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. 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. 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. 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. Fiver number bet - there is only one five number bet available. This is different than inside bets, where the total of all of your inside bets must meet the table minimum.

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. 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. 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) 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. Each player's chips are a different color. There's no advantage to limiting yourself to inside or outside. 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. Minimum bets work differently for inside and outside bets. Inside bets can usually be as small a you like, as long as the total of all your inside bets is the table minimum. Remember that you can bet inside or outside if you like; there's no requirement to bet both on a given spin. 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. 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. 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.