At this point the
dealer will say 'place your bets' and everyone at the table will start throwing
chips down like crazy. If you haven't read up on the rest of the site I'll
quickly go over the different colors of chips and how they relate to the rest of
the roulette rules. Each player plays with their own color chips. All of your chips of the same
color are worth the same amount. When the new session starts you can put your
chips down where you want to bet, and you don't really have to be in a hurry. At this point, as you intuition may have mentioned
to you, you can't place any more bets. On inside bets, the total of all
of your bets must add up to at least the table minimum. 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. 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. There
are the different types of outside bets.
The house edge is the same whether you
make one bet per spin or several. When the ball is getting
ready to drop, the dealer will wave his hand over the table, which means "No
more bets". 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. 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 chips can in fact be any denomination - $1, $5,
$25, etc. Minimum bets work differently for inside and outside bets. For outside bets, any bet you make has to be the table minimum. 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. All the bets on the layout carry the same house edge, with the exception
of 5-number Line Bet (0, 00, 1, 2, 3), which carries a whopping 7.29% edge! Black and Red still have equal chances of hitting. There's an old saying,
"The wheel has no memory. 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 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.