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. Each roulette table moves in sessions, each session is associated with a spin of the wheel and that spin's result. A session ends when the ball lands where it may, and the dealers clear the board of losing bets (and pay winning ones of course) At this point the dealer will say 'place your bets' and everyone at the table will start throwing chips down like crazy. After the ball has started spinning, the dealer will wave his hands across the table and say 'no more bets'. Just sit back and let the ball fall where it may. 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. 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. 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. 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)

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. 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) The house edge is the same whether you make one bet per spin or several. 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. " 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) There's no advantage to limiting yourself to inside or outside. 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! Black and Red still have equal chances of hitting. " That means it doesn't know what it spun before, and even if it did, the wheel can't select what number comes up out of its own volition. You can certainly switch to another number if you want, but that won't improve or worsen your chances. 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. The European wheel has a lower house edge (2.63%) because it has only 37 slots instead of 38 (no 00) If you play Roulette, the most important thing is to find a casino that offers the European wheel (which is called "Single 0" Roulette)