As you’ve seen in movies and TV roulette is a game with a revolving wheel containing 38 numbered slots numbered from 1 to 36 and two more numbered 0 and 00. The croupier spins the wheel one and spins a metal ball in the opposite direction. As the ball loses momentum it drops into the slots and skips from one to another until it lands in one of them.
The betting table is in front of the wheel. It’s covered with a felt pad with a square for each of the 38 numbers on the wheel and other places where you can bet on “odds” or “evens” or “reds” or “blacks,” etc. If you put your chip or cash in a single square and the ball lands into the slut bearing that number you get to keep the money you bet and the casino will pay you the amount you bet times 35. So if you bet $1 and win you keep your dollar and get $35 from the house.
That would be a fair return on your bet if there was one chance to win and only thirty-five ways to lose. But in the United States with the 0 and the 00 slots there is one way to win and thirty-seven ways to lose, so the payoff for a win should be thirty seven times the amount you placed at risk.
These loaded odds should be an obvious warning that: “THE LONGER YOU PLAY THIS GAME THE MORE YOU’LL LOSE,” but every casino has roulette wheels and they always seem to be spinning for someone.
The use of the 0 and 00 is intended to conceal the true odds, and in California certain forms of the game are required to use the numbers 1 to 38 with no 0 or 00. This is how I’ve set up the range for the 38 numbers to be randomly generated.
The games played in the story use the same strategy for losing money. The players – Harry and Red start with a single number. Harry hooks up to the Generator using his iPhone. They bet the same amount of money on the same number for 38 consecutive spins. You’ll get a sense of the randomness of numbers by putting yourself in Harry’s position, and appreciating how common it is for the generator – whenever online or a roulette wheel – to spit out 38 numbers one at a time and to consistently skip over nearly half numbers in the range while generating what seem to be too many sets of pairs triples, quadruplicates and even an occasional quintuplicate.
Here’s a → link to simple instructions for using the Random Number Generator and another → link to the Generator itself. Open them with two tabs so you can go back and forth.