Roulette is quite a simple game once you know how to play it, and generally no matter where you go in the world (or the online world) you won’t find anything differences about the way that it’s played – well, except for one.

There are two main types of roulette; American and European roulette. Both games are played in exactly the same way by spinning a small white ball around a spinning wheel with numbers. The only difference in the game itself is in the variation of the numbers themselves which I’ll go into now.

In European roulette, you the wheel has thirty-seven numbers. The numbers 1 to 36 in either red or black, and the number zero, all on its own in green. The zero on the European roulette wheel gives the casino its house edge, which works out to be 2.7% over the player in this case.

With American roulette, you have thirty-eight slots this time, but still only have the standard numbers between 1 and 36. The other two slots are taken up by the zero and double-zero (00) slots which are both house-edge spots on the wheel. In this case because the casino has twice as many green slots, their house edge is raised to 5.4% over the player which is a huge margin in the long run.

So really that’s it. There isn’t much in the differences between American and European roulette apart from the zeros giving the casino its edge, and now that you know this, you also know to stay away from American roulette tables, right?

I’ve already gone over the basics of roulette in a previous article, but in this one I’m going to go into a lot more depth as to the exact chances and percentages of winning with roulette.

When thinking in terms of a roulette wheel and the chances of winning, most people only calculate their percentage of winning without taking the zero (or zeros as is the case with American roulette) into account. Although it might appear as only a slight factor, it does make a heck of a difference in the long run, which is what casinos rely on to make their money.

Let’s take for example if you were to place a bet on red, which would cover half of all the standard numbers on the board. If we don’t consider the zero, your odds would be 50% of either winning or losing. The law of averages states that you should win 1 out of every 2 spins, or 50 out of every hundred.

But when we do take the zero into account, the odds start to change quite a lot more.

To calculate the casino’s average from the zero, we take 100 (which represents 100%) and divide it by 37 (the number of slots on the roulette wheel including the zero). This gives us a figure of 2.7, which means that the chance of the ball lancing on a zero (or any other single number for that matter) is 2.7%.

This doesn’t sound like much now, but in the long run it adds up in the casino’s favour and this is what we’ll look at next.

So we’ll take our bet on red again and scrutinize that again. But this time instead of having 50% odds of winning, we must take into account the 2.7% edge the casino has with the zero slot. We do this by subtracting the 2.7% from 100% and we are left with 97.3%. Now that we have the real chance of the ball landing on any of the coloured spaces, we can divide that by two to give us the real odds of the ball landing on a red slot, which gives us a figure of 48.65%.

So as before you had a 50% chance of winning or losing, you now only have a 48.65% chance of winning and a 51.35% chance of losing.

To show you what this means in the long run, let’s say that a person bets 10,000 consecutive times on a roulette wheel with a $1 bet each time on red, they will only win 4,865 of thise times, and the casino will take their money 5,135 times, meaning that no matter where they bet, the casino will always some out on top. It always has the advantage, which is called the casino’s ‘house edge’.

I have just explained this with a simple red-or-black bet, but the odds are in the casino’s favour no matter which way you look at it. This is the inherent fact that makes casinos money machines, wired only to take the money from the people and not to give it away.

Sure it’s possible to have a lucky streak, but normally that’s exactly what it is; luck. There are very few ways out there that don’t involve cheating to give you an edge over the casino and when you do find one, they’re generally very guarded secrets.