The first thing you should know before you learn anything about the bets you can make, is when and how you can make those bets. At this point the dealer will say 'place your bets' and everyone at the table will start throwing chips down like crazy. 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. 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. All of your chips of the same color are worth the same amount. Most roulette sessions move at a fairly slow pace, to accommodate the number of people betting, and the variety on which they can bet. After the ball has started spinning, the dealer will wave his hands across the table and say 'no more bets'. Split bet - you can place a single bet on two individual numbers if those numbers are beside each other on the table layout. When you place an outside bet your bet must meet the table minimum. This is different than inside bets, where the total of all of your inside bets must meet the table minimum.

You should always calculate your expected loss and how long you can play on a given bankroll before playing any game, but with roulette it's especially important. We've added blue circled letters to the diagram to point out how to make the not-so-obvious bets (the sets of 2-6 numbers) Here are the different bets you can make. When the ball is getting ready to drop, the dealer will wave his hand over the table, which means "No more bets". When the ball falls into a slot, the dealer will announce the number and the color, and place a marker on the layout where the winning number is. Don't reach for your winnings until the dealer removes the marker, or the dealer will scold you. New players often have to be told this repeatedly the first time they play because they kept forgetting and because they're excited about collecting their winnings. Sometimes the dealer will ask you "Inside or Outside? " 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) Inside bets can usually be as small a you like, as long as the total of all your inside bets is the table minimum. Remember that you can bet inside or outside if you like; there's no requirement to bet both on a given spin. 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! It's important to understand that the outcome of the roulette wheel is truly random. There's an old saying, "The wheel has no memory. There have been 152 spins (coincidentally, 4 x 38), and so we expect that each number should have come up 4 times on average. Your odds of winning a one-number bet are 37 to 1 (37 ways to lose, 1 way to win) If you win the second spin, your bet is "released from prison" and you get it back.