Straperlo or Stra-Perlo was the brand of a fraudulent electric roulette game, promoted by Strauss and Perlowitz.In 1935 during the Second Spanish Republic, they tried to introduce the Stra-Perlo in the San Sebastián and Formentor casinos in Spain. Corruption connected with the prohibition of the game reached the nephew of Alejandro Lerroux and caused the downfall of his Radical Party. The political centre was abandoned and the Spanish public polarized, contributing to the Spanish Civil War.
After the war, estraperlo acquired the meaning of black market, the illegal trade of ration items.
Link
estraperlo in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española.
The primary piece of equipment used to play modern Russian roulette is a toy gun that has a 1/6 probability of activating when the trigger is pulled. The gun may be a dedicated device, or it could be a video game light gun connected to a computer programmed for Russian roulette simulation.
Play
All players put money in the pot. Each player in turn points the gun at their head and pulls the trigger. If the gun activates, the person holding the gun is eliminated from the game. The last player remaining wins the pot.
Odds
Assuming a six-shot revolver and that each hole is equally likely to be under the hammer, the probability of losing in the first round is 1 in 6 and the probability increases with each trigger pull. On the 6th trigger pull the probability of losing is 1 in 1 (100%).
Turn
p(Loss)
1
1/6 = 0.166..
2
1/5 = 0.2
3
1/4 = 0.25
4
1/3 = 0.333..
5
1/2 = 0.5
6
1/1 = 1
If the cylinder is spun after every shot, the odds of losing remain the same, 1/6 each time the trigger is pulled; in this case, in a two-person to-the-death game, it is better to go second (if the first person loses, the second person wins, even if he would have lost on his next move — this is equivalent to the house advantage in blackjack, where the house wins if the player busts, even if the dealer himself also is going to bust).
On December 24, 1954 the American blues musician Johnny Ace shot himself to death in Texas playing Russian roulette in a dressing room before a concert.
John Hinckley, Jr. was known to play Russian Roulette, alone, on two occasions (although neither time he pulled the trigger was the bullet in the firing chamber). Hinckley also took a picture of himself in 1980 pointing a gun at his head.
On February 28, 2000, Rashaad, A 19-year-old Houston resident attempted to play Russian roulette with a semi-automatic pistol, apparently unaware that the mechanics of the game change with a weapon other than a revolver. However, the Darwin Award sources are often suspect. [2]
On June 12, 2001, Clinton Pope, a 16-year-old young man with a criminal record who had been drinking and smoking marijuana for the night, fired a bullet into his face while playing Russian roulette before his friends in St. Petersburg, Florida, U.S. He was sent to a hospital and was in critical but stable condition.[3]
On March 29, 2003, Evan Below, a 14-year-old boy, shot and killed himself while playing Russian roulette with a .38-caliber revolver in the kitchen of a friend’s house in Casper, Wyoming, U.S. The weapon was taken by the houseowner’s son from his mother’s bedroom.
On August 7, 2004, Samantha Goodson, 16, shot her boyfriend, Michael Gerald Henry, 18, dead while they were playing a version of Russian roulette in a house in Jamaica, Queens, New York, U.S. She was charged with manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon.
On August 23, 2004, a 25-year-old Greek soldier, Antonis Syros, was shot in the forehead by a revolver that had held a single bullet at the gates of an Olympic village at Mount Parnitha in Athens, Greece. He was playing Russian roulette “jokingly” with Christos Chloros, a policeman, while he was standing guard.
On March 17, 2006, a 15 year-old teen named Astrid Uytterhaegen shot herself dead while being peer pressured into the whole incident & game by her associates. Her body was supposedly found in a ditch, where she had been left to hide any evidence. Traces of alcohol had also been found. (This seems to be a wrong information as you can see from the comments on this article. Astrid Uytterhaegen never died, a friend of him put that on Wikipedia as a joke and never took it off.).
On April 14, 2006, a 16-year-old teen from Peoria, Arizona shot himself to death while playing Russian roulette on his porch with a friend.
On June 8, 2006, 16-year-old Sean Jones from Jacksonville, Florida shot himself to death while playing Russian roulette on the front porch of his friend’s house. He only fired once.
In addition to these specific incidents, it has been alleged that William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics attempted suicide by playing a solo game of Russian roulette [4].
Legends abound regarding the invention of Russian roulette. Most of these, predictably, take place in Russia, or occur among Russian soldiers.
In one legend, 19th century Russian prisoners were forced to play the game while the prison guards bet on the outcome. In another version, desperate and suicidal officers in the Russian army played the game to impress each other.
