> would writing down results from a roulette wheel in a notebook be cheating?

If you've been to Vegas, casinos tacitly encourage this by showing the last 100 spins of the roulette wheel and displaying "statistics" about the numbers that have or haven't frequently come up. Of course, this is all garbage because at 100 spins that's nowhere near enough to formulate any kind of statistical theory.

(and they have an internal counter, and if there is a meaningful deviation from the 1/38 slots they will rebalance or pull the wheel)

Do you have a source for that?

I'm at work, and it's blocking "casino" sites but google this [1] for a start:

"Roulette - Biased Wheels and Wheelhead Speed - Casino News Daily"

I read the cached version, its an advisory for casinos about how to look out for biased wheels. I'll look again tonight when I get home.

well I attempted to look, but there's too many pages for snake oil "beat the house" systems. I may have been wrong since I cannot find evidence, but if a wheel were biased, people would eventually detect it and exploit it. So at the very least, they would analyze the money drops and see an abnormal money flowing out of one particular table.

Here is a story including a possible way to workaround bias in the wheels

http://www.gambling-stories.com/2014/03/joseph-jaggers-roule...

> Would writing down results from a roulette wheel in a notebook be cheating?

Hilariously, in some casinos, they actually hand out notebooks and pens for that purpose.