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 roulette table moves in sessions, each session is associated with a spin of the wheel and that spin's result. 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) 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. There aren't many specific things that can be considered roulette rules at the table, but here's one you shouldn't forget. The inside bets are made up of specific numbers or combinations of numbers within the number layout, or along the border of it. 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. 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.

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. 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) The house edge is the same whether you make one bet per spin or several. you will likely lose money faster the more bets you make, because you're betting more. 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. That way if two players bet on the same number (or set of numbers), then the dealer knows who to pay, and arguments can't arise over who bet what. 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. In other games the color of the chip denotes the denomination, but in Roulette the color denotes only which player the chip belongs to. When you buy in, tell the dealer what denomination you want. If Black has come up for the last 10 spins in a row, the next spin is not more likely to be Red. There's an old saying, "The wheel has no memory. 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. You can certainly switch to another number if you want, but that won't improve or worsen your chances. The chances of #27 coming up on a given spin are the same, whether it just come up on the last spin or not - 1 in 38. Your odds of winning a one-number bet are 37 to 1 (37 ways to lose, 1 way to win) 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. In effect, this variation has the ability to turn a loss into a tie.