Roulette is one of the gambling industry’s most popular games and is a mainstay at online and land-based casinos around the world. It’s a game of chance, where players place bets on a special table to predict which slot a spinning wheel will land in. Bets can be placed on a single number, various groupings of numbers, red or black, odd or even, or whether the number is high (19-36) or low (1-18).
While many believe that roulette was invented by 17th century French mathematician Blaise Pascal or by Chinese monks, it’s clear that the game evolved from older games like hoca and portique. It arrived in the United States in the mid-1800s and grew in popularity at illegal gambling dens. But it was in France where the game truly took off. In 1843, Louis and Francois Blanc introduced a version of the roulette wheel with a single zero pocket, drastically reducing the house edge and further increasing the game’s popularity.
Today, European roulette is the most played form of the game both at physical and online casinos. This variation has a single zero pocket and lowers the house edge to a desirable 2.7%. It’s for this reason that we always recommend novice players play this variation to maximize their winning probabilities.
There are many betting systems that claim to help you beat the roulette tables. A quick Google search will return thousands (perhaps millions) of supposedly foolproof strategies for playing and winning roulette. The most common ones include the Martingale system and the Labouchere system. Both of these systems require you to make even only chip bets, and you will need to double your stake every time you lose. This ensures that you won’t win every time, but it will also ensure that you won’t lose your entire bankroll.