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 player plays with their own color chips. 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. 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. 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. Split bet - you can place a single bet on two individual numbers if those numbers are beside each other on the table layout. 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. There are the different types of outside bets. 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.

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. When the ball is getting ready to drop, the dealer will wave his hand over the table, which means "No more bets". Don't reach for your winnings until the dealer removes the marker, or the dealer will scold you. 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. Each player's chips are a different color. In other games the color of the chip denotes the denomination, but in Roulette the color denotes only which player the chip belongs to. 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. Minimum bets work differently for inside and outside bets. Remember that you can bet inside or outside if you like; there's no requirement to bet both on a given spin. 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. If Black has come up for the last 10 spins in a row, the next spin is not more likely to be Red. 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. The difference between the true odds and what they actually pay you is 2/38, or 5.26%. On even money bets when 0 comes up, instead of losing right away, your bet is "imprisoned" and rides again for the next spin.