118 Gambling - History of Roulette

History Of Roulette

The Roulette, being a wheel-based game, has certainly had many predecessors perhaps since as far back in time as there was a wheel. There are stories that a game similar to the Roulette was firstly invented in China and then brought to Europe by traders.

According to other sources however, the Roulette as we know it is actually much younger – devised by the French mathematician Blaise Pascal in the 17th century. His fascination with perpetual motion devices had supposedly brought him to the invention of something like a big wheel for his experiments and then one of his friends suggested to him to adapt it for gambling.

Anyway, it was Parisians who played a type of Roulette very similar to the modern game for the first time in 1796. Initially the “0” number on the wheel was coloured in red and the “00” was in black, which led some players to confusion, and the colours of the zero numbers were changed to green. Then, in the 1800s, the Frenchman Francois Blanc invented the single-zero game by removing the “00” number from the wheel to increase the players’ advantage over the house. This version of the game has since been known as the French Roulette and later as the European Roulette (both identical in rules, but different in table layout). As gambling was made illegal in Europe in the 1870s, Francois Blanc went to Monaco where he established and ran the first casinos. By the time gambling was legalised in the most of Europe in 1933, the Monte Carlo casino had become so popular that some were calling the Roulette the “King of Casino Games”. There is a very interesting story trying to explain Francois Blanc’s huge success with the game – based on the fact that the sum of the numbers from 0 to 36 is 666, fabled to be the “Number of the Beast”, they say he had struck a deal with the devil to have the secrets of the Roulette revealed to him.

The game spread also to the United States in the early 1800s, taken there by French emigrants. In America the “00” number was preserved (and thus the initially greater house advantage) and this game is nowadays known as American Roulette (or American Wheel).

Back in Europe there was another refinement of the rules of the Roulette that increased further the odds in favour of the players – with the so-called “En Prison” rule. With it, if a player made an even-money (even, odd, red, black, 1-18 or 19-36) bet, and a zero (or a double zero in Atlantic City in the United States as this rule was later adopted there) would come out, the player had the options either to “imprison” his bet, meaning that it would stay where it had been placed until the outcome of the next spin, or he could choose to surrender half of it.

One of the most famous Roulette bets ever documented that deserves a special place in the history of the game was Londoner Ashley Revell’s double-or-nothing bet made in the Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas in 2004. Ashley had sold all his possessions, clothing included, for the amount of $135,300, which he then bet all on red. It was red 7 the pocket that the ball fell into, so he doubled his bet amount and walked away with $270,600. One could say this story comes proper to counter Einstein’s famous quotation that “you can beat the Roulette table only by stealing from it”.

Presently, like most other casino games, the Roulette has also made it successfully online, thus now available to gambling fans in the comfort of their homes.