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 the
dealer will say 'place your bets' and everyone at the table will start throwing
chips down like crazy. 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. Just sit back and let the ball fall where
it may. Split bet - you
can place a single bet on two individual numbers if those numbers are beside
each other on the table layout. The outside bets on a roulette board are
simply the bets that reside 'outside' of the main playing area of 38 numbers. 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.
Roulette would be a great game were it not for the high
house edge - usually 5.26%, sometimes as low as 2.63%, which is still higher
than blackjack, craps, or baccarat. 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. 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) In most games players can continue
making bets even while the ball is still spinning. Then he'll scoop up all the losing bets towards the dealer area. In other games the color of the chip
denotes the denomination, but in Roulette the color denotes only which player
the chip belongs to. When you buy in, tell the dealer what denomination you want. It most other games a bet usually wins only even money, but
Roulette gives you the chance to win 35 times your bet (a winning bet placed on
a single number) 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! Black and Red still have equal chances of hitting. There's an old saying,
"The wheel has no memory. " 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. 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
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.