How do you win at Roulette? Well, type winning roulette system into Google and you’ll discover around 863,000 entries – most of them promising to sell you a magic, 100% guaranteed system that will make you wealthy in a matter of days and weeks.

Believe them at your peril.

The simple truth is that there is no 100% guaranteed system. As the great Albert Einstein once said, “The only way to beat Roulette is to steal the money when the dealer’s not looking.” Many of the system sellers simply want you to sign up at one of their ‘recommended’ online casinos. They get an instant referral or affiliate reward from the casino and – in the main – you get to lose the price of the system and potentially much, much more to the casino.

Other sellers simply offer you a variation of the Martingale system. The logic is simple: place a bet on say Red and if it doesn’t come up, double your stake. Keep doing this until red does come up. Sounds almost plausible until you do the maths. Here’s the progression: 1-2-4-8-16-32-64-128. Let’s stop there (although I’ve seen online casino games where Red has chosen not to appear for twelve times!) If we just take the eight progressions in the sequence above, you will have lost a total of $255.00. Add just three more bad results and you’ll be down by $2047.00. Can you feel the pain? Believe me, I’ve been there and the simple reality is that you will get wiped out – and sooner rather than later.

A few system sellers will try to bamboozle you with science. This system, they will say, is based on complexity theory or some vastly impressive algorithm. The result, in my experience, is the same. You lose, and the system seller (and especially the casino) wins.

Is there any system that works, then? Not if you’re looking for a guaranteed positive result every time. It simply won’t happen. That said, it is possible to win consistently more than you lose if you adopt an exceptionally cautious strategy designed to minimise the risk of a wipe-out. There are many such systems – and I will tell you about just one of the systems that I have used successfully for the past four months without a loss (so far!). I am not advising you to use this and if you do so, you do so at your own risk. I can only tell you what has worked for me. Here goes. Watch the online wheel and only place a bet on Red if Black has already appeared nine times in a row. The longest one-color sequence I have ever experienced is 12 plus one zero – so I make sure that my bank is sufficient to cover at least four negative results plus an extra three as a safety margin. Starting with a $1 stake, in other words, I need to have a bank of at least $127 just to be safe.

The flaw in the system? Glad you asked. Waiting for nine Reds or Blacks in a row can take many hours – in fact, there are rare occasions when you could sit there all day and still be waiting. If you’re thinking ‘life’s too short’, I would have to agree.

But there is a solution. Look carefully in the marketplace and you will discover a small number of automated robots (the one I use is Roulette Bot Pro – but there are others.) These often come with pre-installed strategies, but I tend to avoid them. The beauty of the robots is that you can put in your own betting strategy (the nine-blacks-or-reds-in-a-row strategy, for example) and then just leave your computer and the automated software running. When the magic sequence happens, the software immediately places your agreed stake and will repeat the sequence for only as long as you tell it to. I have tested the nine in a row strategy and it has been consistently successful – slowly (sometimes very slowly) accumulating small wins that mount up over time.

The automated software allows you to test other strategies, too – and to do so on the demo version of whatever online casino you choose. This is a great learning tool, if only to alert you to the major flaws of most systems you try. But there are other successful strategies which I will shortly try on a live platform. Remember, though, this is gambling. Never gamble with money you can’t afford to lose – and definitely avoid the temptation to chase your losses with bigger and bigger bets. Online roulette can be fun, and it can be profitable – but treat it with due caution and make sure that you never get carried away. And never be tempted by anyone who promises you a 100% guaranteed system. At best, they’re deluded. At worst, they’re taking you for a ride.