Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

Roulette is an over the board game that is similar to Wheel of Fortune. Since these are spun by hand of the person running the board, the author asked "is this good randomness?"

In the game, there are 54 small segments: 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 40, 1x and 2x. Players bet on a number that the wheel will land on. For payouts, the player gets the money bet * segment + 15. If it lands on a multiplier, the players winnings are multiplied by that amount.

The author did an analysis on which numbers were landed on, which segment was landed on and a few other pieces of information. From there, the author looked at the randomness of these values to see if they could gain an edge.

The author noticed that the particular numbers on the board did not have random probabilities for being landed on for the turn being performed. They did analysis on the expected amount of money outputted from this as well. For example, position 29 had a 2.15% probability instead of the expected 1.851% probability.

The strategy is pretty simple. Wait for the 40 number to be the in the relative 29th position. If not, then don't bet. Using this strategy would take a while but would yield results with a 90% probability. This means that the house edge could be overcome but exploiting the lack of randomness on spins.