As a game of pure chance, there’s only one way to win at roulette: through complete luck.
Some have tried to devise strategies and staking plans that beat the wheel, but none have come up with a system that guarantees winning spins or sessions.
Step forward Niko Tosa, a Croatian who, along with two associates, won more than £1.3 million playing roulette at the Ritz Club in London. The trio’s winnings were claimed across multiple sessions, meaning that they either defied the laws of probability or something more sinister was at play.
But after a nine-month long criminal investigation, Tosa and co have been cleared – the investigators from Scotland Yard were simply unable to find any evidence of impropriety or cheating.
Tosa, meanwhile, has maintained that his winnings came about for one simple reason: practice.
Oh, and a defective roulette wheel….
Shady Character
After news broke of Tosa’s winning spree and the subsequent investigation, media agency Bloomberg set to work trying to find out more about this mysterious Croatian.
It turns out that Tosa is actually a pseudonym, and the individual behind the moniker regularly changes his name and appearance in a bid to baffle casinos around the globe and avoid detection.
Simply identifiable as a man in his fifties from a small Croatian village, ‘Tosa’ has revealed that his roulette strategy is to simply watch each wheel spinning at a casino for a prolonged period of time, trying to detect whether it has a defect that yields patterns of predictable results.
It’s a skill, Tosa says, he has developed over a number of years, and that such practice – and powers of concentration – are all that are required to identify a roulette wheel that can be predicted with a certain degree of accuracy.
Security camera footage taken from the Ritz showed the Croatian and his two allies – later identified as Nenad Marjanovic and Livia Pilisi – scanning the gaming floor for a particular table. After taking their seat, it was clear to see the trio place their bets at the very last possible moment after the ball had been released….suggesting they were trying to calculate where the ball would land after a set number of revolutions.
It was noteworthy that their bets were placed on particular quadrants of numbers that appear consecutively on the wheel – suggesting they had a rough idea of where the ball would come to a halt.
According to the investigation’s findings, the trio started out with a ‘few thousand’ pounds before bumping up their winnings to the £1.3 million mark.
Police investigated Tosa and his chums when they returned to the Ritz again under the alleged charge of ‘deception’. They were searched and had in their possession mobile phones and a tablet, and when it was put to Tosa that he had in fact used some kind of electrical device to measure the path of the ball with each spin – making it easier to predict its landing place, the Croatian replied:
“You can call me Nikola Tesla if I have such a device!”
Police also searched the trio’s hotel rooms, where they found bundles of cash and some papers listing local casinos – each with a + or – against its name.
The investigation also saw the roulette wheel used and the gaming floor stripped to search for bugs or other electronic devices, while the croupiers spinning the wheel on those fateful days were also hauled in for questioning – it was held that they knew nothing about Tosa or his tactics.
And so all of the charges were dropped….with Tosa, Marjanovic and Pilisi free to walk away with their winnings.
After running into trouble in Europe and Las Vegas, where Tosa claims he was beaten up by security after winning so much, he has since been spotted in casinos in far-flung locations including Slovakia and Kenya as he seeks out his next defective roulette wheel.
Can the R0ulette Wheel Be Beaten?
Albert Einstein once remarked that the only way to beat roulette is to ‘steal money from the table when the croupier isn’t looking.’
Now, Einstein knew a thing or two, but his comments were made based upon a fair and working roulette wheel – one that was completely unpredictable.
However, some roulette wheels can be defective through wear and tear or a mechanical fault, and it is these that can be predicted with relative accuracy – if you know what you’re doing, which Tosa claims to.
The Croatian has claimed that he has spent hours studying roulette wheels – both those in the casino and the one he purchased for his home, in a bid to spot such imperfections. He trained himself to predict where the ball would land after three spins of the wheel had passed; usually around the time that the croupier orders ‘no more bets.’
It’s still nigh on impossible to predict the exact number where the ball would land, so Tosa and co used the ‘neighbours’ bet (sometimes referred to as ‘Orphelins’) to at least hedge their bets and spread their chances. At the Ritz, it was a strategy that worked famously.
Indeed, one of the croupiers questioned by investigators claimed that Tosa was betting on as many as 15 numbers per spin, so how exact his theory was remains to be seen – albeit, it was clearly profitable.
He’s not the first to have profited from a defective roulette wheel – Gonzalo Garcia Pelayo and Richard Jarecki are just two others that have pocketed millions from spotting such opportunities.
Casinos try to limit their liability by changing their roulette wheels at regular intervals, while modern design also features scalloped pockets – these make the way in which the ball clatters around the wheel more unpredictable, with ricochets and angles that cannot be factored into predictive bets.
But, who knows: maybe there’s still opportunities out there to beat the (defective) roulette wheel?