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. If you haven't read up on the rest of the site I'll quickly go over the different colors of chips and how they relate to the rest of the roulette rules. 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. Now lets take a look at each of the individual bets you can make. The inside bets are made up of specific numbers or combinations of numbers within the number layout, or along the border of it. Street bet - this is a bet not unlike a split. It allows you to bet on three different numbers with the same 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. 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 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. 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. Here are the different bets you can make. The house edge is the same whether you make one bet per spin or several. In most games players can continue making bets even while the ball is still spinning. 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. 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. Inside bets can usually be as small a you like, as long as the total of all your inside bets is the table minimum. 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) In this way, Roulette is more like slots - one single bet can win a lot. If Black has come up for the last 10 spins in a row, the next spin is not more likely to be Red. The wheel has no memory. 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. 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. If you win the second spin, your bet is "released from prison" and you get it back.