Feedback on roulette side bet

Hi everyone,

Following up on the recent discussion on how to track multi-spin roulette side bets, here's a multi-spin roulette side bet I've put together. The overall goal is to achieve a long streak of increasing numbers. Have a look:

Uppercut Roulette

1) Each player makes a wager on the specially-marked Uppercut wager area.
2) Like craps, the next spin establishes the point. If 36 shows, the wager loses right away – there aren’t any numbers greater than 36.
3) Otherwise the bet rides and the wheel is spun again. If the next number spun is greater than the current point, it becomes the new point number. If not, the bet ends.
4) The Uppercut wager lasts as long as each roulette spin makes a new point by beating the previous point, up to a dozen spins total, with the dealer tracking numbers on a special layout area and/or by using a visual recent-number display. When the sequence is over, the number of points is compared to a paytable. As an example, the sequence 5, 8, 10, 22, 19 would be four points before the 19, while the same sequence in a different order, 5, 10, 8, 22, 19 has only two point numbers. For American roulette, 00 is considered greater than 0 and less than 1.

Here's the paytable:

# of Points	Award (in units)
12 (top award)	2500
11	1000
10	500
9	250
8	100
7	50
6	25
5	10
4	5
3	2
2	0 (push)
1	-1 (lose)

For double-zero American roulette, the house edge is 5.06%, actually a bit better than the rest of the bets on the table. For single-zero roulette, the house edge is (curiously) 5.26%. Calculating the house edge is itself an interesting discussion, but that's for another thread.

For the layout, I initially propose to use the layout suggestion I made in the other thread:

Put the numbers 0, 00, and 1-36 in a miniature version of the main layout, where each box is 1" wide by 3/4" tall, and use chess-piece-like markers to denote the numbers in the sequence. When the next spin ends the series, count up the number of markers on the mini-layout and pay off the wager. Then remove the markers from the mini-layout and start over.



I don't want to steal DJTeddyBear's thunder from Hit-It-Again, but I see these as very different propositions. His is a long-shot jackpot wager with a probability of winning at 1/38 but where you can win massive awards (including a progressive). Uppercut has much higher hit frequency but much lower awards on average. With this paytable, you'll push 33% of the time and win 2+ units another 15% of the time.

Questions or comments? What do you think?

Quote:

I don't want to steal DJTeddyBear's thunder from Hit-It-Again

Don't steal my thunder! Pay me for it!

I sense you got this idea when thinking about my idea, therefore, I want a piece of your pie. (It can be a small piece, like, a slice of cherry pie at the WoV lunch next week...)

Just kidding. Go for it.


---


I sense problems - mostly with booking and tracking the bet. I'd need to see more descriptions on this.


What about late participation? Can the bet be placed anytime? If not, why not? What conditions allow betting?

Quote:

For double-zero American roulette, the house edge is 5.06%, actually a bit better than the rest of the bets on the table. For single-zero roulette, the house edge is (curiously) 5.26%.

I think that's bad. Why would the casino want to learn a new bet and procedure, etc, and not make more money for the effort?

The higher the ultimate payout, the bigger the house edge needs to be.

By the way, I didn't vote.

My choice would have been "I don't play Roulette, but this seems intriguing."

That's right. I don't play Roulette. At least, not much. Maybe about 15-20 minutes per casino trip. And that's mostly just to sharpen my understanding of my own invention.

Quote: DJTeddyBear

Don't steal my thunder! Pay me for it!

I sense you got this idea when thinking about my idea, therefore, I want a piece of your pie. (It can be a small piece, like, a slice of cherry pie at the WoV lunch next week...)

Just kidding. Go for it.

Actually, the patent issued in 2008. But if you can get it into a casino, I promise you'll get a piece of the pie.

---

Quote:

I sense problems - mostly with booking and tracking the bet. I'd need to see more descriptions on this.


What about late participation? Can the bet be placed anytime? If not, why not? What conditions allow betting?

Not with manual tracking, it'd be too complicated. With an electronic system or e-table (e.g. Rapid Roulette), sure, why not?

I recognize that procedure is the toughest part about doing this manually. That's why I'm asking so many questions.

Quote:

I think that's bad. Why would the casino want to learn a new bet and procedure, etc, and not make more money for the effort?

The higher the ultimate payout, the bigger the house edge needs to be.

It's straightforward to decrease the payouts and increase the edge. Also, if you limit the streak to 8, the payout is only 100-1. That turns out not to change the edge much at all, but dramatically limits the risk. The 2500-1 payout is mostly for show. It'll almost never happen (1 in about 3.3 billion times).

I figured that if a player had a shot to win 100-1 (at long odds, granted) but the house edge was slightly better than every other bet, they'd probably make it. No?

