How is this trick done? To someone less schooled in magic, it might seem like there is no "trick" at all, after all Brown fails to win any money. Let's first deal with this misconception:
Rest assured that what Brown is doing here was designed to fail from the start? Why would a mentalist performer want to deliberately fail at something? In fact it is relatively common for magicians to throw an apparent failure into their act as a subtle means of throwing people off, provided you do it right.
The general public is aware from their experience of magic that it very rarely goes truly wrong. Ladies do not get sawed in half. People who are just extraordinarily skilled at something by contrast do often fail to pull it off. Tiger Woods is a great golfer but the day before I wrote this he drove a ball into a lake like a rank amateur in the US Open. We know this on an instictive level.
Now let's look at what Brown is claiming to do here: predict the final resting place of the roulette ball. Interestingly, some people credibly claim to be able to do this. But, in truth, even individuals like Laurance Scott, the man most associated with the science of roulette prediction, who claim (plausibly) to have made money at roulette, do not claim to be able to predict the exact number which will come up, or even close to it. If you could predict exactly where the ball would land, you would have a 3500% return on investment. Even if you could do it, say, 1 time in 10, instead of the normal random 1 in 35, you would still be getting 250% return on average. The casino would be bankrupted in hours.
Predictors like Scott merely claim that they know that certain numbers will come up with slightly higher frequency than other numbers, by only a few % more than normal, a very different thing from the type of almost-perfect prediction Brown hints at.Over a very long series of trials (say, a few thousand spins at least) they might win more than they lose, but they can lose for hours, days, weeks or even months.
I have occassionally experimented with roulette prediction, and, if possible at all, it is a very difficult thing to do. Many spins are completely random due to the effects of scatter and bounce, and the randomizing effects of obstacles scattered around the wheel. In no sense could you try and impress your friends with your skills, let alone the nation on a TV programme, because in the vast majority of cases your guess as to the pocket the ball would land in wouldn't get anywhere near the right number.
This leaves the rather more complex question of what Brown is doing in the programme. It could simply be that he wandered into a random casino and threw down five grand on a random number. But he is only one number out on his prediction, which suggests some kind of manipulation. My "guess" and it truly is a guess, is that the whole casino was a set-up, and the event was filmed with multiple spins till the "right" (or wrong depending on your perspective)number came up. Brown claims not to use stooges and I'm fairly certain he keeps to that...most of the time. I'm sure he rationalized it to himself that he wasn't breaking his own rules as the trick was meant to be a failure.
An alternative possibility is that the casino was genuine and Brown simply bet until he got a number sufficiently close to the desired one for his purposes. The fact that Brown talks to the guy whose money he is supposedly betting with is suspicous: there is no interaction between them but Brown clearly wants to give the impression of a conversation. This suggests manipulation or editing of the audio which may suggest Brown was not betting at the suggested stakes, but, presumably, much lower.
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