Actually, there's not much to tell. Everyone went a little crazy when on Monday, June 18, pro-poker player Jeff Romano posted a picture to his Twitter that appeared to show a roulette wheel at the Rio hitting the number 19 on seven straight spins, before the ball landed on 15, then hit 19 once again for a run of eight 19s in nine spins.
The odds on an unbroken run of seven consecutive 19s hitting would have been about 3 billion to 1, had the event actually occurred, but subsequent accounts from sources at Caesars Entertainment reported first that the incident was simply a diagnostic test in progress, followed by official confirmation that in fact it was due to a roulette-reader malfunction. According to the LV Sun, PR spokesman Gary Thompson explained later that week that the number 19 hit twice for real in a three-minute span, at which point the machine began misreading spins, registering four 20s in a six-spin series, then the successive 19s. "We had a look at the surveillance cameras, and those number absolutely were entered wrong. The board was not reading the proper numbers on those spins." So, rather than some historic moment in roulette history, it turned out simply to have been a technical glitch. Click the link to see the picture posted by Romano.
For more -- mainly real and verified -- crazy roulette statistics, check out the QoD archives for 4/21/11.
