Roulette excel isn't the same as mechanical wheels

I've spent  a lot of time so far giving you the tools on how to calculate probabilities and check if staking plans work in excel.

The game of roulette isn't played in Excel, it's played on a mechanical wheel (unless you are playing online in a non-live roulette game and then you may as well be playing in Excel).

So what's my point:

If your number based system (martingale, reverse martingale etc)  doesn't hold up in Excel, it won't hold up in the real world either.

Ahhhhh, but you said in the real world, it's mechanical wheels, so there are wheel biases, dealer signatures etc, so maybe my system does hold up in the real world and not in Excel?

sure maybe, but that's blind luck.   does every dealer have the signature, every wheel have the same bias?  if that's what you think then you're crazy.

If you want to look at real world advantage play then we'll get to that but if your number based system doesn't hold up in excel it won't hold up with mechanical wheels.   if you want something to hold up with mechanical wheels then you need a different strategy.   and we'll get to that.

hope this helps

Martingale stake formula

I've spent a few posts now showing why employing Martingale against fair odds (or in the case of red or black in roulette less than fair odds), that you're always gonna lose.  If you want to read a bit more about it read my post on martingale in roulette begin very bad.

If you've forgotten what martingale is, it basically means everytime you lose, double up your previous bet

Calculating your martingale stake

In one of my earlier posts, i showed you this table, where for a losing streak, how much you'll have to bet to recover

I thought it might be useful to provide a formula that calculate the stake required to cover your losses during a martingale

And that is S = I * (2^(n+1))

I = Initial Stake
n = length of streak
S = Stake Required

Which means Initial Stake * (2 to the Power of the current length of the streak)

So in the scenario where our initial stake is £10 and we've lost 10 times and we need to make our eleventh bet.  Our new stake would be:

£10 * (2 to the power of 10) = £10 * 1024 = £10,240

Obviously you'd be better throwing your money down the toilet but there ya go.  But if you want to calculate it, that's how you do it.

And if you wanna do it in Excel

To do this in Excel with a table like the following

In the cell B4 (stake column row 4) just enter

=POWER(2,A3-1)*$B$3

Obviously you can also calculate it in excel, you can just double up the previous stake.  but the point is to show you how to do when you just know the initial stake and the bet number.

Please don't do martingale with roulette kids, not worth it.

Hot numbers in roulette

I'm not gonna name the site but I was looking at yet another person peddling their roulette strategy based on tracking numbers (no genuine advantage play).

Basically, you stick in the last 6 numbers and voila, it will tell you where to bet.   If the wheel spins 3, 4, 5, 14, 15 and 17.   You should probably bet on 19-36, cause those numbers are due....

Just for fun, let's see how that looks in the Excel Simulator

The Random Numbers

This is what my Excel Random Number generator produced (feel free to replicate this experiment yourself)

3, 14, 9, 9, 3, 21, 35, 3, 29, 0, 19, 36, 4, 9, 5

The distribution

Oh look the number 3 came up 3 times (surely that's a hot number)????  BTW, that was sarcasm.   We know enough about random numbers now to know that that can easily happen.  However this could be an interesting blog post in the future.   Hot numbers.

What might be more interesting is the ranges, which is what they were betting on in this system.

Their system was either avoid betting on 1 to 12 because it's hot.  but it might have been bet on 1 to 12 because it's hot.

There is no hot....  It's just some random numbers.   nothing is due or not due....

The kicker

And here was the kicker.  Don't worry, if you lose, just martingale and it'll recover your losses.

And we know how that ends...

Anyways, you know my thought on this sort of thing already.  I could type up their system into Excel and formally disprove it.   But you can always do that yourself if you want.

We know enough about random numbers, streaky numbers and martingale to know this is a silly strategy.

For more info on Martingale, read my martingale post (and feel free to download the excel tool)

For more info on streaks, read my post on streaky coin tosses

For generating roulette numbers in excel, read my post (or look at the martingale one)

Roulette Red or Black Level Staking Plan Simulator

In my previous post, I showed you how you can simulate roulette in Excel and track how much you'd win lose against a level staking plan (bet the same amount each time).

