The gambler who beat roulette

Ask just about anyone who has a passing familiarity with the game, and they will tell you that roulette is a game of chance. It follows an inexorable logic that makes sure that the house always comes on top.

Yet, this is not a story about fatalism. It’s the tale of the gambler who beat roulette, defying the odds and leaving casinos incredulous as to how he did it decades after he first surfaced in one of the most exclusive London casinos. Where others saw an immutable fact of life, Niko Tosa saw an opportunity.

But crediting him and him alone as the only person to have beaten roulette would be a comforting thought for casino bigwigs.

The industry knows, however, that Niko Tosa is hardly the only person to have succeeded, even if his talent is singular in many ways.

Just like the infamous MIT Blackjack team plagued casinos for decades, so has Niko Tosa been in and out of casino floors for many years, and as the available evidence would suggest – to this very day.

Unlike J.P. Massar and his college friends, however, nobody truly and fully understands how Niko managed to beat roulette. Or if the industry knows, it’s keeping it as a guarded secret.

Who is Niko Tosa, the gambler who beat roulette?

No one gambler beat roulette, and crediting Niko Tosa with the feat alone would be unfair to others whose names we will admittedly never know. Yet Niko Tosa did something that no other person had done before him.

He made the possibility of beating the roulette wheel known to gambling industry honchos and the owners of esteemed private establishments from London to Nairobi who at first laughed, then became anxious, and finally realized that the belief of guaranteed riches owed to the ever-so-slight advantage the roulette wheel has against players was perhaps misplaced.

When the penny dropped it had been years of people like Niko Tosa successfully defeating the roulettewheel and overcoming the house edge in an improbably consistent manner.

Never mind that Niko Tosa was himself in hot water with law enforcement. He always walked away scot-free, insisting that he had not cheated at any casino floor in any way, a theory that has mostly been born out over the years.

Not much is known about the Croatian, other than that he first appeared in the Ritz, or at least it was in London’s high-end gambling club that his name finally caught the attention of police officers, casino security, and the press.

On March 15, 2004, the Ritz casino was visited by a trio the establishment’s staff was already familiar with. The three people, one Croatian man, Niko Tosa himself, were flanked by a Serbian businessman, one Nenad Marjanovic, and a Hungarian woman, Livia Pilisi.

They had been coming to the Ritz for a couple of weeks at that point, defying statistics, amassing piles of chips, and starting to unnerve higher-ups but also inspire a sense of awe in the establishment’s footmen.

That night, Niko Tosa and his friends would score one of their biggest wins at the casino. It was mostly Marjanovic and the Croatian who were gambling usually, setting out with £60,000 and £30,000 respectively that evening.

By the early hours of March 16, the men had won £684,000 and £310,000 respectively, and they were preparing to leave. They asked for cash and checks and walked away with what had now put their total winnings at £1.3m after several weeks of playing at the Ritz. This would not be the end of Niko Tosa’s crew visits to the club, however.

How did Niko Tosa beat roulette in the Ritz?

Nobody knows. What is known is what it looks like to knowhow to beat the roulette. Upon examining footage from Niko Tosa’s visits, but also witnessing it first-hand at the gambling tables, the Ritz security found one thing very bizarre about the way the trio had been playing.

They would wait until the ball started spinning and several seconds in, they would all three jump in some sort of hive-minded unison pushing chips onto the table and covering up to 15 numbers, mixing both inside with outside bets in a seemingly erratic, but always predetermined pattern.

That itself was odd, of course, but casinos made a fair bit of money on gamblers who decided to bet while the ball was already in and spinning, and before the dealer would pronounce the fateful "all bets are off."

Another thing that wasn’t immediately noticed and made sense to industry types only years after was that the trio of gamblers seemed to favor a certain part of the wheel, which would later be called the "drop zone," a term that is to casinos what DEFCON is to the armed forces.

Yet, Niko Tosa and his friends did not show the usual sort of enjoyment that moved people who had just won triple-digits. They were methodical, calculating, and appearing to bealmost bored. Sometimes they would not even look at the table or react to a win – or even a loss.

The footage was pored over by security staffers to conclude that some sort of computerized device must have been used to time the spin of the wheel and determine what the most likely sector for the ball to drop in would be.

