Roulette’s whirling wheel has mesmerized generations of gamblers, arguably coming to embody the glamour, excitement and occasional misery of the casino better than any other game. Glyn Thomas examines the statistics, strategies and history behind ‘The Devil’s Game’.
Whether portraying a dodgy local villain or James Bond outplaying the bad guy, whenever the director wants to show a casino, there is one essential central prop – a roulette table. Add some cigar smoke, a few floozies and a sweaty, fat man wearing a tight dress shirt. Drop the lighting or add chandeliers to reflect the class of the establishment and hey! We’re gambling!
That the game has become synonymous with casinos is no surprise as roulette (which literally translates as ‘small wheel’) has existed since the 17th Century. The original idea for a gambling wheel is attributed to number of people – from a mad Benedictine monk to the Chinese, but most sources point to a French scientist, Blaise Pascal. Even his contribution is clouded in a degree of mystery as some say that he was trying to build a perpetual motion machine. If so, he failed, but unwittingly developed a perpetual money-making machine instead!
The simple version of the game was called ‘boule’. It’s still around today in France and known as ‘the little game’. Roulette, or ‘the big game’ was brought to prominence by the brothers Francois and Louis Blanc (managers of the Bad Homberg casino in Germany) in the mid 19th Century. The enterprising pair removed the double zero and hence improved players’ odds.
With greater chances of winning, roulette took off, particularly in Monaco, aided by the patronage of the Prince of Monaco, Charles III. Fortunes were lost and won at the spin of a wheel and the game’s reputation was sealed. Eventually, roulette found its way to the United States in virtually the same format but with the double zero reinstated on the wheel.
As you are playing against the house rather than other players, roulette can be a very social game – and occasionally very animated. In Vegas it is not uncommon to be sat between a James Caan lookalike and a Vietnam vet. Furthermore, as you are playing you also get free drinks and your English accent will go down a storm – how cool is that? To top it all, whereas most casino games require a degree of concentration (and hence alcohol can take the edge off your play), roulette is so simple that a more leisurely approach can be adopted.
The wheel
It’s a testament to roulette’s popularity that there are currently over 5,000 roulette wheels in the world. It’s all the more remarkable, given that, aside from technological improvements, the game with the white ball whizzing around a 560mm diameter wheel has remained unchanged since its invention. . . Well, almost!
Essentially there are three versions of roulette – English, French and American. In English roulette (also, confusingly, described by the Americans as ‘European roulette’) the wheel has 37 slots representing numbers 1-36 and one zero. American roulette, on the other hand, has a wheel with 38 slots, because there are two zeros. French roulette is an article in its own right and will be covered at a later date – it has two zeros, a different layout and, perhaps in a move to solve French unemployment, four dealers. English roulette was a direct development of the labour-intensive French version, adapted to speed the game up by having only one dealer.
Still with me? Don’t worry – for the purposes of this article, we’re going to assume we’re playing English roulette.
Basic play
A minimum of one player is required, with a maximum of eight. Each player has chips of a different colour (to avoid bets being confused). When you cash up at the end of the game, you exchange the coloured chips for real value ones.
To play, you place your chips on the numbers (including zero) and set betting positions (odds or evens, red or black, et al) on the table layout. The casino sets minimum and maximum bets. When sufficient time has elapsed for betting, the dealer spins the wheel and launches the ball in the opposite direction. Just before the ball is about to drop, the dealer says ‘no more bets’ and bets can no longer be placed or changed.
Once the dealer has placed a dolly on the winning number on the layout and cleared all the losing bets, you can start placing new bets, while the winners are being paid out.
Betting
There are nine standard types of roulette bets: six ‘inside bets’ and three ‘outside bets’. All individual outside bets must be at least the table minimum, while the total of the inside bets must exceed the minimum. This catches a lot of first-time players out – if you’re a roulette neophyte, it’s worth watching for a while before plunging in. The house also sets different minimum and maximum limits for different tables so don’t drift from one table to another without checking this out.
Other nuances you should know about include late betting and misplaced chips. If you bet after the dealer has said he is no longer taking bets, your bet will be void. During betting, the dealer will try his or her best to tidy up various piles of chips into a semblance of order but if you want a split bet make sure you place it correctly on the line and that it stays there. With chips flying all over the table, some end up getting moved to places that were never intended. Misplaced bets tend to be the biggest source of disputes, but it’s your money, so look after it.
Little known and generally used only by terminal show-offs, so-called ‘French bets’ (examples include ‘voisins de zero’ and ‘orphelins’) are multiple-chip combinations of bets that cover specific areas of the wheel. As good luck would have it, they were covered in depth in last month’s issue of InsideEdge.
There is no system for roulette!
