"You cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it."
This is an immortal Einstein quote many gamblers - particularly roulette players - are so familiar with. This is the famed genius and Father of Relativity's way of saying that roulette, regardless of how good your system is, can never be won if chance does not permit it.
It's actually questionable whether or not he said that statement at all. He probably did if you consider that he may have found some time to ponder on the probabilities of the game, being one who'd most likely wallow in complicated math during his spare time. We may be stereotyping the man here but the point is that it's possible that he actually gave thought to such a mundane thing as roulette, out of curiosity more or less.
Now the question we'd like to present and answer here is that, can Einstein - or whoever else said this if you're still skeptical - be wrong on this one? Let's consider the facts.
Chance is the primary mechanism behind every roulette game. The roulette wheel follows no set pattern. The outcome of the game is purely random and utterly unpredictable, and as such, there is no way to tell which number or color will come up in the next spin. This confounds many people, and has even gotten some beginners to quit out of frustration.
Fortunately, we have roulette systems that, while not really able to predict the results of a roulette spin, take advantage of the underlying probabilities for the benefit of the player. These systems exploit the fact that an even money bet can win almost 50% of the time, allowing the players to profit once certain conditions are met.
Sadly, even proven roulette systems like the Martingale, despite the strong mathematical backing, is still dependent on luck. The possibility of profit is still there of course, but whether you actually win a spin or not is still subject to chance and can never eliminate the house edge, which is the casino's advantage over the players. This is the obvious flaw of every roulette system, which is why some people kept saying that betting with a system is just the same as betting in random.
The bottomline here is that it takes a certain amount of luck to win roulette, not that it can never be beaten at all. However, trumping over the house - or what the Professor refers to as the roulette table - is an entirely different matter. The house edge can never be eliminated, and the casino wins in the end.
Whether or not Einstein actually gave the assessment that the roulette table can never be beaten unless you cheat on it is trivial. Whether or not this is right however, should shed light on the possibilities of winning the game without worry. It turns out however that Einstein is correct as you can't beat the house in the game with strategy or without, which is the point of winning roulette.