When playing roulette, you place chips on a special layout until the dealer announces no more bets. Each bet has a different payout. There are two categories of bets, outside and inside.

Outside bets pay higher odds but have lower chances of winning. Several strategies exist to increase your chances of winning, including the Martingale System and the D’Alembert System.

Origins

There is much speculation as to the origins of roulette. One theory is that it developed spontaneously from other games that used a wheel. Other theories suggest that it may have evolved from a game created by Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician in the seventeenth century. It is also possible that it arose from the wheel-of-fortune-type carnival games that were popular in the 1500’s and early 1600’s. These games included roly poly, bassette, and even-odd.

There is evidence that roulette appeared in France in the late 1700’s. However, at that time it was not the modern European/Latin American style of roulette with a single-zero wheel. It was a variant with a double-zero wheel. This wheel was used by the Blanc brothers when they opened the first casino in Monte Carlo.