How Many Spins Do You Need For Testing Roulette Systems?

It makes sense to test your roulette system before betting real money. After all, you’re going to lose if you bet with a losing system. But there’s confusion about how many spins you need to actually test, to be assured your roulette system is winning.

The short answer is literally hundreds of thousands of spins, and maybe more. But if you’re like most system players, you’ll see this as pointless because you’ll never play that many spins. If that’s how you see it, you’ve got a bit to learn.

Understanding The House Edge

The house edge is a discrepancy between payouts for wins, and the odds of winning. For example, there are 37 numbers on the European single zero wheel, and the payout is 35-1. So when you win, the payout is unfair.

This house edge affects every single spin, although you only notice the effects when you are paid for wins. That is if you’re paying attention.

You’re more likely to notice the effects after many hundreds or thousands of spins, because you bankroll will become depleted. Although if you’re not aware of what’s really happening, you’ll probably think your depleted bankroll is just the result of being unlucky. You might even incorrectly believe the casino is somehow cheating you.

Understanding how the house edge really works is key to understanding why tests must be done in the long-term.

Do Long-Term Tests Matter If You Only Play Short-Term?

Keep in mind every spins is independent. If the roulette game is giving fair random spins, you’ll win 1 in 37 spins if you bet a single number. The odds of roulette are governed by the amount of pockets on the wheel, as with any online casino. But the odds are determined by the physical variables that determine the winning number, although that’s another story.

Say for example you played for only 10 spins. The problem with this is anything can happen in such a short amount of spins. So this makes the results statistically insignificant. In other words, they don’t matter, and are not indication of the long-term results you can expect with your system.

A gambler might then argue that this system is designed for short-term play. But what happens if 1000 players all apply the same short-term winning system? Will all 1000 players win?

The reality is there will be winners, and there will be losers. But the majority of players will have lost. The casino does not care who wins or loses. The statistics they analyse are consistent with the house edge.

How Many Players Win Roulette?

You may be aware of the term “return to player”, otherwise known as RTP. This is a hypothetical value that indicates how much of a player’s initial investment is likely to be returned to them. I find it to be more of a politician’s term, which has very little relevance to real play situations.

For example, return to player maybe 90%. You might mistake this was thinking 10% of players will profit. The reality is almost 100% of players will not profit at all. This is because the return to player value is hypothetical as I explained before. And essentially the more you play, the more likely it is that your bankroll will be drained.

My point here is if your system legitimately works, in the more that you play, the more you will earn. This is in contrast to what most will assistance to attempt to do, which is achieve a profit in relative short-term.

It is delusional to think that a system will work for some time, then eventually fail. This is the mentality of gamblers who think that suddenly the wheels patterns change against them. The reality is they have been chasing patterns that only exist in their head.

Conclusion

To determine if a roulette system legitimately works, you need to test as many numbers as is practically possible. In statistics, you will never get 100% certainty that something is true. In the case of roulette, you will never get 100% certainty that your roulette system works. It is entirely possible that you can win for an entire year with a losing system.

How is this possible? Luck. I myself won consistently over a year with a bad system. Eventually it started to lose, and I started to blame the casino for changing something. This was my delusion. The reality was previous numbers over the year were suited to my system. But eventually my luck run out, and I started seeing the real results of the system.

So to answer to the primary question, how many numbers you need to test the system? Simply the more numbers you test, the more assured you are that your roulette system works.