Quote: MathExtremist

Questions or comments? What do you think?

Hi M.E.,

I think that there may be some mileage in this wager - although I'm not a roulette player this concept is one of the more interesting sidebets that I've seen on roulette. You've asked for questions or comments so firstly the questions:-

1. Have you got an issued patent or is it patent pending ?
2. What happens with a repeated number ? Does it end the wager ?
3. Have you approached any casinos/distributors with the game ? If so, what has the feedback been like ?
4. Who did the math' analysis ?
5. What would the % split be if someone placed this game for you ?


I'll move onto the comments, which I'll keep brief for now. Please bear in mind that these are my personal opinion (and I reserve the right to be wrong :-) ) so please don't get offended if you disagree with my thoughts.

1. The name of the game doesn't quite fit the wager.
2. Roulette players are used to seeing 35/1 payouts and you would need a run of 7 to beat this. I'm not sure how the math' looks but I think that the payout structure should be different (I have 2 ways to make the payouts larger without affecting the house edge) - I agree with you that, as this is a community bet, then the cap should be around 100/1 and only 8 numbers need to be used (possibly less).
3. The house edge is good although, as you stated, it's easy to change it accordingly.

Ok, that's it for now. If you want to answer any questions confidentially then please PM me.

Quote: Switch

Hi M.E.,

I think that there may be some mileage in this wager - although I'm not a roulette player this concept is one of the more interesting sidebets that I've seen on roulette. You've asked for questions or comments so firstly the questions:-

1. Have you got an issued patent or is it patent pending ?
2. What happens with a repeated number ? Does it end the wager ?
3. Have you approached any casinos/distributors with the game ? If so, what has the feedback been like ?
4. Who did the math' analysis ?
5. What would the % split be if someone placed this game for you ?

Thanks for the feedback. Here are the answers to your questions:
1) Patent is issued, and the game (as described) is approved already.
2) You can do it either way, strictly greater-than, or greater-than-or-equal-to. If you use greater-than-or-equal-to, the awards need to shrink.
3) No, I haven't really approached casinos yet. The manual tracking issue is still a big hurdle. I've gotten lukewarm feedback from e-table vendors. They didn't hate it, but didn't immediately jump to sign a deal either.
4) I did.
5) Depends on several factors.

Quote:

I'll move onto the comments, which I'll keep brief for now. Please bear in mind that these are my personal opinion (and I reserve the right to be wrong :-) ) so please don't get offended if you disagree with my thoughts.

1. The name of the game doesn't quite fit the wager.
2. Roulette players are used to seeing 35/1 payouts and you would need a run of 7 to beat this. I'm not sure how the math' looks but I think that the payout structure should be different (I have 2 ways to make the payouts larger without affecting the house edge) - I agree with you that, as this is a community bet, then the cap should be around 100/1 and only 8 numbers need to be used (possibly less).
3. The house edge is good although, as you stated, it's easy to change it accordingly.

Ok, that's it for now. If you want to answer any questions confidentially then please PM me.

Thanks -- I asked for feedback, so I wouldn't be a very good listener if I took offense. I'm not a marketing person and "Uppercut" was just the first thing that came to mind. I'm very open to suggestions on better names for this. At one point, I was thinking about calling it the "ladder" bet, as in "climbing the ladder". But like DJTeddyBear, I'm not much of a roulette player. The reason I did this was to try to bring some of the community excitement of craps over to the roulette table. In craps, everyone's rooting for the same thing. In roulette, players mostly do their own thing. A multi-spin community bet like this changes all that. I'd like to think that a roulette table full of people making this bet would be cheering for something like "19 or higher" altogether.

When drawing from N numbers with replacement, the probability of a run of successively increasing numbers of length L is
(SUM[x = L .. N] (x choose L)) / ((L-1)!*N^(L+1))

There's probably a reduction for that, but I did it all in Excel so I didn't need one.

How do you make payouts larger without changing the house edge unless you decrease hit frequency somehow? Realistically, this bet almost never goes beyond 4-5 spins anyway. I could shorten the series and tweak the payouts to get a 9% edge:

# of Points	Award (in units)
7 (top award)	100
6	50
5	20
4	5
3	1
2	0 (push)
1	-1 (lose)
House edge	8.98%

Alternately, I could have more losers and not start paying until 2 or more in a row. For example:

# of Points	Award (in units)
6 (top award)	100
5	25
4	10
3	2
2	-1 (lose)
1	-1 (lose)
House edge	9.18%

Obviously the paytable permutations are just about endless.

Good answers. Unfortunately my Internet is down for
24 hours so I'm typing this on my iPhone.

I'll follow up more when my Internet provider has sorted
my modem out.

Best regards,
Geoff