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. 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. Most roulette sessions move at a fairly slow pace, to accommodate the number of people betting, and the variety on which they can bet. 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. Split bet - you can place a single bet on two individual numbers if those numbers are beside each other on the table layout. There are no winning outside bets for 0 or 00 results. When you place an outside bet your bet must meet the table minimum. This is different than inside bets, where the total of all of your inside bets must meet the table minimum. Columns - at one end of the set of 38 numbers are boxes with the words '2 to 1' written in them.

Roulette is the game where you guess where the little marble is going to drop on the spinning wheel. 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. 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. 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. That way, you're not locked in and you always have the ability to change your mind. In other games the color of the chip denotes the denomination, but in Roulette the color denotes only which player the chip belongs to. For outside bets, any bet you make has to be the table minimum. In this way, Roulette is more like slots - one single bet can win a lot. It's important to understand that the outcome of the roulette wheel is truly random. 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. 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. You don't get paid for the win, though, but it's better than losing it outright. In effect, this variation has the ability to turn a loss into a tie.