The Basics of Roullete

Roullete (also called Roulette) is a gambling game in which players bet on the color of a number or grouping of numbers, whether they are odd or even, high or low. It is a popular casino game that offers considerable depth for serious betters. Despite the simplicity of its rules and appearance, it can be very profitable for those who play correctly.

The game’s history goes back more than 300 years. It was invented in its primitive form in the 17th century by Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician who was studying probability in the hope of creating a perpetual motion machine. It reached its present layout and wheel structure about a hundred years later, when it became an extremely popular game in Europe.

Modern roulette wheels are made of a solid, slightly convex wooden disk, with metal separators arranged around its circumference and the compartments or pockets between them (called canoes by croupiers). Thirty-six of these pockets, painted alternately red and black, carry the numbers 1 to 36. On European-style wheels, a 37th compartment, painted green, carries the sign 0; on American-style wheels, two green compartments on opposite sides of the wheel carry the signs 00. The symmetry of the wheel and its spindle ensure that the ball will drop into one of the thirty-six colored compartments with every revolution.

Before the ball is spun, bets are placed by laying chips on a betting mat, the precise placement of the chips indicating the type of bet being made. All bets except the ones on six numbers or less are known as Outside bets. The payout for a winning bet is determined by the number of chips in that particular area on the table. For example, a bet on the number zero costs 17 chips and pays 235 chips; bets on 1 to 11 cost 26 chips and pay 392 chips; and so on.

Despite the fact that there are a variety of systems for playing roulette and supposedly winning it, in the end all that matters is luck and a little bit of strategy. A quick search on Google will return countless, often very complicated, systems of playing the game. But the most important factor is to set a budget before you start, and stick to it. This way you can avoid being a victim of the house edge.