The press claims Niko Tosa used a computer to beat roulette

Niko Tosa and his partners returned on the next day at 10 pm sharp, as they had promised leaving the establishment in the early hours, but this time, the Ritz had a slightly different welcome party for them.

John Wootten, the freshly appointed security chief at the Ritz, had watched the footage and concluded that Niko Tosa must have been cheating in some way. He put his money on a device of sorts that allowed them to somehow predict the most likely drop of the ball in the wheel.

Wootten himself had tried promoting the idea to industry bigwigs in the past across various events in the years before 2014, but he had been mostly laughed at, or not excited much interest in the best of cases. Yet Wootten was determined.

He knew of and had read The Eudaemonic Pie, a book about the adventures of a few physicists who spent quite a bit of time trying to program a device that measures the spin speed of roulette wheels to determine where a ball is most likely to drop.

The device worked in a controlled laboratory setting, but faulty electronics of the era meant that the physicists got skin burns, smoke coming out of their pants, and other unpleasantries to associate the expeirence with when they took their contraption to conduct field tests. The ordeal cost them healthy skin tissue and several thousand dollars before they gave it up.

Although Stephen Hawking himself would argue that beating roulette was impossible, some fellow physicists have proven that if you can time the wheel, you can predict where the ball would land within a reasonable degree. So that seemed like a way that a gambler who beat roulette could use to get their way.

When Niko Tosa arrived with his entourage at 10 pm sharp, he was escorted to the security room where police were already waiting. There, the trio was informed that they were arrested on suspicion of "deception" (the exact term used in the Bloomberg reporting) and escorted to a police station where they were interviewed at length.

Their hotel rooms were searched. Police officers found multiple burner phones, cash, and maps with London casinos neatly marked down, along with travel documents and passports in other people’s names. Wootten had told the police to look for hidden devices, but none were found.

Yet, the group did appear suspicious. As one Metropolitan police officer put it, they looked like criminals, but nobody knew what their crime was and if there was a crime to speak of in the first place.

Although no computerized devices of any sort were found on the three people, the media had already caught a whiff of the story, and The Mirror, among others, published a semi-sensationalist piece that claimed that a "high-tech gang" had cheated its way through the Ritz, leaving the property on the hook for £1.3m.

Decades later, Niko Tosa would insist in an interview for Bloomberg, which did most of the original reporting, that he had never used any device to cheat, and was repeatedly exasperated when pressed on the matter – mad not so much at the journalistic inquiry as he was at himself for not able to clearly explain how he had become the gambler who beat roulette in the first place.

The Ritz discovers an uneasy truth: gamblers can beat roulette

The Ritz case is important, not only because it put Niko Tosa’s name on the map as the gambler who beat roulette for the first time, but also because it led to the discovery of the uncomfortable truth – that the odds did not necessarily and always favored casinos. The house edge was a palliative, not a panacea, it turned out.

Although Wootten knew he was defeated, and the police could not find evidence of cheating, the Ritz had been trying its best to get to the bottom of the case – not only because it feared Niko Tosa, but also because the casino faintly suspected that others may have pulled off the same trick only at a much smaller scale.

Wootten would quickly prove his worth in gold, not just because of his assertiveness to pursue theories that others at the time were prone to ridicule, but because he also knew the right people. In the midst of the Niko Tosa investigation, Wootten convinced the Ritz to fly in his friend, Mike Barnett, who specialized in the impact of computerized devices on gambling floors.

Barnett flew in from Australia, all expenses covered, and he quickly decided to vindicate his friend and prove to the industry that they were dead wrong thinking that roulette was tamper-proof. So, he set up a session that was seen by the gambling industry’s top brass, the Ritz, private establishments, and the UK Gambling Commission.

He then demonstrated that by using a roulette computer that timed the wheel’s spin, he could ever-so-slightly flip the house edge back in favor of the player, by eliminating at least some of the numbers that were highly unlikely to come up during a roulette spin. Yet even this did not explain how Niko Tosa and his entourage were able to win in such a consistent manner without any device.

Wootten himself was an avid reader of the often undignified attempts and the great lengths gamblers would go to beat roulette. Some used earpieces, others even wanted to have a chip implanted directly into their scalp to time roulette.

