Ever wonder why casinos change roulette balls so often? Some even change balls after every spin! Is this practice because of cheating?
Actually it is...well, sort of. Most dealers are trained to either speed up or slow down both the wheel and ball delivery to avoid wheel clocking, the practice people (but not cheaters)use to pick up on defective wheels on which the ball lands on certain sections of numbers more than probability would dictate. These are called bias wheels. Some dealers switch balls that jump out of the inner cylinder after spinning, fearing that the ball itself is defective, but the reality is that they just flicked the ball too hard. Some pit bosses believe that a defective roulette ball increases the probability that a roulette biased-wheel team will have success clocking those biased wheels, but I do not believe that to be true, and moreover, what exactly is a defective roulette ball?
Most pit bosses know that no amount of ball changing on a random, non-biased wheel, has anything to do with the outcome of the next spin. Each spin is an independent event, and over the long run, you can plan on playing at 5.26% disadvantage.
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