There are many different types of circles in the world. While some are considered ‘perfect circles’ where every curved boundary is the exact same distance from the centre, in practice, many circles deviate from this mathematical definition.
Draw a circle freehand, for instance, and it’s almost never correct. Most people end up drawing an irregular curved or non-geometric loop that’s loosely round but lacks precision.
Sometimes, this is fine. Roundabouts, for example, don’t necessarily need to be a perfect circle. Other things that require precision, like a roulette wheel, do.
Why Tolerance Matters
A roulette wheel isn’t just decorative; it is engineered to ensure outcomes are evenly distributed and that results are completely random.
The tolerance itself isn’t about how it looks; it’s how it operates. A roulette wheel cannot be perfect without offering complete stability and roundness. Without it, certain parts of the wheel will get favoured by the ball due to shape and deviation.
That isn’t all, either. While the circle must be perfect, each pocket needs to have an identical depth and pattern, frets between them have to be equally high, and the ball track has to be uniform all the way around.
How the Wheels Are Built
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Trusted by leading gaming operators worldwide, TCSJOHNHUXLEY’s Saturn™ Roulette Wheels deliver precision, reliability and exceptional performance.
TCSJOHNHUXLEY is one of two established manufacturers alongside Cammegh of Kent, and they describe the process as hand-built and something
that takes 32 hours and 10 separate skilled processes.
Every wheel then goes through more than 130 individual quality checks before dispatch, finishing with a special measuring device that calculates tolerance across every surface the ball touches.
This level of precision is required to ensure complete randomness. A non-round wheel, a deeper-than-normal pocket, or a too-high fret can cause the wheel to react in a favourable way to specific sections.
The Same Wheels, Streamed
— Cammegh Gaming (@CammeghGaming) June 30, 2020
At a physical casino, you can see the wheel. You can review its roundness, each pocket, its quality, and so forth. So, what is the case when you play online? Purely virtual iGaming roulette titles don’t need to rely on top-notch mechanical engineering to ensure fairness as these things can be replaced with a simple random number generator. However, many a Great Britain casino offers live roulette options in addition to completely virtual games, and these live studios need to ensure their roulette wheels are fair and come from quality manufacturers like TCSJOHNHUXLEY just as land-based casinos do. These roulette wheels come with embedded sensors and patented drop zone detection, which flags non-random results and drop zone bias.
Alongside this, they must meet technical standards and comply with the UK Gambling Commission’s (UKGC) standards. One requirement is to get their wheels independently tested by laboratories the Commission approves for their purpose.
As a result, three parties ensure wheels are created properly to ensure randomness: the operator, the roulette wheel maker, and the tested laboratory. Collectively, these ensure that all roulette wheels, even ones used in live studios, are random.
What Perfect Means in Practice
The circle of a roulette wheel needs to be perfectly aligned to its specifications to ensure complete randomness. If not, certain parts of the wheel will be favoured, resulting in biased results.
The biased results aren’t just a problem for the player, either. Operators can also suffer from this if their roulette wheels aren’t configured properly and someone figures it out. Therefore, they need to be engineered perfectly to provide the roulette experience.