Roulette can be bet either with standard casino chips or special wheel chips. Aside from avoiding confusion, another advantage of using wheel chips is that the lowest denomination of wheel chips is usually less than the lowest denomination of casino chips. With its high house edge, roulette is a game to be played for fun, not profit. So you may as well play as cheaply as you can. You may begin making bets on the layout as soon as the bets from the previous spin have been collected and paid off. If you cannot reach the part of the layout on which you wish to wager, slide your chips over to the dealer and tell him what bet you want to make. He will position the bet for you. The dealer will roll the wheel in one direction, then spin the ball on the backtrack in the opposite direction. It takes the ball a little while to lose momentum sufficiently to start its descent toward the numbered bowl. You can continue betting until the ball begins to descend and the dealer call "No more bets. " If you make a bet too late, it will simply be returned to you whether the bet wins or loses. Roulette can be bet either with standard casino chips or special wheel chips. Aside from avoiding confusion, another advantage of using wheel chips is that the lowest denomination of wheel chips is usually less than the lowest denomination of casino chips. With its high house edge, roulette is a game to be played for fun, not profit. So you may as well play as cheaply as you can. You may begin making bets on the layout as soon as the bets from the previous spin have been collected and paid off. If you cannot reach the part of the layout on which you wish to wager, slide your chips over to the dealer and tell him what bet you want to make. He will position the bet for you. The dealer will roll the wheel in one direction, then spin the ball on the backtrack in the opposite direction. It takes the ball a little while to lose momentum sufficiently to start its descent toward the numbered bowl. You can continue betting until the ball begins to descend and the dealer call "No more bets. " If you make a bet too late, it will simply be returned to you whether the bet wins or loses.
As soon as the ball lands in a numbered slot, the dealer will announce the winning number and point to it on the layout. He may also mark it on the layout by placing a transparent plastics tube on the number. He will then gather in all the losing bets and, finally, pay off the winning bets. The outside bets are paid off first, then the inside bets. The dealer pays off the outside bets in the boxes in which they were made. He will then calculate the total payoff for all of a player's winning inside bets-for example, a player may have both a straight bet and a street bet that covered the winning number - and place the sum of his winning in front of him. However, the winning bets themselves are left on the layout, as well as the payoffs from any winning outside bets, before the dealer calls "No more bets" again. Otherwise, they will count as wagers on the next spin. Each player is paid off in the same kind of wheel chips he is using to wager with. In cases of a large win, the dealer may use regular casino chips for the payoff since he has only a limited number of wheel chips for each player.
There are two kinds of table minimums at roulette, a chip minimum and a table minimum. The chip minimum is the lowest amount at which you can value each chip. The table minimum, which is always higher than the chip minimum, is the lowest amount you can wager. This minimum works differently for the outside bets from how it works for the inside bets. For the outside bets, the table minimum is the lowest amount you can wager on any one bet. However, for the inside bets, the table minimum is the lowest aggregate amount you can have wagered. If the table minimum is one dollar, the total of all your inside bets must be at least one dollar, but each individual bet need not be one dollar. You may, for example, make two different straight bets for twenty-five cents each plus one line bet for fifty cents. If the minimums are not posted at the table or if you are unsure how to interpret the, ask the dealer before you begin to play.
The house percentage on any roulette wager is very easy to figure. Let's take the straight-up bet as an example. You are wagering on one number out of thirty-eight possibilities, so the correct odds are 37 to 1. The house pays 35 to 1. Therefore, two units are being held out of the pot by the house. This means that the house advantage is 2/38, which, when converted to a percentage, yields 5.26 percent as the hose edge. In plain terms, you can expect to lose two dollars out of every thirty-eight dollars you bet.
Let's try the split bet. This time you are covering two numbers out of 38 for true odds of 38 for true odds of 36 to 2. The house pays 17 to 1, which is the same as 34 to 2. Te casino's profit margin is two units out of 38, which we have already figured out is 2/38 or 5.26 percent. In fact, although there are eleven different wagers offered at roulette, you do not have to remember eleven different house percentages. The house advantages for straight-up, split, line corner, street, column, dozen, red/black, odd/even, and high/low bets are all 5.26 percent. You can easily check this for yourself using the same process I applied in the above two examples.
There is also another simple way to calculate the house edge at roulette. Simply figure out what your net loss would be if you make a particular bet thirty-eight times in a row and each of the thirty-eight possible results came up once. For example, assume that you made a line bet on numbers 1,2, and 3 thirty-eight times and that each number came up once. (This is exactly what you can expect will happened in the long run). Let's further assume that each bet consisted of one chip, for a total investment of thirty-eight chips. The number I would come up once, giving you a profit of eleven units plus returning your original one-chip bet. Number 2 would come up once for anther return of twelve units. The one time number 3 came up would give you another twelve units. All your other bets would lose. In the end you would have thirty-six chips left after having wagered thirty-eight chips, for a net loss of two chips. By now, I don't have to tell you that the loss of those two chips means 2/38 or 5.26 percent.
This percentage- 5.26 percent - is a pretty bad edge to have to buck. It is more than five times as high as what you will face at either blackjack or craps if you play the way I've taught you. And there is no getting away from it, because it is everywhere on the layout. In fact, there is only one wager you can make at roulette that does not face this 5.26 percent bite. That is the five-number bet. Don't get your hopes up. This one is even worse. The house percentage is a huge 7.89 percent. You will lose your money 50 percent faster on this wager than on any other roulette wager. Instead of losing tow dollars out of every thirty-eight, you will lose three dollars out of every thirty-eight dollars wagered on the five-number bet. To make a five-number bet at roulette is to prove that you know nothing about the game. The best thing you can do is to forget that this bet even exists.
