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You are correct.
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Messieurs et Mesdames, faites vos jeux. (I am a complete games snob, it isn’t proper roulette in English. Sorry. A country where high school dropouts can manage the intricacies of baseball statistics could surely have coped with manque, pair, impair and passe.)
I was once at a conference which took place in an hotel in the South of France - rather nice and one of the people on my dinner table was a French countess, because you get a better class of engineer in France. On the last evening we were given admission to the casino.
It wasn’t a success, unless you consider a success to be a load of engineers and scientists explaining the probability of the various games to one another in a variety of languages.
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I always assume that all gambling is rigged.
Am I wrong?
Seems a safe way to view this sort of thing…
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It looks as though the spacing of the decorative screws on the end of the table is asymmetrical thanks to the dummy screw. A dead giveaway.
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On the day when I left home, to make my way in the world, my daddy took me to one side. “Son,” my daddy says to me:
“I am sorry I am not able to bankroll you to a very large start, but not having the necessary lettuce to get you rolling, instead I’m going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you’re going to wind up with an ear full of cider.”
-Sky Masterson
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I’d still rather play the US Roulette over the Russian one or the Chat one. 
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You are right. You do sound like a snob. 
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I’m well aware that not every dealer is Shawn Faquhar. But I’m also well aware that I’m not Penn. I just stay away from it altogether myself because I know about this and people like Rickey Jay in the world.
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no fair using real magic!
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Well according to Titanic Thompson (the inspiration for Sky Masterson used by @nimelennar above) the way to make a million dollars in horse racing is to start with ten million… so not all of it.
edit fix @ name… stupid similar avatars.
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oops. fixed.
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For a video that has such a great story to tell, what a somewhat unsatisfying explanation.
They restored the table. Couldn’t they have actually demonstrated the cheat in action? Couldn’t they have shown the screw/button more closely? They saved the 1930’s newspaper used as stuffing; but they don’t show it on video.
This cheat was probably only used rarely, when it really counted: when some idiot had placed a HUGE bet on a particular number. (All other times, a fairly even amount is going to be randomly distributed all around the wheel; the Mob will be satisfied with just the 5.3% house advantage.) But the croupier still had to be somewhat skillful. Since he has to wait for the wheel to spin so the “safe area” is in the correct position when the cheat pin affects the ball. [Every time the “unsafe” number rotates past a certain fixed landmark, he momentarily presses the button: if the ball doesnt hit either pin, it was in the wrong place to drop. He’ll do this with each rotation until he gets a hit or the ball drops naturally.]
It probably deflects it very mildly (but predictably)-- and note that there are 2 pins. I originally thought this was so the croupier has “his choice” of where the ball will begin its descent (patrons wont notice it “always” starts to fall from a particular place). But now I think it’s just a fail-safe: this makes it much more reliably force a ball to drop opposite of where the “unsafe” number is. The croupier is too busy monitoring where the number on the wheel is to also fine-tune where the counter-rotating ball is; the 2-pin solution is a sure fire way of dropping it “away” from the unsafe number.
Additional finesse is required for not just pushing the button when the roulette wheel/ball are the correct alignment, but also doing so when the ball is traveling slowly enough that an altered ball trajectory would appear to be a ball naturally starting its decay.
And, for a very good reason, the 2 pins are both located in the rim of the wheel closest to (and least visible from) the players’ area.
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I’m not really a snob, I just play one on the Internet sometimes. But the story about the conference is absolutely true.
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Did we watch the same video? They show the holes at 5:20, and the pins popping out when he pressed the button. He doesn’t show the ball spinning, but perhaps you just don’t do that with antiques.
The whole thing could have been a little more polished, maybe, but perhaps we’re just spoiled by an increase in production value on most YouTube videos in the past five years.
As for the skill of the croupier, I’m pretty impressed (assuming they got the cheat to work well). I just assumed that the pins were in the moving part of the table, to cause a fairly predictable result every time, but watching it again I see that the rim is stationary (it should be obvious I don’t have a lot of experience with roulette). So I assume that the table needs to be slowing down before you hit the pin, and your timing has to be impeccable in order to have a predictable effect. I’m guessing it only works to protect against large bets on individual numbers, or on the large thirds groups (each block of 12), because you’d have no way to steer it more precisely than that.
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This is quite interesting (sorry, stats nerd here). The fact that the roulette wheel has a 0 is what creates the house edge, but you can still bet on 0 and win on it.
You see, how it works is that roulette pays off numbers, groups, red and black and so on at a rate that is equal to 36:1 for each number.
However, on a table with a single zero, there are actually 37 cups for the ball to land in, so every bet has that fixed edge on it. American roulette works the same way, except it’s paying off 36:1 for a chance that’s actually 38:1 on a fair wheel.
The trick is really a cognitive one, disguising 37 as 36, because people don’t usually start counting from zero.
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They [quote=“SamSam, post:37, topic:97862”]
Did we watch the same video? They show the holes at 5:20, and the pins popping out when he pressed the button. He doesn’t show the ball spinning, but perhaps you just don’t do that with antiques.
[/quote]
I stand corrected. (The dangers of watching a video at 360p.) But he still could’ve run the ball! There’s no damage accrued to an antique from this. They restored it, but they won’t use it?
I’m guessing it only works to protect against large bets on individual
numbers, or on the large thirds groups (each block of 12), because you’d have no way to steer it more precisely than that.
As for the croupier’s technique, if you read The Eudaimon Pie, their cheat relied on octants. But for this wheel’s purpose, I agree it was probably just a single number that had to be avoided.
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