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) 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. Now lets take a look at each of the individual bets you can make. 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. Street bet - this is a bet not unlike a split. It allows you to bet on three different numbers with the same bet. Fiver number bet - there is only one five number bet available. There are no winning outside bets for 0 or 00 results. When you place an outside bet your bet 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. 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. 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. you will likely lose money faster the more bets you make, because you're betting more. If you're asked Inside or Outside, always answer "Both", even if you only intend to bet one or the other. 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) In this way, Roulette is more like slots - one single bet can win a lot. 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. Here's another example: Since there are 38 slots on the wheel, we expect any given number to hit 1 out of 38 spins on average. There have been 152 spins (coincidentally, 4 x 38), and so we expect that each number should have come up 4 times on average. The chances of #27 coming up on a given spin are the same, whether it just come up on the last spin or not - 1 in 38. Your odds of winning a one-number bet are 37 to 1 (37 ways to lose, 1 way to win) The European wheel has a lower house edge (2.63%) because it has only 37 slots instead of 38 (no 00) 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. You don't get paid for the win, though, but it's better than losing it outright.