Roulette: Odds or Evens
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by admin on 19-06-2009
Roulette, meaning simply ‘wheel’ in old French, is a game many of us are familiar with. One of the staple casino games, or at least portrayed that way in the media, is now big business online. But where does it come from, and what are the odds?
In the game of roulette, players bet on a ball landing on one of several coloured numbers after the roulette wheel is spun. Players can bet on either a number, a range of numbers, the colour red or black, or whether the number is odd or even. A croupier - casino employee who takes and pays out bets or otherwise assists at a gaming table – then calls the number and colour and a payout, if applicable, is then given.
The first form of roulette came about when scientist Blaise Pascal introduced a very early form of roulette in the 17th century in his search for a perpetual motion machine. The game has been played in the way that we would understand since as early as 1796 in France. A very early description of the roulette game in its current form is found in the French novel La Roulette, ou le Jour, which describes a roulette wheel in the Palais Royal in Paris in 1796. During 1800s, roulette spread all over Europe and the U.S.A., becoming one of the most famous and popular casino games in an astoundingly short space of time.
Roulette also has the honour of being one of the few games in which many people have poured hundreds of man hours into devising a strategy for winning at roulette. Some of these strategies include the ‘Labouchere System’, whereby the player decides how much to bet before playing, the ‘D’Alembert System’, which is a complicated pyramid system, the ‘Dozen Bet’ system, where the player uses an incrementing stake list, and the 1st and 3rd column strategy, which is used to cover a large number of instances on the table.
Today, thousands of gamblers play roulette online, and the game has translated to internet play extremely well, as proven by its popularity. Many traditional ‘bookies’ now have a virtual roulette table arcade.
