Roulette is one of the easiest casino games to learn and play. It also offers excellent opportunities of winning to those who are willing to make a study of it.
The centerpiece of the roulette table is a rotating wheel that contains 37 or 38 numbered slots. A croupier spins a small ball in the direction opposite to the wheel, and it will eventually slow and drop into one of the slots. Your task as the player is to predict where the ball will land. You do so by placing a bet on a field of corresponding numbers. If you are right, you will win at fixed odds. If not, you will lose your wager. Nothing could be simpler, or potentially more frustrating.
The French Evolution
One of the earliest forms of roulette was called “Roly Poly.” Popular in England in the 1720s, it involved rolling a ball around a wheel with slots, two of which were marked for the banker. Players wagered on which slot the ball would land in, losing their bets if the bank’s slot came up.
When the British Parliament outlawed Roly Poly in 1739, a new game replaced it called E/O, or “Even and Odd.” This game featured a wheel with forty unnumbered black and white slots, one of each colour designated for the banker. The dealer collected losing bets and paid off winners at even odds, making it strictly low-profit game. When a black or white bank slot was hit, losses were collected, but no winners were paid, thus creating a very small house advantage.
Around 1745, E/O crossed the channel to France, where the white slots were painted red and the French took to calling the game “roelete” or “small wheel.” The physical wheel they used for this game was a native invention created by mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). In 1655, Pascal had been trying to create a perpetual motion machine and the smoothly rotating disk he came up with suited roelete perfectly.
Meanwhile, an Italian lottery-type game called biribi had become popular on the streets of Genoa, and it spread to the South of France. One version of the game employed a board displaying 36 numbers and a sack of correspondingly numbered balls. Players would wager on which ball would be blindly drawn by the dealer.
It is not certain who had the bright idea of fusing biribi with roelete by numbering the slots on the wheel and configuring the board layout in red and black, but it clearly occurred sometime between 1760 and 1789. That’s when the game of roulette as we now know it became the rage in the casinos of Monte Carlo and the resorts of Spa in southern Belgium.
Following the French Revolution, when anti-gambling laws were relaxed, the Palais Royale in Paris adopted roulette as its primary form of amusement. The “small wheel” was poised to become the “King of Casino Games” and a new French export.
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