american roulette wheel and table layout

Casino operators such as the Blanc Brothers decided to head to Monte Carlo where the king was eager to establish a casino. Meanwhile, back in Europe trouble was brewing for roulette as Germany moved to ban gambling altogether. The game was an immediate hit in places like Louisiana and was played extensively up and down the Mississippi River, where steamboat casinos plied their trade in sophisticated casino games. With French colonies firmly established in the New World, the game of roulette made the journey to North America towards the end of the 19 th century. A new and improved wheel was introduced sporting a different colour for the house pockets in either blue or green, resolving the issue for good. Eventually, players began to complain that it was too tell when the ball had landed in one of the dreaded house pockets. At this early stage, all pockets were painted in an alternating pattern of red and black, even the house pockets. However, the two zero positions were known as the house pockets and, if the ball landed in either of them, the house would win. Players could place a bet on a single number or several, all with different odds of winning. The original French roulette wheel had 36 numbered pockets as well as two additional pockets which were numbered “0” and “00”. Suddenly players could now gather around the roulette table, watch as a numbered wheel, with alternating red and black colours was spun, and a tiny metal ball was, in turn, spun along the rim of the wheel in the opposite direction. Before the introduction of the roulette wheel and table, card and dice games had been the order of the day. When the game was first introduced in fashionable gambling houses around Paris, people were fascinated with the wheel. As the popular story goes, a famous French mathematician discovered the wheel purely as a by-product of his attempts at creating the world’s first perpetual motion machine.

The story of roulette’s birth is quite an interesting and somewhat amusing since its inception was purely accidental. While that answer may always be a mystery, one thing is for sure, in roulette the wheel definitely came first! Roulette is believed to be one of the oldest casino games in the world and its history stretches back to the 1700’s in Europe, where the game as we know it was born. We’ve all heard the argument about which came first, the chicken or the egg, something that has been debated for centuries.

American roulette wheel and table layout