The earliest known use of the term is from “Russian Roulette”, a short story by Georges Surdez in the January 30, 1937, issue of Collier’s Magazine. A Russian sergeant in the French Foreign Legion asks the narrator, “Feldheim… did you ever hear of Russian Roulette?” When I said I had not, he told me all about it. When he was with the Russian army in Rumania, around 1917, and things were cracking up, so that their officers felt that they were not only losing prestige, money, family, and country, but were being also dishonored before their colleagues of the Allied armies, some officer would suddenly pull out his revolver, anywhere, at the table, in a cafe, at a gathering of friends, remove a cartridge from the cylinder, spin the cylinder, snap it back in place, put it to his head, and pull the trigger. There were five chances to one that the hammer would set off a live cartridge and blow his brains all over the place. Sometimes it happened, sometimes not.
Whether Czarist officers actually played Russian roulette is unclear. In a text on the Czarist officer corps, John Bushnell, a Russian history expert at Northwestern University, cited two near-contemporary memoirs by Russian army veterans, The Duel (1905) by Aleksandr Kuprin and From Double Eagle to Red Flag (1921) by Petr Krasnov. Both books tell of officers’ suicidal and outrageous behaviour, but Russian roulette is not mentioned in either text. If the game did originate in real life behavior and not fiction it is unlikely that it started with the Russian military. The standard sidearm issued to Russian officers from 1895 to 1930 was the Nagant M1895 revolver. A primitive double-action revolver, the Nagant’s cylinder spins freely until the hammer is cocked. While the cylinder does not swing out as in modern hand-ejector style double action revolvers, it can be spun around to randomize the result. However, it holds seven cartridges not six, which throws some doubt on the accuracy of the reference in Collier’s.
The only reference to anything like Russian roulette in Russian literature is in a book entitled A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov (1840, translated by Vladimir Nabokov in 1958), where a similar act is performed by a Serbian soldier: the dare however is not named as “Russian roulette”. Russian officers did play a game called “cuckoo” with a Nagant revolver, in which one officer would stand on a table or a chair in a dark room. Others would hide and yell “cuckoo” and the man with the gun would fire at the sound.
In the 1978 movie The Deer Hunter, the game is also depicted as being played in Vietnam. According to one website claiming to offer insight into the practice of Russian roulette, Valerie Douglas, whose father’s cousin and father were in the Vietnam War states that Russian roulette occurred both for gambling and murder. [1] Several teen deaths following the movie’s release caused police and the media to blame the film’s depiction of Russian roulette, saying that it inspired the youths. There is also an interesting Russian roulette scene in the Japanese film Sonatine, directed by Takeshi Kitano.
A semi-automatic pistol, unlike a revolver, will automatically load and fire a round if it has any rounds, Or may contain a round in the chamber even when the Magazine is removed. There has been at least one Darwin Award resulting from an attempt to play Russian roulette with such a pistol. This variation is sometimes referred to as “Polish roulette,”—a bigoted play on the stereotype of Polish people being of low intelligence—though its actual origins are disputed.
“Russian Poker” is a variation of Russian Roulette – the difference being that in Russian Poker, one’s opponent places the gun up to the other person and pulls the trigger.
Russian roulette (in Russian: (Русская) Рулетка, оr (Russkaya) Rulyetka) is the practice of placing a single round in a revolver, spinning the cylinder and closing it into the firearm without looking, aiming the revolver at one’s own head in a suicidal fashion, and pulling the trigger. The number of rounds placed in the revolver can vary, though as a rule there will always be at least one empty chamber. As a gambling game, toy guns are often used to simulate the practice. The number of deaths caused by this practice is unknown.
Petits-Chevaux, French for “little horses”, is a gambling game played with a mechanical device consisting of a board perforated with a number of concentric circular slits, in which revolve, each independently on its own axis, figures of jockeys on horseback, distinguished by numbers or colors. The bystanders having staked their money according to their choice on a board marked in divisions for this purpose, the horses are started revolving rapidly together by means of mechanism attached to the board, and the horse which stops nearest a marked goal wins, every player who has staked on that horse receiving so many times his stake. Figures of railway trains and other objects sometimes take the place of horses. In recent years there has been a tendency to supplant the petits chevaux at French resorts by the boule or ball game, on the same principle of gambling; in this a ball is rolled on a basin-shaped table so that it may eventually settle in one of a number of shallow cups, each marked with a figure.This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
Originally, martingale referred to a class of betting strategies popular in 18th century France. The simplest of these strategies was designed for a game in which the gambler wins his stake if a coin comes up heads and loses it if the coin comes up tails. The strategy had the gambler double his bet after every loss, so that the first win would recover all previous losses plus win a profit equal to the original stake. Since a gambler with infinite wealth is guaranteed to eventually flip heads, the martingale betting strategy was seen as a sure thing by those who practiced it. Unfortunately, none of these practitioners in fact possessed infinite wealth, and the exponential growth of the bets would quickly bankrupt those foolish enough to use the martingale after even a moderately long run of bad luck.
