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. 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) 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. When the new session starts you can put your
chips down where you want to bet, and you don't really have to be in a hurry. 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. This is different than inside bets,
where the total of all of your inside bets must meet the table minimum. Columns - at one end of the set of 38 numbers are
boxes with the words '2 to 1' written in them.
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. Making a bet is easy - you just place your chip(s) on the number(s), color, or
sets you want to bet on. 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. The house edge is the same whether you
make one bet per spin or several. In most games players can continue
making bets even while the ball is still spinning. Sometimes the dealer
will ask you "Inside or Outside? In other games the color of the chip
denotes the denomination, but in Roulette the color denotes only which player
the chip belongs to. 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. 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. Black and Red still have equal chances of hitting. There have been 152 spins (coincidentally,
4 x 38), and so we expect that each number should have come up 4 times on
average. On an American wheel,
there are 38 spots - numbers 1-36, plus 0 and 00. The difference
between the true odds and what they actually pay you is 2/38, or 5.26%. The
last time we checked, Single 0 Roulette was available at the Stratosphere and
the Monte Carlo on the Vegas Strip. Atlantic City has a special rule which
reduces the house edge to 2.7% on even money bets (Red/Black, Odd/Even,
1-18/19-36): If 0 or 00 comes up on on even money bet, you lose only half your
bet. On even money bets when 0 comes up, instead of losing right
away, your bet is "imprisoned" and rides again for the next spin.