Bear with me, this is a bit of a wordy explanation but I don't know how else to explain it.
Once upon a time, I got the idea I could beat the marginal odds enjoyed by casino's at the roulette table and decided to test my theory using online betting sites.
Standard distribution tends to follow a bell curve, and it's at both extremes of that bell curve that I felt it was possible to manipulate the odds slightly in my favour.
A typical roulette wheel has thirty seven numbers, 1-36 and a zero. I mention the zero separately becaue that is the house advantage. The reason for this is that all the other numbers can be bet on in various ways.
Odd/Even, 1-12/ 13-24/ 14-36, Black/Red and three 'rows'. None of these methods include the zero, so every time zero comes up the house wins everything (if people bet on zero they have reduced their odds of winning massively down to 1 in 37 so they don't do it).
Obviously it's possible to string together a short run of wins for the punter, but over time, for the casino, that 1 in 37 advantage is what makes it profitable.
Now, in order to overcome this I decided to use a martinet system as a base. Simply put, this is where you start your first bet with 1, and if you lose you double down until you win, then you go back to betting 1 again.
This theory is totally impossible to win with because roulette frequently throws up runs of reds, or blacks, or evens etc. so that the doubling affect quickly hits house limits on bets and you lose a huge amount of money.
However, it is possible to pre-load the odds and limit the doubling by bailing out of a run once it hits a certain amount. Also, betting on the 1 in 3 odds sectors can eke the raising cost to a few more spins before hitting the limit.
Now, I tried various different levels before hitting on one that worked in theory and tried it out for real with real money. I made money for two weeks and then it wouldn't work again, ever. So I adapted my theory and tried again.
Once more it lasted two weeks and then failed. This happened six times in a row, forcing me to conclude that they had a smart system running on their casino that analysed bets and worked out any pattern you might be using, then interjected a losing bet at the critical point to ensure you lost. Not enough to form it's own pattern in isolation, but I detected it due to the pattern of its operation.
So what I did then (at this point I was down £3000) was to combine all 6 variations at once. This was a nightmare to track six differnt betting patterns simultaneously without losing track, but I managed with a few mistakes here and there.
Over the course of the next month I not only made back my £3000 I made £800 profit. At which point I invested the £800 in a new laptop and exercise bike and quit due to nervous exhaustion.
I tell you all this because my mind is starting to recognise that there are many plans in motion, not one. Each plan exists in its own right and is not dependent on the others if one should fail, the others pick up the slack.
Overall there is an inexorable progress towards victory, but when most people try to analyse 'the plan' they are overwhelmed by what appears to be chaos and things that don't seem related. Again, this is because there are multiple plans in motion.
It would take an advanced AI to analyse the patterns and pull out all the various plans that are consistent within themselves. I can only tell that this is happening because of the above experience and the way my mind 'feels' numbers etc.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading, and well done! ( and welcome to a glimpse into my mind that I rarely share).
It wasn't luck, it was a balance between the probabilty of a run that resulted in a loss and how much was at stake when the bet was lost.
The cut-off was what made it work over time, along with being able to evade their smart system analysis.
As a side benefit, I learned to script in order to generate thousands of results against which I could test my theory.
Also, I wasn't looking for meaning as such, I was looking to see if what I 'felt' about the gray areas at the edges of the probability curve was right or not in reality. I think I proved it, at least to my own satisfaction.
You're developing a gambling addiction, because you think there are patterns that you can exploit for your own profit. That is fallacy. This is actually a fallacy called The Gambler's Fallacy.
Every number is perfectly random. You cannot use numbers in the past to predict numbers in the future. There is nothing you can do to increase or decrease your odds of winning roulette.
I hope you really have learned computer programming or scripting. If you need a place to start, look at Python, because that's pretty easy to learn. I hope you do actually implement your strategy in code and see how it works when you randomly select numbers from 0 to 36. Here is what you will find: if you play long enough you will lose all of your money regardless of your strategy. You may be up for a little while, but you cannot be up consistently. There's also no way to guarantee you will be up at all.
It was python I learned, and please forgive me for sounding a liitle peeved here, but running my method against tens of thousands of results showed me that it worked.
It's also a bit presumptious to suggest I'm developing a gambling addiction when i clearly stated I quit once I'd proved to myself it worked in practice as well as theory.
Hey friend, I just think you're going down a dark path, and I'm trying to warn you that you don't want to go there.
The basic facts are all casino games favor the casino in the long run. That's how they stay in business. And that's how they're able to have such magnificent buildings, staff, entertainment, etc.
Blackjack is a game where if you count cards you actually can get the odds in your favor consistently. So the casino makes that against the rules and has all kinds of ways to prevent counting as well as to automatically detect when someone is counting.
If there was a strategy to consistently win at Roulette, no matter how complicated, smarter people than us would have found it first, and those people would have used it to enrich themselves. I say there is no such strategy, and there is only luck. What worked for you this time will not consistently work for you in the future.
I appreciate your concern, I really do, but this event occurred over 10 years ago and I haven't touched it since, so I don't think I'm heading anywhere in that regard.
I learned my lesson then and I don't care to repeat it.
Hopefully that reassures you, but thanks again.