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 player plays with their own color chips. All of your chips of the same color are worth the same amount. 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. Split bet - you can place a single bet on two individual numbers if those numbers are beside each other on the table layout. 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. 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. This is different than inside bets, where the total of all of your inside bets must meet the table minimum.

Making a bet is easy - you just place your chip(s) on the number(s), color, or sets you want to bet on. 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. 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. Then he'll scoop up all the losing bets towards the dealer area. 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. 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. 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! It's important to understand that the outcome of the roulette wheel is truly random. Black and Red still have equal chances of hitting. 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. You can certainly switch to another number if you want, but that won't improve or worsen your chances. 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.