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. 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. Most roulette sessions move at a fairly slow pace, to accommodate the number of
people betting, and the variety on which they can bet. Split bet - you
can place a single bet on two individual numbers if those numbers are beside
each other on the table layout. Street bet - this is a bet not unlike a split.
It allows you to bet on three different numbers with the same 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. When you place an outside
bet your bet must meet the table minimum. Low or High - this bet lets you predict whether you
think the next number to come up will be part of the range from 1 to 18, or part
of the range from 19 to 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. 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. Then he'll scoop up all the losing bets towards the dealer area. 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. There's no advantage to
limiting yourself to inside or outside. Roulette games have minimum bets, which will be posted on a
placard at the table. 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! 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. 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. Your odds of winning a
one-number bet are 37 to 1 (37 ways to lose, 1 way to win) If you play Roulette, the most important thing is to find a casino that
offers the European wheel (which is called "Single 0" Roulette) 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. On even money bets when 0 comes up, instead of losing right
away, your bet is "imprisoned" and rides again for the next spin. If
you win the second spin, your bet is "released from prison" and you
get it back. In effect, this variation has the ability to turn a loss into a tie.