The Basics of Roullete
Roulette is one of the casino games that can be played by everyone and it requires no special skills or equipment to play. In fact, it’s probably one of the easiest casino games to learn and is a good choice for beginners because it is so simple to understand and use. The game’s popularity is mostly due to the fact that it offers players a very low house edge. In order to reduce the house edge even more, a number of casinos and online sites offer the ‘La Partage’ rule which divides all winning even-money bets in half between the player and the house.
Basically, the game of Roullete is all about spinning a wheel that has colored numbers on it. A small ball is thrown onto the wheel while it’s in motion and, if it stops on a number that the player has bet on, then they win. Those bets are then paid out automatically, although the player’s wagered chips remain on the table to be used again in the next spin of the wheel.
There are a few rules that must be followed when playing the game. Firstly, the dealer will only allow players to place their bets once they have announced “no more bets.” This helps to prevent cheating and additional advantages from being gained by placing bets at specific times during the course of the game.
Another important thing to remember is that all bets must be placed before the dealer spins the wheel. Once all bets have been placed, the dealer will spin the wheel and a ball will then be rolled around it on a track that runs around its outer edge.
The wheel itself is a solid wooden disk that’s slightly convex in shape and has a series of metal compartments or pockets (called frets by the roulette croupiers) that are painted alternately red and black and numbered nonconsecutively from 1 to 36. There are also two green compartments on American-style wheels that carry the signs 0 and 00.
To the casual observer, the numbers on a roulette wheel appear to be randomly distributed and there is no obvious pattern. However, this is far from the truth and it’s because of the distribution of these numbers that the house has an advantage in the game. The house gets this advantage from the 0 and 00 on the wheel, which don’t pay out like the other red and black numbers, nor are they odd or even. This gives the house a 1.4% edge over all outside bets, which are the most common in roulette. Hence, the reason why the house edge is so much lower in European roulette than in its American counterpart.