The idea of this is to prove that over time, you can only lose in Roulette playing Red or Black.   You can use the simulator to play 10, 100, 10,000, 40,000, in-fact as many games as you want.  

You should see over time, that your losses will match the house edge.   i.e. you will lose about 2.7% to the house.

I promised in that post that'd I'd enhance the version to allow you to summarise your bank.  I have now done that.   And it now looks like this

As you can see, i've add the following features to the simulator

• Win Percentage
• Max Bet
• Minimum Bank
• Maximum Bank
• Final Bank
• Percentage of Bank
• Game Over (when you run out of money)

Download

You can now download the Roulette Level Staking Plan simulator from my dropbox 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/d2508drcv73rn8z/Roulette%20Level%20Staking%20Plan%20Simulator.xlsx?dl=0

(please note the simulator doesn't handle half-bet returns)

Hope this helps

How to track your wins, losses and bank in Excel for Roulette

In my last post, I showed you how to create a roulette simulator in excel.

In this post, I'll show you how to do a simple of track your wins, losses and bank for a level staking plan (bet the same flat amount every time).  In a future post we'll make it a little more advanced.

The following screenshot shows you what we're looking to generate.

This allows us to see the wins, losses and bank for a Red/Black betting strategy against our roulette simulator (btw, betting red/black blindly is a good way of losing money, see my post on true odds of roulette).

1) The first 2 columns are generated by our roulette simulator, please see how to create a roulette simulator in excel to show you how to generate those two columns.   Alternatively you can manually type in your own values (or copy and paste them in) if you want to track your bank against actual results instead of randomly generated ones.

2) The 3rd Column (Bet) - this is your prediction, just enter in Red or Black (i've bet red for every row).  Enter Red in cell C3.

3) The 4th column (stake) - this is a level staking plan, e.g. bet $10 every time.   Enter 10 in cell D3

4) The 5th column (win) - this tells you if your prediction won or not.  type in the following formula in Cell E3

=IF(C3=B3, "Win", "Loss")

B2 has the result of the random number generator, C3 has your prediction.  (The letter is the column, the number is the row)

5) The 6th column (bank) - is your bank.  In cell F2, enter your start bank (1000 in my case)  And for cell F3, enter the following formula

=IF(E3="Win",F2+D3,F2-D3)

This basically means, if the result in E3 (Win column) is Win, then you add your winnings to your previous bank (D3 is stake, F2 is previous bank).   if it's not a win, then minus your stake (D3) from your previous bank F2.

6) And now do the draggy copy with each row down the excel sheet, to do this for multiple rows.  Excel will automatically update the formula cells as you drag and copy.

This is pretty simple.  At the moment only works for red/black.  but can be easily modified for other betting strategies.

In a future posts 

• will show you how to use excel to track your current bank and final bank etc.
• will test stupid plans such as martingale and reverse martingale

If you're interested in track streak, you could combine the technique in the how to track streaks in excel, to see your winning streaks or streaks of red/black results

Hope you have fun playing with this.  Feel free to drag a million rows :).   See what happens to your bank.   BTW, you will see that the casino always has the edge (should correlate with the true odds after a while)

UPDATE

I've now included a copy of the Roulette Level Staking Plan simulator for Excel in my dropbox here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/d2508drcv73rn8z/Roulette%20Level%20Staking%20Plan%20Simulator.xlsx?dl=0

(please note the simulator doesn't handle half bet returns on zero and only does red or black.  the point of the simulator is to disprove strategies hence why i haven't put time onto this yet).

hope this helps

Simulating Roulette in Excel

In one of my earlier posts, i showed you how to simulate a coin toss in excel (or google docs)

In this article, we will look at extending that technique to allow us to simulate roulette.   We're obviously just gonna randomly throw a roulette number and not simulate physics or mechanics (for now ;).   The idea is that you will be able to use this simulator to test out any crazy betting systems you may come up with.

