A professor who beat roulette
&gt; “I [experimented] until I had a rough outline of a system based on the previous winning numbers,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 1969. “If numbers 1, 2, and 3 won the last 3 rounds, [I could determine] what was most likely to win the next 3.”<p>I&#x27;m calling shenanigans here.  I can believe that a roulette wheel might have biases, and that you might be able to leverage those to beat the house.  I have a very hard time believing that a roulette wheel could have a <i>contingent</i> bias such that the next outcome depended on the previous one.  What possible mechanism could cause that?  I&#x27;m also skeptical that even if there were such a mechanism that you could reliably determine it with the number of data points that one person could plausibly collect and analyze, especially in the 1960s.<p>In fact, let&#x27;s do the math: 37*37=1369 so you&#x27;d need that many spins <i>at a minimum</i> just to see every possible number pair come up <i>once</i>.  Let&#x27;s suppose that a spin takes a minute.  It would take a <i>minimum</i> of 22 hours of watching <i>one</i> roulette wheel to see every combination.  More likely you&#x27;d need 10-100 times that much data to get a statistically significant result.  And that is just for one wheel [UPDATE: and a one-round contingent bias.  The claim is a three-round contingent bias.  Collecting that much data for even a single wheel would take years of constant effort.]<p>Nope.  Not possible.