Origins of Roulette

Origins of Roulette Game

While some historians claim rudimentary spinning wheel games of chance in the ancient Chinese and Roman societies as the forefathers to modern roulette, documentation of the modern roulette wheel establishes that the gambling game as we know it today came directly from 17th century France. “Roulette” is a French word that translates to “small wheel” in English. The invention of the roulette wheel can be pinned to famed French mathematician Blaise Pascal who, in 1655, came up with a crude version of the device in his attempts to develop a perpetual motion machine. Had Pascal’s invention actually been a perpetual motion device, the game of roulette would have never developed because the wheel would have never stopped, hence it would be perpetually spinning.

Pascal’s version of the roulette wheel remained relatively unchanged for over two hundred years where the game was mostly played in the confines of French monasteries (no gambling involved) as a way to pass the time. However, the game the monks played was discovered to be a game of chance and made its way into the Palais Royal by the year 1796. At this time, the roulette wheel consisted of 36 numbered slots from 1 to 36 and bettors placed their wagers on where they thought the ball would land or on a combination or range of numbers where the bettors thought the ball would land. The greater the chance the ball would fall in the combination or range of numbers, the lesser the value of a winning bet. For example, in these first roulette games, a bet on the number 1 would have a probability of 1 in 36 so the winning bet would be much greater than the winning bet on the odd numbers, for example, where the odds are 1 in 2 for a winning result.

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In the year 1842, the French brothers Francois and Louis Blanc established the first casinos in Monte Carlo on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. A bit of legend surrounds this development where it is said that the Francois Blanc sold his soul to the devil for the secret of the roulette wheel – adding a zero. Whether Francois Blanc made a deal with the devil or not will never be known, but the Blanc brothers did forever change the game into the form that it is still known in Europe today by lengthening the odds a bit for a winning wager when they added the number 0 to make 37 numbers on the wheel from 0 to 36. Adding this 0 gave the house an edge in bets on odd or even numbers or red or black numbers. Where these odds were 50/50 before the zero was added to the wheel, a bet on red or black or odd or even now became a 51.36% chance in favor of the gambling establishment, or house. In Monte Carlo, roulette earned its nickname as the “game of kings” where it was first widely played on royal ground and in royal casinos.

Roulette as we know it today has an American version and a European version. The European version still retains the version introduced by the Blanc brothers to Monte Carlo in 1842 that has 37 numbers from 0 to 37. When roulette arrived on American shores in the latter half of the 19th century, proprietors of American gambling establishments weren’t happy with the small edge in favor of the house and added a second naught slot – the double zero (00). This addition of the double-zero (00) slot on the American version of the roulette wheel brings the total number of slots to 38: 00, 0, and 1 to 36. The odds on the American version are even more slanted in the house’s favor where a bet on odd or even or red or black is now 52.64% in favor of the gambling establishment. This is exactly what the Americans were looking for and roulette rapidly became wildly popular with gold and silver miners in the mining boom towns of the American west.

Thus, today there are two versions of the game of roulette that are played in a “brick and mortar” casino – the American version with two zero slots and the European version with a single zero slot. Here it becomes obvious that if one has a choice on where to place an “even bet” they would always choose the European roulette wheel where the odds of a winning bet are slightly more in favor of the bettor placing the wager than on the American roulette wheel.

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