The Man Who Beat Roulette

Quote of the Week:

“To thine own self, be true.” –Hamlet, William Shakespeare

Fact of the Week:

The house always has the edge. Every game, at every casino in the world, gives better odds to the house. That’s how they make money.

Black Jack is one of the friendliest player games, with the house’s edge typically at just under one percent. Roulette finds itself on the other end, with American tables giving the house a 5.26% advantage. European tables, which do not include a double zero, give the house a 2.6% edge. People still win, simply because luck favors them on that day, but give any casino long enough, and they’ll always make money.

Except in the case of Niko Tosa.

Via Abposters. Credit: Adobe

Niko Tosa, an alias, is the one man on the planet who has figured out how to beat roulette. Tosa lives in an undisclosed location in Croatia and goes by many different names. He’s never been photographed and until this year, had never been interviewed.

Tosa first gained notoriety amongst casinos after his experience at the Ritz Club in London in 2004. The members-only casino, which has hosted Al Pacino, Johnny Depp, and Bill Clinton, watched as Tosa came in several consecutive nights with two constituents. He studied the wheels, picked a table, and began to play. Tosa waited until after the ball was spun and right before bets closed before quickly placing his chips on groups of numbers.

Several thousand dollars turned into $1.6 million. When Tosa and his two partners returned on the night of March 15th, they were arrested on suspicion of deception. A months-long inquest that even involved ripping apart all the roulette wheels found no signs of cheating, and Tosa was allowed to walk free with the money.

Since then, Tosa has been in and out of casinos across Europe, sometimes beaten up by casino thugs furious at him for winning.

This year, Kit Chellel, a Bloomberg reporter, finally tracked down and interviewed Tosa, who revealed his secret. He explained that some roulette wheels have tiny defects—like imperfect balance—that increase the odds of the ball bouncing a certain way. Tosa spends hours studying a wheel at his house and has perfected the science of guessing which way the ball will roll. In response, casinos have worked ever harder to increase randomness in their wheels by switching to scalloped pockets so the ball spends more time bouncing randomly.

Tosa, for his part, believes he’ll still beat the odds. He is planning his next tour of European casinos which he will visit under new identities.

He actually isn’t the first to accomplish this, as a young medical researcher named Dr. Richard Jarecki studied wheels in the 1960s and won millions of dollars before getting banned by most casinos.

While the ability to accurately make predictions about which way the ball will bounce seems impossible, both Tosa and Jarecki backed up their assertions by beating the house odds like no others.

Daily Mail contributed to this article.

News Update:

21 Jump Street turned real this year in Boston, as an adult woman pretended to be a high school student at three different schools. The difference was, she was not placed there by any law enforcement agency but rather attended through her own decision.

“I am deeply troubled that an adult would breach the trust of our school communities by posing as a student,” Superintendent of Boston Public Schools Mary Skipper said to USA Today. “This appears to be a case of extremely sophisticated fraud.”

The Boston Police received a phone call on June 14th from school administrators concerned about a student withdrawing from their school after enrolling less than a week prior.

“A man said his ‘daughter’ was being bullied at the school and he wanted to enroll her into another school, the incident report said,” according to USA Today.

The school began to look at the student’s paperwork and noticed something incorrect with one of the forms submitted for enrollment. A further inquiry revealed the woman had attended three high schools under different names, though no reason has been offered as to why.

USA Today contributed to this article.

Sports Update:

Credit: Wake Forest Baseball

Four teams remain in the Men’s College World Series, with an elimination battle happening as this article goes out. In bracket one, Virginia and Oral Roberts were eliminated, with Florida and TCU battling for the final spot. Second-seeded Florida has zero losses and unseeded TCU one, meaning TCU will need to beat the Gators twice to reach the championship.

In bracket two, Tennessee and Stanford have been eliminated, with top seed Wake Forest (zero losses) and fifth-seeded LSU (one loss) still alive.

Florida currently leads TCU 2-1 after seven innings, with the Wake Forest-LSU game to come at 7pm EST this evening.

This week, instead of a riddle, we’ve included the link to the latest strip of Cliff Notes Comics. For the most accurate representation of college, there’s no better place:

http://cliffnotescomics.com/