Roullete (pronounced: roo-lay-te) is a casino game that involves spinning a wheel with numbered slots. The goal is to predict where the ball will land once the wheel comes to a stop, and if your number or one of its groupings, such as odd or even, red or black, is chosen you win. Bets are placed by laying down chips on a betting mat with the precise location of the chip correlating to the bet being made.
A roulette wheel consists of a solid disc, slightly convex in shape, with metal compartments around its edge. Thirty-six of these are painted alternately red and black, numbered 1 to 36; on European wheels an extra compartment, painted green, carries the numeral 0; and on American tables there are two additional green 00 slots. The croupier spins the wheel, and when the ball and wheel come to rest, it will land in one of the compartments.
There are several variations of roulette, the most popular being American Roulette, which was adapted for gambling dens in the United States from the French version, and European Roulette. The main difference between the two is that La Partage (a rule that gives half of winning bets back to players) is in play in European Roulette, but not in American.
There are many strategies to playing roulette, including learning the probabilities of different numbers and the odds of hitting a particular combination of bets. However, the biggest problem with roulette is that it doesn’t pay what your bets are worth – the odds of hitting a single number on a straight-up bet are 37 to 1, but the payouts are only 35 to 1. It is this huge discrepancy that creates the house edge.