Yet, one thing was evident following Barnett’s demonstration – using a computer to time roulette and beat it was possible. This was confirmed by the UK Gambling Commission, which similarly ran tests, but cautioned that certain conditions need to be observed for the system to work – conditions that were not present when Niko Tosa was hitting the wheel.

Want to beat roulette? Find the drop zone

Over the years, it has become evident that some gamblers can spot something about the tables they are playing, and hence win more. Niko Tosa, for example, didn’t win much money for weeks while he was visiting the Ritz – in comparative terms, at least.

He had been studying the wheels and looking for one specific one. That is why the footage from March 15, 2004, shows the trio stop attentively on the Ritz’s gambling floor for a moment as they scan the room. Niko Tosa was able to make out one specific one that had been moved around the floor the previous day.

Why was he going after one specific wheel? Because he knew something about it. One theory has to do with the "drop zone." This is the idea that over time, physical wheels develop imperfections. Even a minuscule tilt could scramble the odds and flip the house edge.

If someone is prescient enough to spot the trend, they may quickly exploit it. However, even this theory is hard to prove when applied to Niko Tosa. He never openly said that he had used a drop zone but argued that he simply "knew" because he was a well-trained mind.

However, the drop zone would become a source of major anxiety for casinos and not only land-based ones.

Physical roulette is not the only one that gamblers beat

Evolution Gaming, one of the biggest and most esteemed suppliers of live casino games can attest that drop zones are bad for business. The company, which was founded in 2006, had discovered over the years that some gamblers had been able to win uncanny amounts, overcoming probability, and astronomical odds in the process.

That mostly had to do with bad studio environments from which the casino games were hosted, and by bad, we mean that imperceptible flaw in the table that higher-ups only spot when they had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on that table.

Even in the setting of a far-away live casino studio, gamblers, much like Niko Tosa, were able to discover imperfections that led to incredibly dependable wheels that would favor the player more so than the house. In one instance, Evolution found that the flooring used in its studio was susceptible to give in ever so slightly, when a live dealer was standing next to the table, creating the feared "drop zone."

As technology developed in leaps and bounds, too, so have the ways anonymous gamblers found ways to cheat the casinos.

They used devices that timed the wheel’s spin speed and then placed their wagers, prompting Evolution Gaming to leave the charge in setting up innovative ways the company prevents fraud.

For one, Evolution Gaming is now alternating the speed of roulette spins in live games, it deploys the Random Rotor Speed (RRS) algorithm hoping to one-up suspected cheating gamblers, by throwing off their calculations every time the wheel spins.

This requires a fine balancing act as Evolution – and other live casino developers – have to ensure that by trying to tackle the knotty issue of gamblers who beat their games by predicting outcomes the company is not impacting the advertised odds for recreational players.

Yet, the issue is serious enough to mandate enough R&D spending, with Evolution Gaming hosting a two-day Game Integrity and Risk Conference in 2016 that openly stated that gamblers who use technology to predict outcomes ("advantage players") were getting more sophisticated, and a danger to operators.

Mind, this was before the time of widely-available generative AI, which may further enhance such operations and put software companies on the back foot or playing catch-up.

Evolution already employs more than 400 who are part of its dedicated game integrity and risk department, a unit dedicated to combating what the company has qualified as "cheating." So, not only Niko Tesla is not the gambler who beat roulette for the first time, but we also do not know how many others there are.

The gambler who beat roulette FAQs

Is Niko Tosa still playing roulette?

When Niko Tosa’s article was originally published in Bloomberg, he had enquired as to when the publication date would be, because he was planning another trip. It’s fair to assume that Niko Tosa is very much still alive and active in the world of roulette, traveling as far as Nairobi, Kenya to play.

What is Niko Tosa gambling roulette strategy?

There is no one answer. Niko Tosa’s roulette strategy has been credited to roulette table imperfections, that have caused the wheel to favor certain sectors, a "drop zone," but other theories argue that Niko Tosa used a laser device to time the spin of the wheel. Neither theory has been proven, and there are significant gaps in both.

Is Niko Tosa the only person who has beaten roulette?

No, not at all. Niko Tosa has himself said that he had been taught by "a friend" who turned out to be playing at London casinos in 2004 as well.

