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) All of your chips of the same color are worth the same amount. 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. At this point, as you intuition may have mentioned to you, you can't place any more bets. 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. Street bet - this is a bet not unlike a split. It allows you to bet on three different numbers with the same bet. Fiver number bet - there is only one five number bet available. When you place an outside bet your bet must meet the table minimum. 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.

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) Don't reach for your winnings until the dealer removes the marker, or the dealer will scold you. 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) 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. Remember that you can bet inside or outside if you like; there's no requirement to bet both on a given spin. 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! There's an old saying, "The wheel has no memory. 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. 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.