This question has fascinated gamblers for centuries since roulette evolved out of the Italian game Biribi in 18th century France.
Millions of hours have been spent trying to work out an optimal strategy that can give the player an advantage in roulette over the casino.
Casino fans may have heard of the Martingale or the Fibonacci betting systems that promise long-term winnings, but the truth is roulette is a game of pure luck, and there is no sure-fire way to make a profit. Your fate is in the hands of the roulette gods!
That said, there are ways you can improve your chances of winning. Here are our top tips.
Go European
The two most popular roulette variants are European roulette and American roulette. Both tables have 1-36 numbers, but while European roulette has one green zero, American roulette has two green zeros.
This small difference has a big effect on the house edge. European roulette house edge is 2.7%, while that nearly doubles to 5.3% on the American wheel.
A bet on red, for example, has a 48.7% chance of being successful on the European table, but that drops to 47.4% on the American one.
Although these don’t look like huge disparities, over time this makes a massive difference to your bankroll.
If you choose to play American roulette, make sure you avoid the 5 Number Bet (a combination bet on 0, 00, 1, 2, and 3) as the house edge is over 7%! It’s by far the worst roulette bet you can make.
Lightning Roulette is a live version game growing in popularity at casinos as it offers multipliers of up to 500x on selected numbers.
The house edge is also 2.7%, despite the fact such huge wins are on offer. This is because winning single bets are settled at 30/1 rather than the standard 35/1.
Play with the Le Partage or En Prison rule
French Roulette is basically European roulette but with some additional combination bets that use their original French spellings.
The edge there is the same as on European tables, but it’s possible to find roulette games at Mount Gold with the La Partage or the En Prison rule.
Both rules apply to even money bets on red or black. If the ball lands in the 0 green pocket, the following rules come into play.
Le Partage – A bet on red or black that loses because the ball lands in the green pocket sees the player get 50% of their stake back.
En Prison – Like the Le Partage rule, but the player can either choose to get 50% of their stake back or let it roll onto the next spin (stay imprisoned). If the original bet is a winner on the next spin, they get their original stake back. If it’s a loser, they lose it.
Playing with these rules can push the house edge down to as low as 1.35%, assuming, of course, that you are betting on just red or black each time.
Ignore sequences
The gambler’s fallacy is a well-documented phenomenon in which people believe the outcome of a random event is more or less likely to occur based on the outcome of previous events.
In roulette, tables will display the last sequence of numbers hit, usually up to around 20. If there have been seven black numbers in a row, it’s only natural to think that red is ‘due’ to turn up next after so many blacks.
But the truth is that every spin of the roulette wheel is independent of the last and the next. Even if there were 100 red numbers in a row, red is still as likely as black to come up on the next spin.
Similarly, if number 17 came up, many gamblers would avoid betting that number for the next round even though the odds of it coming up again are the same as any other number.
Don’t let sequences influence your betting. Chiefly, don’t bet more because you are letting yourself be swayed by the previous outcomes.
