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) At this point, as you intuition may have mentioned to you, you can't place any more bets. On inside bets, the total of all of your bets must add up to at least the table minimum. 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. There are no winning outside bets for 0 or 00 results. When you place an outside bet your bet must meet the table minimum. There are the different types of outside bets. 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.

Here are the different bets you can make. 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. If you're asked Inside or Outside, always answer "Both", even if you only intend to bet one or the other. There's no advantage to limiting yourself to inside or outside. Roulette chips can in fact be any denomination - $1, $5, $25, etc. Roulette games have minimum bets, which will be posted on a placard at the table. Inside bets can usually be as small a you like, as long as the total of all your inside bets is the table minimum. 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! Now let's say you've been playing Roulette for a few hours, betting on Red every time, and you've been keeping track of what numbers have hit. 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. On an American wheel, there are 38 spots - numbers 1-36, plus 0 and 00. 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. 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.