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Not covered in the article is how casinos deal with biased wheels in the modern era. Are they replaced regularly? Are they engineered from more durable material

Not covered in the article is how casinos deal with biased wheels in the modern era. Are they replaced regularly? Are they engineered from more durable materials? Do they audit the wheels to look for biases?

usefulcat 5y ago
“Today, most wheels have gone digital, run by algorithms programmed to favor the house”
- bluGill 5y ago
  So long as the random number generator is unbiased they need no other programming in their favor
- jen729w 5y ago
  This stood out for me. Does anyone know what it means? I’ve seen electronic roulette wheels, as in on a computer screen, but that can’t be what this means. And if a tiny ball is bouncing around on a real wheel, which is surely what ‘roulette’ still is to the vast majority of people (because the thing on the TV is no fun at all), how has that “gone digital”? Edit: maybe “most wheels” have gone digital, as in most punters at most places are happy to play the TV. I dare say it’s quicker and simpler than standing round a table waiting for someone to spin a wheel. Sounds absolutely terrible though. Might as well just play what we call ‘the pokies’ here in Australia.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Are you saying that physical wheels are also digital and uses some "magic" (magnets?) to land the ball to a number that's actually been determined by an RNG? Seems unlikely, especially considering at the local casino it seems like it's doing the total opposite - the physical roulette tables have a "debug" screen for the dealer that looks like it's monitoring and digitizing the roulette's output and I'm suspecting it might actually be using the physical table as the RNG for the computerized roulette you see on machines.
jedberg 5y ago
They collect the data themselves and when a wheel gets biased it gets replaced or fixed. They have a little board showing the last few spins, but that also feeds back into their data warehouse where they constantly check all the data for biases.

usefulcat 5y ago

“Today, most wheels have gone digital, run by algorithms programmed to favor the house”

bluGill 5y ago
So long as the random number generator is unbiased they need no other programming in their favor
jen729w 5y ago
This stood out for me. Does anyone know what it means? I’ve seen electronic roulette wheels, as in on a computer screen, but that can’t be what this means. And if a tiny ball is bouncing around on a real wheel, which is surely what ‘roulette’ still is to the vast majority of people (because the thing on the TV is no fun at all), how has that “gone digital”? Edit: maybe “most wheels” have gone digital, as in most punters at most places are happy to play the TV. I dare say it’s quicker and simpler than standing round a table waiting for someone to spin a wheel. Sounds absolutely terrible though. Might as well just play what we call ‘the pokies’ here in Australia.
Nextgrid 5y ago
Are you saying that physical wheels are also digital and uses some "magic" (magnets?) to land the ball to a number that's actually been determined by an RNG? Seems unlikely, especially considering at the local casino it seems like it's doing the total opposite - the physical roulette tables have a "debug" screen for the dealer that looks like it's monitoring and digitizing the roulette's output and I'm suspecting it might actually be using the physical table as the RNG for the computerized roulette you see on machines.

jedberg 5y ago

They collect the data themselves and when a wheel gets biased it gets replaced or fixed. They have a little board showing the last few spins, but that also feeds back into their data warehouse where they constantly check all the data for biases.