For decades, casinos scoffed as mathematicians and physicists devised elaborate systems to take down the house. Then an unassuming Croatian’s winning strategy forever changed the game.

…Casino workers greeted them with hushed reverence. The security team paid particularly close attention to one of the 3, their apparent leader. ‘Niko Tosa’, a Croatian with rimless glasses balanced on the narrow ridge of his nose, scanned the gaming floor, attentive as a hawk. He’d visited the Ritz half a dozen times over the previous two weeks, astounding staff with his knack for roulette and walking away with several thousand pounds each time. A manager would later say in a written statement that Tosa was the most successful player he’d witnessed in 25 years on the job. No one had any idea how Tosa did it. The casino inspected a wheel he’d played at for signs of tampering and found none.

…They would wait until 6–7 seconds after the croupier launched the ball, when the rattling tempo of plastic on wood started to slow, then jump forward to place their chips before bets were halted, covering as many as 15 numbers at once. They moved so quickly and harmoniously, it was “as if someone had fired a starting gun”, an assistant manager told investigators afterward. The wheel was a standard European model: 37 red and black numbered pockets in a seemingly random sequence—32, 15, 19, 4 and so on—with a single green 0. Tosa’s crew was drawn to an area of the betting felt set aside for special wagers that covered pie-sliced segments of the wheel. There, gamblers could choose sections called orphelins (orphans) or le tiers du cylindre (a third of the wheel). Tosa and his partners favored “neighbors” bets, consisting of one number plus the two on each side, 5 pockets in all.

Then there was the win rate. Tosa’s crew didn’t hit the right number on every spin, but they did as often as not, in streaks that defied logic: 8 in a row, or 10, or 13. Even with a dozen chips on the table at a total cost of £1,200 (about $2,200 at the time), the 35:1 payout meant they could more than double their money. Security staff watched nervously as their chip stack grew ever higher. Tosa and the Serbian, who did most of the gambling while their female companion ordered drinks, had started out with £30,000 and £60,000 worth of chips, respectively, and in no time both had broken 6 figures. Then they started to increase their bets, risking as much as £15,000 on a single spin.

It was almost as if they could see the future. They didn’t react whether they won or lost; they simply played on. At one point, the Serbian threw down £10,000 in chips and looked away idly as the ball bounced around the numbered pockets. He wasn’t even watching when it landed and he lost. He was already walking off in the direction of the bar…When the Croatian left the casino in the early hours of March 16, he’d turned £30,000 worth of chips into a £310,000 check. His Serbian partner did even better, making £684,000 from his initial £60,000. He asked for a half-million in two checks and the rest in cash. That brought the group’s take, including from earlier sessions, to about £1.3 million. And Tosa wasn’t done. He told casino employees he planned to return the next day.

…He knew, too, that some of the early pioneers of the field had observed a curious phenomenon. After using predictive technology thousands of times, they’d developed a sense of where the ball would land, even without the computer. “It’s like an athlete”, Mark Billings, a lifelong player and author of Follow the Bouncing Ball: Silicon vs Roulette, said in an interview. “At some point all this stuff comes together. You look at the wheel. You just know.” Casinos call it “cerebral” clocking. All that’s needed is a drop zone and a potent, well-trained mind.

…But he was adamant that he’d never used a roulette computer. The idea was like something from James Bond, he said with a laugh, adding, “We are peasants.”…So how did Tosa do it, then? Practice, he said. They showed me a video clip of a glistening roulette wheel Tosa kept in his house to train his brain. How had he learned? A friend taught him—Ratomir Jovanovic, the Croatian who’d given the disastrous demonstration at the Colony Club. London police had been right that the two were working together.

The condition of the wheel is vital, Tosa said. That was why he’d sought out a particular table at the Ritz—he’d played the wheel enough to confirm that he could beat it. He’d been able to identify it on sight even after the casino moved it into the Carmen Room.

…Ultimately, what set him apart from other roulette predictors was his willingness to go big. Most players only dare win a few thousand dollars at a time, for fear of being discovered. “Like squirrels”, Tosa said with contempt. If he hadn’t been arrested at the Ritz, he claimed, he would have gone back the next night and made £10 million. He felt the casino had gotten off lightly.

[cf. Thorp & Shannon, Eudaemonic Pie] …In presentations that were seen by representatives of virtually every major casino group in the UK, as well as the national regulator, the Gambling Commission, Barnett invited audiences to try using a handheld clicker to time video footage of a moving wheel and ball precisely enough for the computer program to work its magic. Most could, and once they’d done it themselves, some of the mystery fell away. “To make money in roulette, all you need to do is rule out two numbers”, Barnett liked to say, flashing a gold Rolex and diamond encrusted ring as he held up his fingers. With two numbers eliminated, the odds became slightly better than even, flipping the house’s slender advantage.

