Albert Einstein himself once said, “You cannot beat a Roulette table unless you steal money from it.” He was referring, of course, to the House edge, which gives the casino a mathematical advantage over the players on every spin. He was not advocating cheating.

Nevertheless, there are always a few folks who believe the probability of getting caught is low enough and the potential rewards are high enough to justify the risk. They have come up with creative methods of bending or breaking the rules, ranging from simple sleight of hand tricks to the use of sophisticated computers, laser tracking systems, and magnetic-field generators.

Common Cheats

Among the most prevalent attempts at cheating is a practice called “past posting.” As the dealer looks away from the players and down at the wheel to see where the ball has landed, the cheater will swiftly slip a chip or two onto the Roulette table to cover the winning spot. A variation on this which requires less skill is to simply move a losing chip onto the winning position.

Why people still try this form of cheating goes beyond common sense. The dealer is not the only casino employee watching the table. Surveillance cameras and mounted above the pit area, and the “eye in the sky” catches every movement at the table. Security personnel are trained to spot such chip manipulation. Still, desperate players keep trying, which results in getting ejected from the casino at the very least and more often arrested or permanently banned.

Another common ploy is to buy Roulette chips of a certain color at a dollar table, pocket some of them, and then add them back into play among similarly colored stacks at the five- or ten-dollar tables. This assumes that the chips are unmarked and appear to be identical. They rarely are, of course, and keen-eyed croupiers will immediate spot the fakes.

One type of cheat that targets other players rather than the casino is the “snatch.” When a player looks away momentarily, perhaps because of an intentional distraction or simply to position chips on the table, a bystander will grab a few chips from the player’s stack, hoping they go unnoticed. Again, surveillance usually catches such thieves, but it is always a good idea to keep an eye on one’s chips at all times.

High-Tech Cheating

Most of the cheats who have won big at casinos by playing Roulette have done so with the aid of special devices. In 2005, for example, Hungarian gambler Laszlo Kovacs hid a small computer in his shoe. By tapping the sole of the shoe directly beneath the roulette table, he was apparently able to measures the wheel speed and ball velocity, which allowed calculation of where the ball was most likely to land. He managed to cheat Australian casinos out of $200,000 before getting caught.

Of course, all such devices are banned in casinos. Knowing this, one maker of a handheld cheating device that looks like a mobile phone came up with a new way to use it to make money that was not only impossible for the casinos to stop, but also completely legal—selling it on the Internet to hundreds of other would-be cheats.

The manufacturer’s promotion states that “Contrary to popular belief, application of these devices (is) actually legal in approximately half of jurisdictions. This is because most laws only state that the spin outcomes can not be influenced, but nothing is said about merely ‘predicting’ spin outcomes.”

Buyer beware. Casinos can eject any player at any time, and they will if they believe cheating is involved. Use of mobile phones, calculators and computers at the tables is strictly forbidden. There are many ways to win at Roulette legitimately, so cheating with such devices is certainly not an advisable practice.