What’s Niko Tosa’s net worth?

Unknown. Niko Tosa is said to be from a small village in Croatia, and a poor region in general. He is said to have a residence south of Dubrovnik and to have once driven in a Ferrari in his village when he supposedly first won big from roulette.

Where can I find a documentary about Niko Tosa?

Unfortunately, there is no documentary about Niko Tosa’s story. The man has been mostly shrouded in mystery and is known to a select circle of what he has explained are most likely criminals and industry insiders preoccupied with safeguarding the integrity of roulette.

Is there a Niko Tosa Netflix movie?

No, at this time, Netflix has announced no project that features Niko Tosa’s story.

What’s the Niko Tosa method?

No one truly knows. Niko Tosa claimed in an interview for Bloomberg, which popularized his story two decades after it first happened, that he had learned how to predict where the ball was most likely to drop by training his mind on a roulette wheel at home.

Is Niko Tosa on Wikipedia?

No. Surprisingly for a man who completely upended thinking in the casino and gambling industry, Niko Tosa’s name is kept out of Wikipedia, bar a passing mention.

Are there books about Niko Tosa’s strategy?

No, there are no books dedicated to Niko Tosa’s strategy as his method is highly speculative and not known to the public, or even gambling industry insiders. However, two books that discuss the possible way in which he beat roulette are available on Amazon. They are Follow the Bouncing Ball: Silicon vs Roulette by NAME and The Eudaemonic Pie by NAME.

Call me ‘Nikola Tesla’ – How Niko Tesa did it

Niko Tesa’s story is one that fascinates, but a definitive answer of how he did beat roulette has not been furnished, much to the chagrin of roulette buffs and industry types.

Wootten and Barnett have heard the argument that you can train your mind to "predict" where the roulette ball would be most and least likely to drop, as propagated by of Follow the Bouncing Ball: Silicon vs Roulette, a book by Mark Billings, a self-styled professional gambler who has been making a living off the roulette wheel.

Both were skeptical of the notion – at least when it came down to a person using their mind as opposed to a sophisticated device.

This is precisely what Niko Tosa told a Bloomberg correspondent in the 2020s when he finally agreed to an off-hand and redacted interview. In his conversation with Kit Chellel, Niko Tosa insisted that he was not the only gambler who had beaten roulette.

Back when the Ritz case was still hot and toured media headlines, a group of suspects in London were put in the same boat for supposedly cheating at casinos. Essentially, Niko Tosa was rounded up with a group of other people, among whom was his fellow countryman, Ratomir Jovanovic.

The suspects decided to demonstrate that they could beat roulette and acquired legal representation to arrange it – as well as defend themselves from casinos accusing them of cheating but failing to prove how.

Niko Tosa would not play himself, but the group of people who were seemingly unrelated at the time, called on Jovanovic and Youssef Fadel, a partner with whom he had won £380,000 in various gambling establishments in London, to host a presentation in which he wanted to show how gamblers could beat roulette.

The police agreed to attend a presentation at the Colony Club and many gambling firms bosses and owners of clubs attended. Yet, Fadel and Jovanovic completed failed their presentation. Niko Tosa was present himself. After a while, the industry’s top brass got irascible, and their security details were in similarly bad humor.

Police quickly called an end to the demonstration. Why is Jovanovic’s name important you might wonder? When asked how he learned to beat roulette, Niko Tosa said a friend – Jovanovic - taught him how to do it.

That was 16 years after the Ritz saga in a pub somewhere south of Dubrovnik where Chellel met with the enigmatic gambler who has fascinated the world of casinos.

Niko Tosa simply insisted that he had a roulette wheel at home which, much like the argument put forward by Billings, he used to train his mind and sort of "know."

Yet, a more credible explanation is that the way Niko Tosa beat roulette was by finding those small imperfections in a roulette wheel, the "drop zone."

This could be borne out by the way he scanned the gaming floor of the Ritz on that fateful night – and bet across the wheel, bringing associates to ensure that the split-second window he had to place the wagers would be used in the best possible way.

When Chellel pressed Niko Tosa on whether he had used a computer or a device to help himself, the gambler simply replied: "How can I make you understand? You can call me Nikola Tesla if I have such a device!"

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