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. 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. Straight-up bet - this is the classic roulette bet. Choose any one of the 38 numbers and put your chips down on that number for the chance to win back at 35 to 1. Street bet - this is a bet not unlike a split. It allows you to bet on three different numbers with the same 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. This is different than inside bets, where the total of all of your inside bets must meet the table minimum. Red or Black - you can choose to bet on the outcome either being a red number, or a black number. Dozens - a bet very similar to the columns bet, dozens lets you place a bet on either the first dozen numbers (1-12), the second dozen (13-24), or the third dozen (25-36)

Roulette is the game where you guess where the little marble is going to drop on the spinning wheel. 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. 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. 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. If you're asked Inside or Outside, always answer "Both", even if you only intend to bet one or the other. In other games the color of the chip denotes the denomination, but in Roulette the color denotes only which player the chip belongs to. Roulette games have minimum bets, which will be posted on a placard at the table. Minimum bets work differently for inside and outside bets. For outside bets, any bet you make has to be 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. 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. Here's another example: Since there are 38 slots on the wheel, we expect any given number to hit 1 out of 38 spins on average. There have been 152 spins (coincidentally, 4 x 38), and so we expect that each number should have come up 4 times on average. If you play Roulette, the most important thing is to find a casino that offers the European wheel (which is called "Single 0" Roulette) European games have an option called en prison which reduces the house edge to 1.35%, but it's generally not available in the U.S., even in casinos that use the European wheel. If you win the second spin, your bet is "released from prison" and you get it back.