Roulette is sometimes called The Devil’s Game because the numbers add up to 666, but it undeniably has a diabolical hold on some people. Otherwise sensible gamblers become convinced they have a ‘system’ that will let them skilfully outdo a game that involves no skill, and which cannot be (legally) outdone.
Casinos are not charities. Their advantage, even when you are in tiptop form, is quite enough for them to earn a living and gamblers who wilfully choose not to learn the games are just adding to their bottom line.
Type in ‘roulette strategy’ on Google and you will be presented with a whole range of winning roulette schemes that ‘. . . you too can own by just mailing $25 today!!’ Do yourself and your wallet a favour and don’t bother, for there is a harsh reality that you must face: roulette is a game of chance. You have no more chance of winning by using a paid for roulette strategy – no matter how expensive, and no matter how many flashing lights its website boasts – than by picking the numbers from a hat.
Delve into gambling further and you will come across the martingale system for even-money bets. At first glance, this looks foolproof, but it is in reality a recipe for disaster.
Working on the premise that your chances of winning are 50/50 (what about the zero? Oh – it conveniently forgets it’s there), you are urged to place a bet and, if it loses, to then make the same bet but with the amount doubled. If that second bet loses, then you are urged to double the bet again. You are then urged to carry on regardless with this procedure until you win. The theory behind the system is that eventually (!) your bet must win and you will recoup everything you have bet so far and turn in a profit equivalent to your initial bet. Wow.
Do not use this system. Aside from the poor mathematics, if you try to double your bet each time you lose, you will eventually come up against the table limit. As I said, casinos are not charities.
Patterns are for tablecloths
Another common fallacy is that there is a pattern to the numbers that come up. After all, if it’s red for seven spins on the trot, the next one must be black! Look around you next time you are in your local casino and you will see gamblers examining the roulette winning number display to see if a certain sequence is coming up, or ‘hot numbers’ – some may even make a note of them in a small book.
Although they look like skilled gamblers, please believe me, those people are wasting their time. As an aside they are usually women and wearing the following: enough luminescent viscose to supply a freefall parachute display team, a turquoise bum-bag, and a gold charm bracelet. If in Las Vegas, they generally appear to have spent far too long at the deep end of the ‘all-you-can-eat-for-$5’ buffet.
If the 5,000 wheels in the world were spinning 24 hours a day with a ball spun every two minutes, how long would it eventually take for one wheel to throw up a sequence of every single number between 1 and 36 (but not in order – that would be too hard)? The answer, believe it or not, is 25 million years.
Okay, let’s be more realistic and look at the chances of you predicting just the same four numbers repeating on a roulette wheel. Here, the chances are a whopping two million to one. This is bad enough, but even worse when you realize that due to improbability, it is as likely to happen as any other sequence of numbers – just not in the period while you are betting. So, next time you see someone let their money ride on number 7, do not marvel at their insight but laugh at their stupidity and blind optimism.
Winning at roulette is down to luck, collusion with the dealer or, possibly, the use of a barcode scanner linked to a computer in your shoe. As both of the latter options are likely to land you in deep trouble, think positive and remember that numbers such as your birthday, shoe size or number of fingers are as likely to win as any other.
The National Lottery company Camelot is on record as saying that to win big, you have to place random numbers. Yet, every week, approximately 10,000 people play the National Lottery with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 and believe they are the only players to have done so. Think about it – their chances of winning with those numbers are just the same as for a lucky dip, but if they did win, they would have to share the winnings with 10,000 other ‘lucky’ punters! In roulette, the number where the ball will fall next is every bit as random. Just so you don’t get too despondent about the fickleness of roulette, remember that you can sometimes be lucky and win (otherwise no one would play the game). Just don’t get suckered – eventually the only winner is the casino.
Wonky wheels
There are stories of big winners at roulette. Often, they happened way back in the mists of time, suggesting either that the tales are apocryphal, or that cheating was involved. There is one other possibility, however: the biased wheel.
Years ago, Morris Minor cars used to be prone to losing wheels while cornering at speed. The problem was down to the wheel bearing which allowed the ingress of water and over time became rusty and failed. As modern automotive engineering caught up with the problem, sealed bearings were developed and wheels stopped falling off.
Similarly, the early roulette wheels had packed grease bearings that gradually wore or broke down due to poor maintenance. This was a green light to enterprising players who spotted that certain numbers had a habit of appearing on a regular basis – see the box below to find out more.
Unfortunately, biased wheels are now a thing of the past. Some wheel manufacturers – notably Cammegh – have even introduced scalloped ring ball pockets (‘canoes’ as they are known) to make it even harder for the ball to come to rest in a predictable way. Sorry.
For details of roulette bets and the golden rules of roulette betting, click the ‘How To’ button.
