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. All of your chips of the same color are worth the same amount. 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. 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. Columns - at one end of the set of 38 numbers are boxes with the words '2 to 1' written in them.

Making a bet is easy - you just place your chip(s) on the number(s), color, or sets you want to bet on. 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. Then he'll scoop up all the losing bets towards the dealer area. Roulette chips can in fact be any denomination - $1, $5, $25, etc. When you buy in, tell the dealer what denomination you want. 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) 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. 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. Your odds of winning a one-number bet are 37 to 1 (37 ways to lose, 1 way to win) 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. You don't get paid for the win, though, but it's better than losing it outright. In effect, this variation has the ability to turn a loss into a tie.