What Is the Table Edge for Roulette?

Roulette is a casino game named after the French word meaning little wheel. In the game, players may choose to place bets on either a single number, various groupings of numbers, the colors red or black, whether the number is odd or even, or if the numbers are high (19–36) or low (1–18).

To determine the winning number and color, a croupier spins a wheel in one direction, then spins a ball in the opposite direction around a tilted circular track running around the circumference of the wheel. The ball eventually loses momentum and falls onto the wheel and into one of 37 (in French/European roulette) or 38 (in American roulette) colored and numbered pockets on the wheel.

The first form of roulette was devised in 18th century France. A century earlier, Blaise Pascal introduced a primitive form of roulette in the 17th century in his search for a perpetual motion machine. The game has been played in its present form since as early as 1796 in Paris.

An early description of the roulette game in its current form is found in a French novel La Roulette, ou le Jour by Jaques Lablee, which describes a roulette wheel in the Palais Royal in Paris in 1796. The description included details such as the house pockets, “There are exactly two slots reserved for the bank, whence it derives its sole mathematical advantage.”.

The book was published in 1801. In 1843, François Blanc designed and built the first publicised casino at Bad Homburg which featured this new style of roulette.

Blanc offered the single-zero style game at his casino and French casinos followed suit with this style of roulette table.

In 2012, while researching my book “The Story of Roulette,” I came across an extraordinary document hidden away in the archives of France’s National Library. The document is an essay written by Pascal himself about probability and gambling.

In it he reveals that he invented a primitive form of roulette while searching for a way to create perpetual motion. This is the earliest known reference to what we now call “roulette.

Pascal’s essay was published posthumously in 1655 but it wasn’t until 1796 that roulette appeared in its modern form in Parisian casinos. In 1843 François Blanc introduced single-zero style roulette at his Bad Homburg casino and French casinos followed suit with this style of table.

The American version of roulette was introduced to Nevada casinos in 1931 by Phil Ivey Sr., who had been running illegal casinos in California.

This version features 38 numbers: 1 through 36 plus 0 and 00. The extra number increases your chances of winning but also decreases your payout if you do win.

The table edge for Roulette is 5%.