Electronic Roulette Devices
Although there are some electronic devices around which claim to give you an edge when playing Roulette, use of such devices in Casinos is illegal in the USA and ‘not recommended’ in the UK. Although you probably won’t go to prison in the UK if caught with such a device, you’ll probably be arrested, get winnings confiscated and may end up in court (although not illegal in the UK, it is a very ‘grey area’). Various attempts have been made by engineers to overcome the house edge through predicting the mechanical performance of the wheel, most notably by Joseph Jagger at Monte Carlo in 1873. These schemes work by determining that the ball is more likely to fall at certain numbers. Claude Shannon, a mathematician and computer scientist best known for his contributions to information theory, built arguably the first wearable computer to do so in 1961.
To try to prevent exploits like this, the casinos monitor the performance of their wheels, and rebalance and realign them regularly to try to keep the result of the spins as random as possible.
More recently Thomas Bass, in his book The Newtonian Casino 1991, has claimed to be able to predict wheel performance in real time. He is also the author of The Eudaemonic Pie, which describes the exploits of a group of computer hackers, who called themselves the Eudaemons, who in the late 1970s used computers in their shoes to win at roulette by predicting where the ball would fall.
In the early 1990s, Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo used a computer to model the tendencies of the roulette wheels at the Casino de Madrid in Madrid, Spain. Betting the most likely numbers, along with members of his family, he was able to win over one million dollars over a period of several years. A court ruled in his favor when the legality of his strategy was challenged by the casino.
In 2004, it was reported that a group which consisted of two Serbs and one Hungarian in London had used mobile cameraphones to predict the path of the ball, a cheating technique called sector targeting. In December 2004 court adjudged that they didn’t cheat because their special laser cameraphone and microchip weren’t influencing the ball - they kept all £1.3m.
Source: wp