Analysis
Suppose that someone applies the martingale betting system at an American roulette table, with 0 and 00 values; a bet on either red or black will win 18 times out of each 38. If the player’s initial bankroll is $160 and the betting unit is $10, the player will make a win in approximately 96% of sessions, gaining an average of $4.30 from each winning session. In the remaining 4% of sessions, the player will “bust”, exhausting his bankroll, for a loss of $160. It follows then that the average session losses of a gambler employing this strategy are $2.27. Given a larger bankroll, the odds of making a win before running out of cash increase; however, the average winnings grow more slowly than the average losses, so the game remains a losing proposition.
Modern casinos generally have table minimums and maximums to prevent players from doubling their bets more than five or six times, rendering the martingale system obsolete.
Albert Einstein is reputed to have stated, “You cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it.”
And yet, the numerous even money bets in roulette have inspired many players over the years to attempt to beat the game by using one or more variations of a Martingale betting strategy, wherein the gamer doubles the bet after every loss, so that the first win would recover all previous losses, plus win a profit equal to the original bet. As the referenced article on Martingales points out, this betting strategy is fundamentally flawed in practice and the inevitable long-term consequence is a large financial loss. There is no way such a betting strategy can work over the long term. Another strategy is the Fibonacci system, where bets are calculated according to the Fibonacci sequence. Regardless of the specific progression, no such strategy can ever overcome the casino’s advantage; players trying them will inevitably lose sooner or later.
While not a strategy to win money, New York Times editor Andres Martinez described an enjoyable roulette betting method in his book on Las Vegas entitled “24/7″. He called it the “dopey experiment”. The idea is to divide your roulette session bankroll into 35 units. This unit is bet on a particular number for 35 consecutive spins. Thus, if the number hits in that time, you’ve won back your original bankroll and can play subsequent spins with house money. If your number never hits – well, it can take a great deal of time to spin the wheel 35 times; think of the fun you’ll have in that time! In practice, this dopey experiment often results in funny looks from the dealer at first; soon, however, every gambler at the table will be putting money on your number. This turns roulette into a group activity that can rival craps for cheers when the number hits. However, there is only a (1 − (37 / 38)35) * 100% = 60.68% probability of winning within 35 spins (assuming a double zero wheel with 38 pockets).
There is a common misconception that the green numbers are “house numbers” and that by betting on them one “gains the house edge.” In fact, it is true that the house’s advantage comes from the existence of the green numbers (a game without them would be statistically fair) however they are no more or less likely to come up than any other number.
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, the man who broke the bank 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 [1].
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 1990′s, Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo, realizing that most roulette wheels are not “perfect”, 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 in London had used mobile cameraphones to predict the path of the ball, a cheating technique called sector targeting. [2] 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. [3]
Betting Only on Red
One conceivable strategy would be to bet on the ball landing in a red space for a certain number of spins, for example, 38.
There are 18 red spaces on a roulette table with 38 total spaces. Dividing 18 by 38 yields a probability of landing on red of 47.37%. This probability can be used in a binomial distribution and made into an approximate standard normal distribution.
Doing so indicates that, if one were to spin the wheel 38 times, there is a 99% probability that the ball would land on red at least 10 times. There is an 83% probability that in 38 spins, the ball will land on red at least 15 times. Out of 38 spins, there’s a 50% chance that 18 will be red.
However, the break-even point is 19 spins, since the bet on red is 2:1, and the probability of 19 red spins in 38 is only 37%. This indicates the difficulty of winning by only betting on red.
The results occur because, as indicated by the 18 divided by 38 equals 47.37% figure, the ball will land on red less than half the time. This percentage applied in the binomial and standard normal distributions creates the vast divide in probability from 18 red spins to 19 red spins out of 38 spins. Basically, it is very unlikely for anyone to spin much more than 18 red spins out of 38 spins.
Betting multiple times
This type of bet is a combination of the red bet and the martingale system. Except this bet also includes the odd. What you do is you start off with a bet of 1 on each the red and the odd (or you can do the black and even). You treat each bet seperately. When one bet loses, you double it. When one bet wins, you set it back to 1. The reason that this technique keeps you in the game so long is that there is a 25% chance of you winning both the red and the odd and theres a 50% chance that you will break even. Of course in order for this method to last, you would need an unlimited source of money.
