By Samantha Williams
Online roulette is an electronic adaptation of one of the most iconic gambling games of all time and its invention was a mistake…of sorts. The quest for the perpetual motion machine has always been high on the inventors’ to-do-list and in the 17th century Blaise Pascal invented a wheel for this purpose. He was a brilliant French mind – writer, mathematician, philosopher, scientist, you know, one of those general well rounded boffins – I think we might call him a nerd today!
To get back to the story; he invented this wheel to perpetual motion – it didn’t work, but this did not stop a friend from suggesting the wheel would make a great gambling game. There were all kinds of mythical suggestions; that Monsieur Pascal had sold his soul to the devil for the secret of the game – the numbers do after all add up to 666 when summed up together, and quite a few players have sold their soul to the devil for the secret to win.
There is no secret to winning online roulette or off. It is a completely random number game, and any skill lies in knowing what betting options are the safest at the greatest odds. Of course there are the inevitable scamsters and some who have even got away with it. For example a group of 2 Hungarian women and 2 Serbian men, hooked up a complex system of lasers, computers and cell phones to try and beat the roulette odds in the London Ritz Casino. They won £1.2 and their technology could tell what the likelihood of the next number coming up would be. After being caught and prosecuted, the Judge deemed that they had done nothing illegal. They got away with their winnings and that is what I call a true marriage of innovation and luck!
Nevertheless, don’t get caught by charlatans online who say they have software to sell you that will break the encryption codes or read RNG’s for online roulette. There is always someone who wants to take your hard earned money away from you – especially online. Rather take that money and place it on a bet on the wheel, you will have better luck, and this way if you lose, you only lose once.
This marvelous invention was tweaked about 200 years after Blaise Pascal’s invention, by brothers Louis and Francois Blanc. They changed the roulette wheel and table and this is the game most similar to the online roulette we play today. Pleas note; European roulette has only one zero pocket and this make the odds better than with the American wheel. Why anyone would want to play American roulette online, I have absolutely no idea. They added a “00” pocket, to increase the odds for the house and take advantage of drunk cowboys and gold prospectors during colonization.
