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) At this point the dealer will say 'place your bets' and everyone at the table will start throwing chips down like crazy. 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. At this point, as you intuition may have mentioned to you, you can't place any more bets. Split bet - you can place a single bet on two individual numbers if those numbers are beside each other on the table layout. There are no winning outside bets for 0 or 00 results. This is different than inside bets, where the total of all of your inside bets must meet the table minimum. Dozens - a bet very similar to the columns bet, dozens lets you place a bet on either the first dozen numbers (1-12), the second dozen (13-24), or the third dozen (25-36)

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. Making a bet is easy - you just place your chip(s) on the number(s), color, or sets you want to bet on. 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. The house edge is the same whether you make one bet per spin or several. 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. 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) 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. In other games the color of the chip denotes the denomination, but in Roulette the color denotes only which player the chip belongs to. For outside bets, any bet you make has to be the table minimum. 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. if you win, the casino doesn't pay you 37 to 1, they pay you less - 35 to 1. The difference between the true odds and what they actually pay you is 2/38, or 5.26%. 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.