or lost, they just played on. There was no emotional reaction either way. At one point, after a £10,000 bet, one of the duo was seen to idle casually up to the bar. It was noted that he was not even watching the table when the ball bounced into a losing pocket.
Roulette was designed to be random. That is what makes it so enchanting. Essentially, it is chaos theory captured in a spinning wheel in the most elegant of surroundings. However, Tosa and his friends seemed to know what was going to happen, which was uncanny. It unsettled the security staff.
Casinos are used to customers winning enormous amounts of cash and leaving the casino with their wallets bulging. There is the reassurance that they will come back and lose it all next time. After all, everyone knows the house always wins. However, Tosa seemed oblivious to this and carried on consistently winning over hundreds of rounds of play.
Going underground
Despite police investigations and all kinds of theories and explanations, no one has worked out how Tosa was so successful. After the story hit the headlines and he was exposed, casinos tried to ban him from playing in their establishment. However, in an interview last year, Tosa admitted to be still playing, but in disguise. He said he was preparing for an international casino tour.
He claims he has never used a computer and says it is all about the condition of the wheel. This is probably why there has never been any news of him breaking roulette at an online casino. Tosa claims it is all about the condition of the wheel being played on. A slight defect will reduce the randomness and increase predictability. Watching the ball and the wheel right up until the last moment allows him to predict where the ball will land. He cannot predict the exact ‘pocket’, which is why the ‘spread betting on the orphans’ worked. He claims this system has allowed him to hone his skills to give him the edge over the house.
The mechanics of the system
Unsurprisingly, this level of detail and knowledge has not just come to Tosa in a flash. He is reported to spend hours at a time studying roulette wheels and how they spin. While we said that only a select few might have a roulette wheel in their home, Tosa is one of that select few. However, his is not kept in his ‘mancave’ for a a party night. This is a whole new spin on work from home, and he has spent years studying how different wheels rotate. He claims he uses intuition to ‘feel’ where the ball will land.
Not the only guys to beat the roulette wheel
While the Tosa story is fascinating, he is not the first person to seem to beat impossible odds and consistently beat a random game. In the 1960s, a young American doctor spent thousands of hours working out a system that bagged him the equivalent of $8 million. Like Tosa, he relied on the mechanical imperfections of the wheels and running collected data to see if numbers came up more frequently than chance alone would predict.
He created a system based on his findings and told the press about his findings. When the casinos heard what he was doing, he found himself barred. Wheels were checked for imperfections and variations, and the designs were adapted to ensure the ball bounced chaotically for longer. The design of the segmented pockets was also changed to ensure the game remained random and unpredictable.
In conclusion
Albert Einstein allegedly said, ‘No one can win at roulette unless he steals money from the table when the croupier isn’t looking’, but Tosa’s experience suggests it is all about the player looking intently.
Online casinos have given ‘the house’ the edge again, as the virtual wheels do not develop the same quirks and imperfections over time. However, as anyone who works with computer programs will tell you, they, too, are susceptible to errors. The challenge for the casino owners is who will find the errors first – they have to hope it is their in-house security and not someone trying to break their systems.
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