Famous Bets
In 2004, Ashley Revell of London sold all of his possessions, clothing included, and brought US$135,300 to the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas and put it all on “Red” at the roulette table in a double-or-nothing bet. The ball landed on “Red 7″ and Revell walked away with his net-worth doubled to $270,600.
In the 1942 film Casablanca, Rick’s Café Americain has a trick roulette wheel. The croupier can cause it to land on 22 at will. Rick (Humphrey Bogart) urges a Bulgarian refugee with whose case he becomes sympathetic to put his last three chips on 22 and motions to the croupier to let him win. After the man’s number dramatically comes up, Rick tells him to let it all ride on 22 and lets him win again. Although the details are not mentioned in the film (the croupier only notes that they are “a couple of thousand” down), it appears that Rick has given the man 3675 (3*35*35) francs.
In the music video for Palace & Main by Kent, guitarist Harri Mänty goes to Las Vegas and bets the entire video budget on black. He wins, and the profits were donated to charity.
In the third part of the 1998 film Run, Lola, Run, Lola uses all her money to buy a 100-mark chip. (She is actually just short of 100 marks, but gains the sympathy of a casino employee who gives her the chip for what money she has.) She bets her single chip on 20 and wins. She lets her winnings ride on 20 and wins again, making her total winnings 100,000 marks.
The Big Six wheel is a gambling game based on a large vertical spinning wheel, similar to the wheel used on the television game show Wheel of Fortune. (The wheel used on the show is mounted horizontally, however.) The wheel is divided into sections, separated by spokes or pins. The wheel is spun by a dealer, and the winning section is indicated by a pointer mounted on a flexible piece of rubber or leather, which also rubs against the pins to impart friction and slow the wheel down.
Bettors wager on what number or symbol appears in the winning section, and are paid at odds that are based on the distribution of that symbol on the wheel. Most wheels have 54 sections. The numbers or symbols used differ according to the variation of the game.
Money wheel
The version most commonly seen in American casinos use pieces of U.S. currency — specifically, the $1, $2, $5, $10 an $20 bills — and two special symbols, usually a joker and the casino logo. Bets on the $1 bill pay even money, on the $2 bill pay 2-1, on the $5 bill pay 5-1, and so on. These odds are based on how many slots contain each bill. The joker and logo appearin one slot each, and pay off at odds of 40-1 or 45-1, depending on local gaming regulations and/or the generosity of the game operator.
The house advantage in this game is one of the highest in most casinos, ranging from 11.1% on the $1-bill bet to more than 24% on the joker or logo (when it pays 40-1).
Dice wheel
This variation is base on the now-uncommon game of chuck-a-luck (also known as “birdcage”), with many similarities to sic bo. The symbols on the wheel represent combinations of three dice. Players bet on the numbers 1 through 6. If the number be appears on one of the dice, the bet is paid at even money; on two dice, the payoff is at 2-1 odds; and on all three dice, the payoff is 3-1. Because only 54 three-die combinations are on the wheel (as opposed to 216 possibile combinations on three actual dice), the house advantage on this variation is even worse than the chuck-a-luck “edge” of 7.87%.
This variety is seldom seen in casinos, but frequently seen as a carnival game, or at a charity “Monte Carlo night” fund-raiser.
Other variations
Some operators will use different variations of symbols and payoffs, but they are infrequent. One known variation was used for a short time at the now-defunct Grand Casino in Gulfport, Mississippi (destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina). Called “Mississippi Derby,” a player would be on one of eight “horses” to win, place or show, as with beting in horse racing. The horses were represented on the wheel in three concentric rings, with the outer ring representing the winner, the middle ring representing the second-place horse, and the inner ring representing the third-place horse. The payoffs varied from horse to horse, depending on how many times the number appeared on the rings; odds ranged from 40-1 for the “longshot” to win, down to 1-2 for the “favorite” to show. The game was short-lived.
Roulette is a casino and gambling game (Roulette is a French word meaning “small wheel”). A croupier turns a round roulette wheel which has 37 or 38 separately numbered pockets in which a ball must land. The main pockets are numbered from 1 to 36 and alternate between red and black, with number 1 being red. There is also a green pocket numbered 0. In most roulette wheels in the United States but not in Europe, there is a second zero compartment marked 00, also colored green.If a player bets on a single number and wins, the payout is 35 to 1. The bet itself is returned, so in total it is multiplied by 36. (In a lottery one would say ‘the prize is 36 times the cost of the ticket’, because in a lottery the cost of the ticket is not returned additionally.)
