What is Roulette?

Roulette is a game of chance. It involves spinning a wheel with compartments that are either red or black and numbered nonconsecutively from 1 to 36. There is also a green compartment marked 0 or, on American roulette wheels, 00.

Players place chips on a betting table in front of the wheel. There are different types of bets, including inside and outside bets. Inside bets have higher payouts but lower chances of winning.

Origins

The precise origins of roulette are a bit of a mystery, but most scholars believe that it was invented by the 17th century French mathematician Blaise Pascal. He came up with the game while working on his attempts to create a perpetual motion machine.

Pascal’s invention merged two strands of recreational gambling: wheel-and-ball banking games and number-betting lottery systems. Its numbered wheel transforms mechanical spectacle into a matrix of granular odds; its bank-reserved outcomes become the zero pockets on the wheel; and its betting cloth codifies both traditions into a single instrument.

In the 18th century, French settlers brought roulette to America, where it became an important element of New Orleans’s casino culture. Over the years, it would go on to gain widespread popularity in Europe and around the world. Its cultural significance is rooted in its duality: a mathematically precise yet existentially random game. Throughout the ages, writers and philosophers have used the spinning wheel as a metaphor for life’s unpredictability.