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) 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. All of your chips of the same color are worth the same amount. If you have a player you likes to put down twenty different bets each time they play, the sessions are going to move a little slower. At this point, as you intuition may have mentioned to you, you can't place any more bets. The inside bets are made up of specific numbers or combinations of numbers within the number layout, or along the border of it. Split bet - you can place a single bet on two individual numbers if those numbers are beside each other on the table layout.

Roulette is the game where you guess where the little marble is going to drop on the spinning wheel. 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. You should always calculate your expected loss and how long you can play on a given bankroll before playing any game, but with roulette it's especially important. 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. 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'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. Roulette chips can in fact be any denomination - $1, $5, $25, etc. When you buy in, tell the dealer what denomination you want. There have been 152 spins (coincidentally, 4 x 38), and so we expect that each number should have come up 4 times on average. On an American wheel, there are 38 spots - numbers 1-36, plus 0 and 00. Your odds of winning a one-number bet are 37 to 1 (37 ways to lose, 1 way to win) if you win, the casino doesn't pay you 37 to 1, they pay you less - 35 to 1. Atlantic City has a special rule which reduces the house edge to 2.7% on even money bets (Red/Black, Odd/Even, 1-18/19-36): If 0 or 00 comes up on on even money bet, you lose only half your bet. 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. If you win the second spin, your bet is "released from prison" and you get it back. 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.