The Beginners' Guide to Playing Roulette

If you’re new to roulette, consider this guide to roulette for beginners your new favourite resource. We’ll cover all the rules and bet types you need to know if you want to play this classic casino game.

If you’re here to find out if there’s any skill involved in playing roulette, or any strategy you can use to improve your chances of winning at roulette, the short answer is - unfortunately - no. Roulette is completely a game of chance.

If you’d like to learn some more about roulette anyway, keep reading. It’s one of the most fun casino games around, even if there’s not much thinking behind it. We’ll go into every aspect of roulette’s rules and play, so this can essentially become your roulette for dummies guide. Here you can try free roulette simulator.

What is roulette?

Roulette is a game of chance played at essentially every online and brick-and-mortar casino in the world - so it’s worth knowing a thing or two about. Though the game employs a board and wheel that may look intimidating to a complete novice, the objective of roulette is quite simple - bet on the number (or group of numbers) that the ball eventually lands on.

Some bets have higher odds than others, based on their likeliness of winning. The house edge on roulette is about 2.5-5%, depending on the casino and the rules used. (But more on that later.)

You can play roulette almost anywhere you can gamble, including:

Online (on your computer, phone browser, in-app roulette, or live streamed video roulette)
In casinos (table roulette)
Fixed odds betting terminals (at your local bookies, in the casino or at the pub)
There’s even tombola roulette at special terminals

How do you play roulette?

Roulette is played with a board and a spinning roulette wheel with numbers in partitions around the edge. When playing live roulette at a roulette table in a casino, the croupier will spin the roulette wheel in one direction, and spin a ball into the wheel in the opposite direction. As the ball spins in the wheel, it will slow down and eventually fall into one of the numbered partitions (called frets). The number it falls on is the winning number, and anyone who has bet on that number wins.

Once someone has won, there will be a brief respite from play as the croupier adds up and dishes out the winnings, before spinning the ball back into the wheel for another game. Once the losing bets have been cleared from the table, you can begin placing bets with your chips again.

Placing a bet in Roulette

When betting in roulette, you place chips or cash on the area of the table that represents the bet you’d like to make, which you can do until the croupier announces “no more bets”. When playing online roulette, or at a roulette terminal, you can choose the amount that you would like to bet (usually represented in incremental amounts at the bottom of the screen) and then select which numbers you would like to place bets on.

The roulette table

The numbers on a roulette table run from 0-36, with 1-36 numbered in alternating red and black, with zero the only green. Some tables have a double zero (00) or even triple zero (000). Extra zeros change the odds on your bet -- the more ‘0’s a table has, the worse your odds are (the house edge is higher).

Whether you’re playing live or online, bets are made by placing chips at various points on the table which correspond to different bets, on different numbers, with different odds.

Types of Bet in Roulette

You can place bets in a number of ways. Every type of bet in roulette is classified as either an inside bet, or an outside bet. Inside bets are bets which are placed inside the grid of numbers in the centre of the table, and outside bets are bets which are placed around the edges of the table.

Inside Bets:

Straight up (betting on a single number, e.g. 5)
Square (also known as a ‘corner’, this bet covers 4 numbers in the shape of a square, surprisingly - e.g. 5, 6, 8, 9)
Split (also known as a ‘cheval’ - a bet that covers two adjacent numbers, e.g. 5 & 6, or 5 & 8)
Street (an inside row of 3 numbers, e.g. 4, 5, 6)
Six line (also known as a ‘double street’ this bet covers two rows of numbers, e.g. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, & 9)
Trio (A three number bet involving a zero, e.g. 0, 1, 2 or 00, 2, 3)
First four (the first four numbers on a single-0 layout only - i.e. 0, 1, 2, 3)

Outside Bets:

Low/Manque or High/Passe (a bet on numbers 1 to 18 inclusive or on numbers 19 to 36 inclusive)
Red or Black (a bet on either all the red numbers, or all the black numbers)
Even or Odd (a bet placed on all the odd numbers, or all the even numbers)
Dozen bet (a bet placed on the first, second, or third 12 numbers, e.g. 1-12)
Column bet (a bet placed down one of the vertical columns, e.g. 2-35)
On triple zero tables, you can also bet on ‘Green’ (a bet placed on all three zeros)

A note on Announced bets

You may have been at a live roulette table in the past minding your own business when you get shoved out of the way by some ancient little Asian woman shouting “15 neighbours by 5!” This is called an ‘announced bet’.

After making an announced bet, the player will table a £25 chip toward the dealer and he will place it on the layout as shown. This area of the layout is known as the ‘French Numbers’ and can only be used by the dealer for bets of this type. She now has a ‘straight up’ £5 bet on each of the numbers 32, 19, 15, 0, 4. If successful, this bet will win £175 (because it is a £5 on a single number).