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. 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. Most roulette sessions move at a fairly slow pace, to accommodate the number of people betting, and the variety on which they can bet. 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. This is different than inside bets, where the total of all of your inside bets must meet the table minimum. Red or Black - you can choose to bet on the outcome either being a red number, or a black number. 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.

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. 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) You don't have to make just one kind of bet for each spin, you can make several, and you win if the ball lands on any of your numbers. The house edge is the same whether you make one bet per spin or several. 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. Sometimes the dealer will ask you "Inside or Outside? " 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) That's because if you're betting only inside and someone else is betting only outside, he can give you both the same color chips and there won't be any confusion. If Black has come up for the last 10 spins in a row, the next spin is not more likely to be Red. Here's another example: Since there are 38 slots on the wheel, we expect any given number to hit 1 out of 38 spins on average. 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. 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 European wheel has a lower house edge (2.63%) because it has only 37 slots instead of 38 (no 00) You don't get paid for the win, though, but it's better than losing it outright.