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. After the ball has started spinning, the dealer will wave his hands across the table and say 'no more bets'. At this point, as you intuition may have mentioned to you, you can't place any more bets. Just sit back and let the ball fall where it may. On inside bets, the total of all of your bets must add up to at least the table minimum. There are the different types of outside bets. Red or Black - you can choose to bet on the outcome either being a red number, or a black number. Low or High - this bet lets you predict whether you think the next number to come up will be part of the range from 1 to 18, or part of the range from 19 to 36. 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. Here are the different bets you can make. You don't have to make just one kind of bet for each spin, you can make several, and you win if the ball lands on any of your numbers. The house edge is the same whether you make one bet per spin or several. " when you're buying chips, to find out whether you're making inside bets (the ones listed in purple in the table, on specific numbers) or outside bets (the ones listed in yellow, on kinds of numbers) That way, you're not locked in and you always have the ability to change your mind. Roulette chips can in fact be any denomination - $1, $5, $25, etc. For outside bets, any bet you make has to be the table minimum. It most other games a bet usually wins only even money, but Roulette gives you the chance to win 35 times your bet (a winning bet placed on a single number) Here's a handy way to remember the payouts when you're betting on a set of numbers: Take 36 divided by the quantity of numbers you're betting on, and subtract 1. 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. You can certainly switch to another number if you want, but that won't improve or worsen your chances. 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. The difference between the true odds and what they actually pay you is 2/38, or 5.26%. On even money bets when 0 comes up, instead of losing right away, your bet is "imprisoned" and rides again for the next spin.