The Gambling Commission ordered a government laboratory to test Barnett’s system. The lab confirmed his thesis: Roulette computers did work, as long as certain conditions were present.

Those conditions are, in effect, imperfections of one sort or another. On a perfect wheel, the ball would always fall in a random way. But over time, wheels develop flaws, which turn into patterns. A wheel that’s even marginally tilted could develop what Barnett called a “drop zone”. When the tilt forces the ball to climb a slope, the ball decelerates and falls from the outer rim at the same spot on almost every spin. A similar thing can happen on equipment worn from repeated use, or if a croupier’s hand lotion has left residue, or for a dizzying number of other reasons. A drop zone is the Achilles’ heel of roulette. That morsel of predictability is enough for software to overcome the random skidding and bouncing that happens after the drop. The Gambling Commission’s research on Barnett’s device confirmed it.

The government’s report wasn’t released publicly after it was finished in September 2005; casinos made sure of that. But among industry figures, it gave an official imprimatur to an once-fanciful idea. The study also offered recommendations for how casinos could fight back: Shallower wheels. Smooth, low metal dividers between the number pockets. Or no dividers at all, only scalloped grooves for the ball to settle into. These design features increased the time a ball spent in the hard-to-predict second phase of its orbit, hopping around the pockets in such chaotic fashion that even a supercomputer couldn’t work out where it was headed.

Most important, roulette wheels had to be balanced with extraordinary precision. A quick check with a level was no longer enough. Even a fraction of one degree off, and the ball might end up in Barnett’s drop zone.

…As the gaming industry began taking the threat more seriously, wheels were developed with laser sensors and built-in inclinometers to detect even a hair’s breadth of tilt. The stakes were rising, as gambling moved online and millions of people around the world began to wager on livestreams from their home computers or cellphones.

One of the biggest livestreamers was Evolution Gaming Group. Founded in 2006 with some casino equipment and a small office in Latvia, the company charged betting firms a percentage of revenue to use its platform, which became a wildly lucrative niche.

About a decade ago, according to several former employees, Evolution staff made a strange discovery. A handful of players were winning at statistically absurd rates on the roulette wheels spinning day and night at its facility in Riga.

Engineers investigated and pinpointed a culprit: the floor. Specifically, there was a gap between its solid concrete base and the carpeted playing surface laid down just above, a standard feature in studios where audio is recorded. When a croupier stood next to the televised table, the floor flexed ever so slightly, not enough to catch the human eye but tilting enough to help anyone using prediction software.

One online user won tens of thousands of dollars from a major Evolution partner before engineers installed platforms to steady the wheels.

As Evolution grew, opening outlets in Belgium, Malta and Spain, so did the ingenuity of the players exploiting any flaw in its operations. One gambling brand’s croupiers worked in a hot room cooled by a fan that Evolution found altered the movement of the ball. Brand-new equipment might arrive with unglued pockets or start to degrade and lose its randomness after only a few weeks of round-the-clock use. Sometimes, wheels got so dependable that gamblers didn’t even need a predictive equation. They could simply bet the favored section over and over. Always, there were players who seemed able to spot the imperfections before Evolution’s analysts could.

In response, Evolution hired an army of “game integrity” specialists and paid a fortune to consultants, including Barnett. The company developed software to track wheels in real time and identify whether any section was winning more than statistical models said it should. It gave croupiers a screen telling them to toss the ball more quickly or slowly, as required. By 2016, Evolution employed 400 people in its game integrity and risk department, according to an annual report in which it also warned that its adversaries were getting more sophisticated with every passing year. (Asked for comment, a company spokesman said, “Evolution works hard to protect game integrity and it is a prerequisite for our business.”)

According to Barnett, there’s a new generation of online roulette sharps who no longer need human-operated switches to time the ball and wheel. Instead, they deploy software that scans the video feed and does it for them, all from a home computer with no security guards in sight. Gambling firms are fighting back with innovations like ‘random rotor speed’, or RRS, technology, using software to algorithmically slow the wheel differently on each spin.

…Wootten retired in 2020, after the Ritz shut its doors permanently during the Covid-19 pandemic. Over the years he’d collected a cabinet full of increasingly ingenious devices: Palm Pilots, reprogrammed cellphones, flesh-colored earpieces, miniature buttons and cameras. He knew of one player who’d hidden a roulette timer in his mouth and had heard rumors of another who’d tried to get a microprocessor surgically embedded in his scalp.

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