This technique will work for both European and American wheels.   So let's get to it.

Setting up our wheel

First we want to do is setup our roulette wheel in Excel, and it should look something like this...

• First column is a list of numbers from 0 to 36 (37 if you want to do an American Wheel)
• Second column is the corresponding number on the roulette wheel (following actual layout)
• Third column is the color of the number

So to set it up, do the following

1) Open Excel
2) Rename the tab to "European Wheel"
3) In the first row enter the headers (as shown in the screenshot): Number, Actual Number Color
4) In column A enter in each row the numbers 0 to 36
5) Enter the corresponding number in the roulette wheel in order in Column B
6) Enter the color of the actual number in Column C

European Wheel

The following table gives the layout of a European Wheel, you can just copy and past it into excel

Number	Actual Number	Color
0	0	Green
1	32	Red
2	15	Black
3	19	Red
4	4	Black
5	21	Red
6	2	Black
7	25	Red
8	17	Black
9	34	Red
10	6	Black
11	27	Red
12	13	Black
13	36	Red
14	11	Black
15	30	Red
16	8	Black
17	23	Red
18	10	Black
19	5	Red
20	24	Black
21	16	Red
22	33	Black
23	1	Red
24	20	Black
25	14	Red
26	31	Black
27	9	Red
28	22	Black
29	18	Red
30	29	Black
31	7	Red
32	28	Black
33	12	Red
34	35	Black
35	3	Red
36	26	Black

American Wheel

Setting up an American wheel is also pretty easy.  Just create a new table and name it "American Wheel" and set it up the same as a European wheel (0..37 though) and paste in the following layout

Number	Actual Number	Color
0	0	Green
1	28	Black
2	9	Red
3	26	Black
4	30	Red
5	11	Black
6	7	Red
7	20	Black
8	32	Red
9	17	Black
10	5	Red
11	22	Black
12	34	Red
13	15	Black
14	3	Red
15	24	Black
16	36	Red
17	13	Black
18	1	Red
19	00	Green
20	27	Red
21	10	Black
22	25	Red
23	29	Black
24	12	Red
25	8	Black
26	19	Red
27	31	Black
28	18	Red
29	6	Black
30	21	Red
31	33	Black
32	16	Red
33	4	Black
34	23	Red
35	35	Black
36	14	Red
37	2	Black

Setting up the random number generator

So we have our wheels setup, so we just need to setup our random number generator.   Which we want to look something like this

In this diagram:

• Column A shows our randomly roulette number
• Column B shows the color of the number corresponding to it's color on the European Wheel

This is pretty easy to setup

• Manually enter the headers (Winning Number, Winning Color)
• In row 2, enter the following formula in Column A

=VLOOKUP(RANDBETWEEN(0,36),'European Wheel'!$A$2:$A$38,1)

This basically generates a random number between 0 and 36 (RANDBETWEEN(0,36).   And then looks up the corresponding number on our European Wheel tab.   If we want to do this for an American Wheel, we would change the tab to American Wheel and set RANDBETWEEN to generate numbers between 0 and 37,

• Enter the following formula in Row 2 of Column B

=VLOOKUP(A3,'European Wheel'!$A$2:$C$38,3)

This will look up the color of the generated number in our European Wheel (again if you want to simulate American Wheels then switch the tab to American Wheel.

• Do the draggy extends paste thing to copy it to multiple rows

Voila, one very simple roulette simulator in Excel.

This is very simple and easily allows you test betting plans etc.   I use it for disproving systems such as martingale.   It usually proves it to fail pretty quickly.   I obviously have more advanced versions which can do billions of rows of testing but Excel isn't so suitable for that.    However this should be pretty suitable for your needs.

In a future post, i'll show you how to test staking plans such as Martingale and Reverse Martingale with the simulator.   So you can see for yourself how ridiculous these staking plans are.

Hope this helps

UPDATE

You can download a copy of my simulator from my dropbox

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3btgpurbtsuof50/Roulette%20Simulator.xlsx?dl=0