How to Play Roulette: A Complete Guide

Roulette is a game that no casino could be without. The game has survived the ages and continues to be a canvas for innovation in the 21st century.

That durability is because this casino table game represents a perfect marriage of intrigue and simplicity for the player. The game's goal is simple but the path to achieving it is complicated and plentiful.

That lets new players jump right in while the game is intricate enough to keep challenging those who have been playing it on a regular basis for decades. Those are not easy experiences to replicate.

The History and Evolution of Roulette

The history of roulette is hard to pin down in terms of details but accepted history does attribute some credit to a French physicist by the name of Blaise Pascal. Pascal created what many consider to be the first version of the roulette wheel in the mid-17th century while he was trying to accomplish perpetual motion.

The history of roulette from that point is one of cultural exchange across Europe and then onward to Asia and the Americas over the centuries since. During that time, different versions of roulette have been developed and casinos have featured many versions of roulette.

While people play roulette for a broad range of reasons, there are several commonalties in that appeal. Roulette encompasses much of what players desire in a game.

Why Players Adore Roulette

Roulette has not survived for centuries and spread globally on a whim. The reasons why roulette is played are the game's house edges, forms of bets, and simple rules.

When you sit at a roulette table, you have a single thing to do; try to predict the pocket on the wheel where the pill lands when the wheel stops spinning. An easy task but one difficult to accomplish. Also you can play online at legal roulette apps.

There are many different ways to arrive at that result in roulette, which speaks to a wide range of probabilities. You can find anything in roulette, ranging from bets that have close to a 50% chance of hitting to bets that provide an outside result.

The only learning curve with roulette is those bet types and how they can differ from game to game. Once you have the basics down, you can adjust to just about anything the game throws your way.

Types of Roulette You Can Play

Online roulette for real money and roulette tables at land-based casinos usually have one of three roulette types. There are American, European, and French roulette games.

European roulette is the most common and the version most players recognize as the standard. French roulette employs the same wheel but presents a different betting grid to players. American roulette adds a second green number to the wheel, the 00 zero. Overall, American roulette is a higher stakes game than European and French roulette.

Across all three variations, the overall course of the game is basically identical. Each play can happen very quickly.

How To Play Roulette

Learning to play roulette is easy. You select a game and determine how much you would like to bet and which bet you would like to place. There are some bets that are always the best roulette bets, like roulette side bets. Then you put the appropriate chips on the space on the table that corresponds to that bet.

After that, all you do is wait and see the result of your play. You can then play once more if you want or end your session.

You are also allowed to place call bets, bets that do not normally have their own space on the table. In these bets, you will need to announce the croupier and have your bet confirmed by them before the betting closes.

Placing your roulette bets is easier if you know what you are looking at on the table. Understanding how the table's grid corresponds to the wheel takes your knowledge to the next level.

Getting to Know the Roulette Wheel and Table Layout

The roulette table layout and roulette wheel are made up of a series of numbers and wagers based on those numbers.
Those numbers, in most roulette games, will be 0 through 37. American roulette games will, however, have a 00.
In standard roulette, half of the non-zero numbers are red and half are black. Each number on the wheel has a pocket corresponding to it.
The grid typically will have more on it than just the numbers, with spaces for words for common bets like high or low, odds or evens, red or black.
If you're unsure what a space on the grid means, it's perfectly fine to ask the croupier.