The punter can only get an edge over the casino by identifying weaknesses in the apparatus and then exploiting that weakness. Lets consider firstly a real wheel.
The only way to win is to get an edge over the casino. In other words beat the fixed odds over the long term. This can only be done by analysing the wheel in order to predict with accuracy which slot the ball is going to land in next. Slots on a roulette wheel have nothing whatever to do with numbers. They are positions in space on a wheel.
The wheel has fixed mechanical characteristics. For example: the diameter of the wheel is known, the distance between slots is known. If every mechanical parameter about the wheel is known, the application of Newton’s laws of motion would allow you to calculate, with certainty, where the ball will land next. Just as Newton’s laws predict the motion of the planets. Such wheel analysis goes back many years. There are stories of clever individuals timing the speed of the wheel and doing calculations based upon the wheels dimensions etc.
Of course this was in real casinos and it didn’t take long for the casino owners to become wise to this practice. They ejected anyone suspected of being a wheel analyser. The one thing wheel analysers were looking for was a fixed wheel. A fixed wheel is one that displays a bias towards one sector of the wheel. If a wheel analyser could identify a biased wheel they simply bet on the sector and thats how they gained an edge on the casino and won in the long run.
It may be wrong to suggest that casinos deliberately fixed wheels but in the early days mechanical engineering was not as accurate as now. With the technology available then it would have been common for a wheel to be naturally biased. Casinos deploy a number of techniques to thwart real wheel analysers: hazards are a placed in the path of the ball on the wheel surface, croupiers are changed at regular intervals, the ball is spun clockwise then anti-clockwise, the frame that displays the numbers on the wheel is moved around, wheels are moved from one table to another when the casino is closed.
We must emphasis that analysing a real roulette wheel is a complex task. You will need to record many sessions at a particular wheel in order to identify a definite fixed biased there. If you do find such a wheel then you will make some winnings. A repeating bias pattern is the holy grail of real wheel analysis and is hard to find. Casinos go to great lengths to ensure that the result of the next spin is a truly random event.