Is roulette rigged? Be honest.

Since you’ve come here asking me, “Is roulette rigged, Joe?” the first thing I’ll say is: you have nothing to worry about at my establishment. We use a third-party tested RNG to run the games.

However, it’s been brought to my attention that I’m not the only casino in the world, so you might be wondering about the rest of them. Good news is, I’ve just finished reading my copy of Physics, Law, and IT For Dummies, so I’m qualified to show you exactly why roulette in Australia isn’t rigged. Seriously, though, this is kind of my wheelhouse. Some say I’m even smarter than the average Joe.

What is a biased roulette wheel?

When we talk about rigging, we’re not talking about kitting up your 4WD with a rooftop tent and a snorkel.

I’m talking about when a defect or modified roulette-wheel feature, such as using magnets, a tilted wheel, or even a crooked croupier, causes the ball to favour specific sections of the wheel, and the results are no longer random. 

Or, at an online casino, that would mean altering the RNG (random number generator) to rig the outcome. Very, very naughty behaviour, and something I, the embodiment of purity, would never do.

Do land-based casinos rig roulette wheels?

Let’s get into the long and short of it, starting with the Danny DeVito (yes, that’s the short).

If you’re wondering if roulette is fixed, then the answer is no, at least if you’re playing at a licensed casino. These precincts are monitored more closely than TSA when you return from a backpacking holiday in Thailand, unwashed and wearing three-day-old harem pants. 

But I’m not just talking out of my unmentionables; I have proof. Let’s get into the long of it.

Casinos Don’t Need to Rig—They Have the House Edge

Casinos don’t need to rig tables or bring in dodgy dealers to make their dough. They get it from the house edge, a built-in bias where the casino takes a cut of all winning bets.

On European casino roulette boards, the house edge is about 2.7%. For example, if you win $10,000, the casino keeps $270 to keep its lights on. With this automatic cut, the big dogs don’t need rigged roulette tables, just like they don’t need to wear gold chains the size of tow ropes. They take their payout legally through the games, including the table games with the highest payouts and odds.

No One Can Sneak in a Rigged Wheel

Getting a rigged roulette wheel into a casino would take a heist that even David Copperfield would tip his hat to. Inspectors frequent these joints more than hungover uni students frequent the Maccas drive-thru, and they make sure there’s nothing sus going on that could prevent you from taking home a fair dinkum win.

The Wheels Are High Tech to Avoid Tampering

The roulette wheels used in land-based casinos these days are impressively high-tech. It’s impossible to make a fixed roulette wheel with magnets or pedals because the equipment is built to exact, anti-cheating specifications.

Much more meticulously made than the dodgy whippersnapper my mate Brian threw together with a kitchen-sink strainer and a lawn-mower motor.

Can roulette be rigged accidentally?

No. Not if you’re playing at any licensed casino in Australia, at least.

Accidental rigging is when wear and tear causes a tilt in the board, making the ball more likely to land on one side of the wheel. Casino equipment is heavily audited for this sort of thing, so it’s pretty much impossible for faulty equipment to rig a game. In a casino, blaming a dodgy wheel is like Nick Kyrgios blaming his freshly strung, tournament-spec racquet when a shot goes wide.

“But Joe, can they really watch every single spin?”, I hear you ask.

Casinos use high-tech electronic tracking, so if there’s anything even close to a 0.01% tilt, the machine gets pulled out of the building quick-sticks.

“But what about the croupier?” Again, nope.

The rotor frequently changes its speed, making the ball’s landing place harder to predict than the weather in Melbourne. There are brass ‘diamonds’ that deflect the ball in any direction, and the frets further break the trajectory. That’s the back-and-forth pinballing at the end of the ball rotation, when you’re pleading “not four not four not….YES!” With all of these variables, it’s almost impossible for dealers to control where the ball will land.

The Professor Who Beat The Roulette Wheel Through Observation

You probably know a bloke who swears he’s “cracked the code” of roulette. For me, that’s my mate, the whippersnapper engineer. He claims his wins are down to what I like to call ‘reckon-based mathematics’, but then again, I’ve also seen him try to tap on his Myki card with his ID. That said, I’d be amiss not to tell you there was one guy who fixed a game of roulette with what his mama gave him.

Back in the 60s, German-born medical professor Dr Richard Jarecki became obsessed with roulette and set out to beat it. He spent thousands of hours in casinos hunting for imperfect wheels with worn pockets or slight tilts that made certain numbers land more often.

Being book smart and a cheeky little bugger to boot, Jarecki told the media he used a secret supercomputer to predict outcomes. Admitting the truth would’ve meant casinos fixing the wheels and killing his edge.

Eventually, the secret got out. Casinos responded by inventing the perfectly balanced roulette wheels we use today. Thanks, Jarecki…I guess?

Can online roulette be rigged? (Not here, that’s for sure.)

I’ve been waiting for this one. Roll out the red carpet—Joe’s home.

Random Number Generator

Online roulette games like Joe Fortune use something we professionalscall a Random Number Generator (RNG for short). This software determines the outcome of your spin.

It works by spitting out thousands of numbers every second. The moment you click “spin,” it picks one, and that’s the outcome. The RNG knows the outcome as soon as you spin. The actual spinning is merely performative.

This system has no memory. It doesn’t know if you’ve won ten times in a row or if you’re on a dry spell. It has no bias, no personality, and certainly nothing against you, even if you’re wearing your Ed Hardy T-shirt from 2009.

Game Developers Are Heavily Monitored

Verified online casinos use top-shelf developers that are under a microscope 24/7.

Their RNGs are poked, prodded, and stress-tested independently by the big dogs. These labs run millions of simulated spins to ensure the results are genuinely random. If the software isn’t 100% fair and the game doesn’t perform exactly as advertised, it never sees the light of day on my site or any other legit online casino.

In regulated online gambling, every spin is a completely independent event, as fresh and unpredictable as a tattoo idea at 11:47 p.m. Not even Eddie Morra from Limitless could make an educated guess in my joint.

There we have it—a full day’s work at Joe’s School of Roulette. Was I a teacher in a past life? You be the judge. If there’s one thing to take away from all this, it’s that playing roulette at a licensed casino is 100% a game of chance—it has to be. At Joe Fortune, our games are always fair and just as much fun to play. Have a spin at Joe Fortune Casino now for a fair crack at a fat stack of cash.