If you haven't read up on the rest of the site I'll
quickly go over the different colors of chips and how they relate to the rest of
the roulette rules. Each player plays with their own color chips. You trade in
your checks (which most people think of as regular casino chips, but they're
actually called checks) for roulette chips when a new session starts, and the
dealer assigns you a number and denomination. At this point, as you intuition may have mentioned
to you, you can't place any more bets. Now lets take a look at each of the individual bets you can make. Street bet - this is a bet not unlike a split.
It allows you to bet on three different numbers with the same bet. Corner bet -
lets you bet on four adjoining numbers. Placing your chips at the point where
four numbers meet will indicate you want a corner bet. Fiver number bet - there
is only one five number bet available. The outside bets on a roulette board are
simply the bets that reside 'outside' of the main playing area of 38 numbers. Columns - at one end of the set of 38 numbers are
boxes with the words '2 to 1' written in them.
For most bets it's fairly obvious - you can't miss the
Red diamond for Red bets, and things like Even, 1-18, and 1st 12 are written out
in plain English. When the ball is getting
ready to drop, the dealer will wave his hand over the table, which means "No
more bets". That's because if you're betting only inside and someone else is
betting only outside, he can give you both the same color chips and there won't
be any confusion. Roulette chips can in fact be any denomination - $1, $5,
$25, etc. When you buy in, tell the dealer what denomination you want. Remember that
you can bet inside or outside if you like; there's no requirement to bet both on
a given spin. In this way, Roulette is more like slots - one single bet can
win a lot. All the bets on the layout carry the same house edge, with the exception
of 5-number Line Bet (0, 00, 1, 2, 3), which carries a whopping 7.29% edge! If Black has
come up for the last 10 spins in a row, the next spin is not more likely to be
Red. There have been 152 spins (coincidentally,
4 x 38), and so we expect that each number should have come up 4 times on
average. The wheel has no memory. The
chances of #27 coming up on a given spin are the same, whether it just come up
on the last spin or not - 1 in 38. It's more important to know what the house edge is, than how to calculate
it, but here's a quick analysis in case you're interested. If you play Roulette, the most important thing is to find a casino that
offers the European wheel (which is called "Single 0" Roulette) The
last time we checked, Single 0 Roulette was available at the Stratosphere and
the Monte Carlo on the Vegas Strip. On even money bets when 0 comes up, instead of losing right
away, your bet is "imprisoned" and rides again for the next spin. In effect, this variation has the ability to turn a loss into a tie.