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. If you have a player you likes to put down twenty different bets each time they play, the sessions are going to move a little slower. At this point, as you intuition may have mentioned to you, you can't place any more bets. The inside bets are made up of specific numbers or combinations of numbers within the number layout, or along the border of it. The outside bets on a roulette board are simply the bets that reside 'outside' of the main playing area of 38 numbers. There are the different types of outside bets. Columns - at one end of the set of 38 numbers are boxes with the words '2 to 1' written in them.

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. In most games players can continue making bets even while the ball is still spinning. 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. " 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) Roulette games have minimum bets, which will be posted on a placard at the table. 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! You can certainly switch to another number if you want, but that won't improve or worsen your chances. 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. 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. On even money bets when 0 comes up, instead of losing right away, your bet is "imprisoned" and rides again for the next spin. If you win the second spin, your bet is "released from prison" and you get it back. You don't get paid for the win, though, but it's better than losing it outright.