World News for Students of English

12-04-2023 07:00

Roulette was supposed to be a game of chance; however, it isn’t quite as random as most people think. It’s actually possible to get a good idea on which section the ball’s going to stop by measuring the speed of the ball and the rotor.

For decades, casinos scoffed as mathematicians and physicists devised elaborate systems to take down the house. Then an unassuming Croatian cracked the code and his winning strategy forever changed the game. In 2004, Niko Tosa and two companions achieved the impossible. They walked into a London casino with a couple of thousand pounds in their pockets, and over the course of hundreds of games of roulette, they turned it into 1.3 million pounds. Casinos have had to redesign their equipment to encourage the ball to skip and bounce around enough to confuse the predictors. The pockets have been redesigned to be smoother and shallower than before.

Since the pandemic, online gambling’s been the industry’s biggest growth area; however, gamblers can use software to track the ball and rotor automatically and calculate where the ball’s going to land. Companies defend their profits using wheels with in-built lasers and algorithms to make them harder to predict.

Difficult words: random (happening by chance rather than according to a plan or design), scoff (to laugh and talk about a person or idea in a way that shows that you think they’re stupid or silly), elaborate (detailed and complicated).

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