A player can bet on numbers, combinations, ranges, odds/evens, and colors.
History of Roulette
Early roulette table, ca. 1800
The first form of roulette was first devised in 17th century France, by the mathematician Blaise Pascal, who was supposedly inspired by his fascination with perpetual motion devices. In 1842, fellow Frenchmen François and Louis Blanc added the “0″ to the roulette wheel in order to increase house odds. Roulette was brought into the U.S. in the early 1800s, and again in order to increase house odds a second zero, “00″, was introduced – although in some forms of early American roulette the double-zero was replaced by an American Eagle. In the 1800s, roulette spread all over both Europe and the U.S., becoming one of the most famous and most popular casino games. Some call roulette the “King of Casino Games”, probably because it was associated with the glamour of the casinos in Monte Carlo. (François Blanc actually established the first casinos there).
A legend tells about François Blanc, who supposedly bargained with the devil to obtain the secrets of roulette. The legend is based on the fact that if you add up all the numbers on the roulette wheel (from 1 to 36), the resulting total is “666″, which is the “Number of the Beast” and represents the devil.
Types of Roulette
There are two types of roulette, American roulette and European roulette. The difference between the two types is the number of 0′s on the wheel. American roulette wheels have two “0′s”, zero and double-zero, which increases the house advantage to 5.3%. In European roulette there is only one zero, giving the house an advantage of 2.7%.
The two versions also use chips differently. American roulette uses so-called “non-value” chips, meaning that all chips belonging to the same player are of the same value determined at the time of the purchase, and the player cashes in the chips at the roulette table. European roulette uses standard casino chips of differing values as bets, which can make the game more confusing for both the croupier and the players.
A traditional European roulette table is also much larger than an American roulette table, and the croupier uses a long tool called a rake to clear out the chips and to distribute winnings. In American roulette the croupier collects and distributes chips by hand.
There is actually a third type of roulette wheel in use. It is a hybrid of the two versions described above, and is the only kind of wheel that is legal in the United Kingdom. This wheel has an American (English language) layout and a single zero. When a single-zero wheel is used in the United States, it is almost always this type.
Board depiction (American Roulette)
↔
0
-
18
st
12
←
←
odd
←
0
1
2
←
red
nd
12
3
4
5
←
6
7
8
←
blk
9
0
1
←
2
3
4
←
even
rd
12
5
6
7
←
8
9
0
←
9-
36
1
2
3
←
4
5
6
←
↑
↑
↑
Bet odds table (American Roulette)
(in addition to the mentioned payout the bet is returned)
Note also that 0 and 00 are neither odd nor even in this game.
House Edge
The house average or house edge is the amount the player loses relative to a bet, on average. If a player bets on a single number in the American game there is a probability of 1/38 that the player receives 36 times the bet (35 times the bet plus the return of the bet itself), so the player ends up, on average, losing 5.26% on each bet:
( (probability * payout) / bet ) – 1 = expected value as fraction of bet
For example, betting $10 on a single number on an American wheel:
( ((1/38) * 360) / 10 ) – 1 = -0.0526
The house has the same edge on all of the other kinds of bets, except for the five number bet where the house edge is considerably higher (7.89% on an American wheel).
The house edge should not be confused with the hold. The hold is the total amount that the house wins from a player. While the house might have an edge of 5.26%, if a player keeps playing until his or her bankroll is exhausted, the house will enjoy a hold of 100%.
Called Bets
Traditional roulette wheel sectors
There are a number of series in roulette that have special names attached to them. These are placed by betting a set amount per series (or multiples of that amount). They are based on the way in which certain numbers lie next to each other on the roulette wheel. Not all casinos offer these bets.
Voisins (“Neighbors”)
This is a name for the numbers which lie between 22 and 25 on the wheel including 22 and 25 themselves. The series is 22,18,29,7,28,12,35,3,26,0,32,15,19,4,21,2,25 (on a single zero wheel).
9 chips or multiples thereof are bet.
Tiers (“The third”)
This is the name for the numbers which lie on the opposite side of the wheel between 27 and 33 including 27 and 33 themselves. The series is 27,13,26,11,30,8,23,20,5,24,16,33 (on a single zero wheel).
6 chips or multipes thereof are bet.
Orphelins (“Orphans”)
These numbers make up the two slices of the wheel outside the Tiers and Voisins. They contain a total of eight numbers, the Orphans comprising 17,34,6 and the Orphelins being 1,20,14,31,9.
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Early roulette table, ca. 1800
Traditional roulette wheel sectors
