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. At this point the dealer will say 'place your bets' and everyone at the table will start throwing chips down like crazy. 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. 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. 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. There are the different types of outside bets.

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. 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. 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) Here are the different bets you can make. 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. 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. Each player's chips are a different color. Sometimes the dealer will ask you "Inside or Outside? " when you're buying chips, to find out whether you're making inside bets (the ones listed in purple in the table, on specific numbers) or outside bets (the ones listed in yellow, on kinds of numbers) 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 games have minimum bets, which will be posted on a placard at the table. Here's a handy way to remember the payouts when you're betting on a set of numbers: Take 36 divided by the quantity of numbers you're betting on, and subtract 1. The last time we checked, Single 0 Roulette was available at the Stratosphere and the Monte Carlo on the Vegas Strip. 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.