How to Play Roulette
Roulette is an exciting and popular table game, appearing in many variations across online casinos. Your goal is to bet on a space where the ball will land once the wheel spins. The spaces you can bet on range from low volatility (red or black, even or odd) to high volatility (individual numbers). Let’s take a closer look at everything you need to know about roulette.
Roulette Rules
A typical roulette table consists of a wheel alongside a table full of potential bets. While the betting options change slightly depending on the variation of roulette you choose to play, the basic rules remain the same.
As briefly mentioned above, your goal as a player is to bet on where the ball will land once released into the spinning wheel. If it lands in a wheel pocket that you’ve placed a wager on, you win. Before the ball hits the wheel, you can place as many bets as you’d like on the table. As roulette is mostly a game of luck, the only decision you have to make is where to place your bets, which we’ll cover below.
Roulette Bets & Payouts Expanded
| Bet | Bet Name | Payout | Odds of Winning |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Straight-Up | 35:1 | 2.6% |
| 2 | Split | 17:1 | 5.3% |
| 3 | Three Numbers | 11:1 | 7.9% |
| 4 | Corner Bet | 8:1 | 10.5% |
| 5 | Five Numbers | 6:1 | 13.2% |
| 6 | Six Numbers | 5:1 | 15.8% |
| 7 | Twelve Numbers (Dozens) | 2:1 | 31.6% |
| 8 | Column Bet | 2:1 | 31.6% |
| 9 | 18 Numbers (1-18) | 1:1 | 47.4% |
| 10 | 18 Numbers (19-36) | 1:1 | 47.4% |
| 11 | Red or Black | 1:1 | 47.4% |
| 12 | Even or Odd | 1:1 | 47.4% |
Practice Section
American Roulette
For this practice section, we’ll be playing American Roulette, often the most common variant. Pictured above is a typical American Roulette table.
Choose Bet Placement
Your first step after loading the game is to choose where to place your bet. In this practice section, we’ve placed a $1 bet on red. This means we’re betting $1 that the ball will land in a red pocket on the wheel. As you can see in the table above, this gives us 47.4% odds to win (slightly below 50% due to the zero pockets). Of course, at this step, you can choose any of the bets listed above depending on the amount of risk you’re willing to tolerate.
Watch It Unfold
In this example, the ball landed in the 36 pocket, which is red. This results in a winning bet! As the payout is 1:1 for red or black bets, our $1 bet results in a $1 win for a total of $2 returned. That concludes this round of roulette.
Decide Whether To Keep Going
Let’s say we decide to play another round, and we’re willing to take on more risk. As you can see, we’ve now placed a $1 straight-up bet on the number 17.
Tally Results
This spin resulted in the ball landing in the 7 pocket, which means our bet on 17 lost (not surprising considering the long odds of a straight-up bet). This round concludes with a loss. If the ball were to land in the 17 pocket here, we would have won $35 and had our $1 bet returned, resulting in a total of $36.
