The Roulette Table: A Quick Primer

Roulette is a popular casino game where people can bet where a small white ball, spinning around in the tilted track of a specially-made wheel will land. The roulette wheel has thirty-six pockets, numbered one to thirty-six, colored in alternating black and red, and not arranged in numerical order. The casino employee will spin the wheel in one direction, and then they will set the ball on the track, and spin it in the opposite direction, until momentum slows the ball down and causes it to fall into one of the wheel's pockets.

With American roulette wheels, aside from having the thirty-six black and red pockets, there are also two green pockets, numbered zero, and double zero. The European roulette wheel, on the other hand, only has one green pocket, numbered zero.

There are a lot of different types of bets in roulette, and they can be separated into inside bets, and outside bets. Inside bets are bets made on single numbers, or a set of numbers grouped together on the roulette table. Outside bets, on the other hand, are bets made on larger groups of numbers, a range of numbers, or on what color the ball might land in. For the purposes of maintaining a house edge or house average in roulette, most casinos do not count the green pocket or pockets when they calculate for the payout of a particular bet.

To keep bets organized, most casinos also have a roulette table, where the numbers and the types of bets placed are printed and arranged. The croupier places different players' chips on the square or sets of squares that they have designated as their wager, and when a winning number is determined, the dealer will usually rake in the losers' chips, and dole out the appropriate payout for the respective winners.

The American layout roulette table and the French layout roulette tables differ when it comes to how the kinds of bets are arranged, but both kinds of tables arrange the wheel numbers one to thirty-six in twelve rows of three, in numerical order. Thus, there are three columns of twelve numbers; for example, the first column has numbers arranged as follows: 1, 4, 7, 10...etc. In the American roulette table, the two zeros are placed on top of the three columns, and all the different types of outside bets, except for one, are arranged on the left side of the thirty-six numbers.

Squares designated for the last kind of outside bet, the Column bet, are arranged at the bottom of each column. A column bet is when a person wagers that one of the numbers arranged in a single vertical line on the roulette table will be the number in which the roulette ball will fall.