The article implies he started out on double-zero machines with a 5.3% house edge. Assume 1 roll per minute and a Kelly-sized bet:
- It'd take on average 87h to 50x your bankroll at a 2.7% edge (half the supposed house edge). You're on average approximately doubling your money with every win, so he _might_ have just gotten a few more wins in the night than expected, but that would be very lucky.
- It'd take 9.5h on average to 50x your bankroll at a 7% edge (1.5x the supposed house edge). That's very achievable in a long night, and you're approximately quadrupling your bankroll every win, so just being a little lucky with a single extra win would drastically cut down the total time.
A mathematician with a clue and a winning house edge would bet fairly conservatively and bet more as their bankroll expanded and bet less as their bankroll retracted to reduce their risk of ruin. Somebody making 50x their bet in an hour at roulette may sound impressive to many people, but it's obviously idiotic to any gambler worth their salt. It's so unlikely that it suggests incompetence at risk management more than it does genius gambling.
Now if you take a more conservative strategy, lets say you can lose 1% or win 35% of your initial bankroll, sure it may take longer but if you have an edge in your favor it should take a very unlucky streak of bad luck to go bankrupt and when you win your winnings will compound on top of eachother and the casino still will go bankrupt within a month if they don't ban you from playing roulette. So a more conservative strategy nets you more cash on average.
This is kind of a tangent, honestly I'm not even sure how unlikely it is for a gambler with a reasonably executed winning strategy to double up a few times over a long night if they're running hot. They would be doing this over hundreds of rounds of betting, so a small edge compounds rather quickly.
And this is not the only part of the article that smells fishy.
> In a matter of hours, he flipped his $100 into $5,000
This kind of profit has nothing to do with the kind of edge you can get when you have detected some irregularities in the wheel. Maybe you'll have an edge of a few percent. If he really flipped his $100 into $5,000 he was not only seriously lucky, but was also gambling a far too large portion of his bankroll, risking a 'gamblers ruin'.