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. All of your chips of the same color are worth the same amount. Most roulette sessions move at a fairly slow pace, to accommodate the number of people betting, and the variety on which they can bet. After the ball has started spinning, the dealer will wave his hands across the table and say 'no more bets'. At this point, as you intuition may have mentioned to you, you can't place any more bets. Now lets take a look at each of the individual bets you can make. Odd or Even - similar to the red black bet, this even money bet is based on whether the resulting number will be odd or even.

Making a bet is easy - you just place your chip(s) on the number(s), color, or sets you want to bet on. When the ball is getting ready to drop, the dealer will wave his hand over the table, which means "No more bets". Then he'll scoop up all the losing bets towards the dealer area. 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'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. That way, you're not locked in and you always have the ability to change your mind. Roulette chips can in fact be any denomination - $1, $5, $25, etc. Remember that you can bet inside or outside if you like; there's no requirement to bet both on a given spin. 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! Here's another example: Since there are 38 slots on the wheel, we expect any given number to hit 1 out of 38 spins on average. 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. 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. The difference between the true odds and what they actually pay you is 2/38, or 5.26%. If you play Roulette, the most important thing is to find a casino that offers the European wheel (which is called "Single 0" Roulette) 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. On even money bets when 0 comes up, instead of losing right away, your bet is "imprisoned" and rides again for the next spin. In effect, this variation has the ability to turn a loss into a tie.