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. At this point the
dealer will say 'place your bets' and everyone at the table will start throwing
chips down like crazy. 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. Split bet - you
can place a single bet on two individual numbers if those numbers are beside
each other on the table layout. 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. Columns - at one end of the set of 38 numbers are
boxes with the words '2 to 1' written in them.
Roulette is the game where you guess where the little marble is going to drop
on the spinning wheel. 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. When the ball is getting
ready to drop, the dealer will wave his hand over the table, which means "No
more bets". Then he'll scoop up all the losing bets towards the dealer area. Don't reach for your winnings until the dealer
removes the marker, or the dealer will scold you. That way if
two players bet on the same number (or set of numbers), then the dealer knows
who to pay, and arguments can't arise over who bet what. 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) There's no advantage to
limiting yourself to inside or outside. 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! There's an old saying,
"The wheel has no memory. 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. 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. The difference
between the true odds and what they actually pay you is 2/38, or 5.26%. The
last time we checked, Single 0 Roulette was available at the Stratosphere and
the Monte Carlo on the Vegas Strip.