Cracking the Roulette Wheel
Patrick Austin

This is another "book" I acquired quite recently that doesn't have any recommended selling price on the rear cover, and looks to have been compiled using a John Bull printing set. On the final page I found that it was printed in Great Britain by Amazon, which indicates to me that it's one of those "Print-on-Demand" titles that is printed to order locally in whatever country an order is received from. Interesting that it details "Great Britain" as the county of printing and not "The United Kingdom", but then geography isn't a strong point of so many people who are from the States.

Not withstanding the POD aspect what about the content? A 140 pages of poorly written and repetitive (the term "my systems" appear eleven times in a passage a little over a single page long) "use my system and be financially independent for the rest of your life" type nonsense, that constitutes a route-map to the poor house. Apparently Mr A has pulled in over $200K per annum, for over 20 years, by applying his winning roulette system, and states that anyone using it can easily make $150-$200 per hour. Yeah ... right! Here's the lead in that appears on page one which I think says it all:

Dear New Professional,

Congratulations on purchasing one of the most proven gambling systems in the world! First published in 1994, Winning Money™ has been regarded as one of the bestselling roulette strategy books of all time.

Now, building on over twenty years of using the system, the 3rd edition of Winning Money™ takes the previous editions to an entirely new level: Cracking the Roulette Wheel.

Changing your life is not easy, but by buying my system you have made an important first step. By playing my system like I will show you how to do, you could begin to make positive changes to your life and achieve your dreams. Money and happiness are not out of your reach and can be yours.

Please let me know how you are doing, so drop me a letter. See our website www.WinningMoneyatRoulette.com for more contact information.

Good luck!
Patrick Austin, C.P.A.

You'd actually be hard-pressed to make contact with Mr A now, as at the time of writing www.WinningMoneyatRoulette.com no longer has anything at the end of it and is free for anyone to register. Presumably when the lease ran out on this domain, there hadn't been a sufficient volume of traffic to interest any of the opportunists that lurk around the web to snap it up and make use of it. But you get the picture?

Basically, Mr A's system is an adaptation of the Martingale (*groan*) and simply doubles up on losing spins until you win back your losses and make a bit. Problem is there are two glaring flaws in the plan:

*Betting on one of the evens payoff options doesn't take account of the increased table minimums that are usually in place - so it's extremely unlikely that any player could double up for a further ten spins (eleven in total),

*During the explanation of the statistical aspect, using an example of flipping a coin, no mention is made of the shocking 5.26% house edge that double zero roulette games carry, or it's impact. Nor is there any consideration of natural variance when calculating the probabilities of runs of "x" number of losing spins occuring.

Mr A asks early on, on page 7, "How many time in a row can you flip a quarter and make it go heads? Maybe four or five?" . . . Well, I reckon on average you'll see five on the trot once every thirty-two attempts; (1/2)⁵ = 1/32. How many spins are you intending to play?

In addition to the flaky maths and probability analysis in Appendix A the book contains, in the main, a great deal of superfluous wordage around hustling comps (who to speak to and what to say), the joys of self-employment (presumably as a "professional" gambler) and a third rate, very short, list of casinos where you can ply your trade if you do as Mr A advises. Bearing in mind this title was written in 2010 this list is pathetic - the listing of casinos outside of the United States is just one entry long; "Monte Carlo". So no effort spared in researching that aspect then?

In summary Cracking the Roulette Wheel is the second re-incarnation of just another systems scam, written with the aim of relieving the gullible of a few dollars. Bearing in mind this is the second one of these I've reviewed of late, allegedly written by a qualified CPA, it does make me wonder just how low the threshold is for someone to qualify as a practising accountant in the States. One could be forgiven for thinking that just about anyone can get a practising certificate, or . . . . . this could all be bullshit?

The best place for this one is the bottom of the recycling bin. Taking what's written by Mr A seriously will end in tears.

March 2018.