These odds are for American roulette, which features a single zero and a double zero. For the French or European version of roulette, the odds are slightly different because there's only one zero.
- The roulette table comes with six to eight sets of different colored chips, each set consisting of 300 chips. When a player purchases chips he gets his own color and the value of each chip is the buy-in divided by the number of chips received. The dealer will place a token on top of the dealer's stack of that color of chips to indicate the value.
- Different types of roulette offer different return to player (RTP) rates. For example, American roulette will reward you with 94.74% RTP. But European roulette has a much more attractive 97.3% RTP. These margins can have a major impact over the long term, so you should consider them every time you head to the casino lobby for online roulette games.
- The roulette tips to win we will be sharing here work with either so you can count these as online roulette tips and tricks too. One very important point you should understand right from the start though is that even if you become some sort of roulette expert, the house will always end up winning most of the time! Go to Coral Casino.
- He said: “To encourage people to bet at roulette, it has been traditional to allow bets to be made after the wheel is spun and the ball is flung, but only before it begins to drop.
When it comes to ease of play, roulette is hard to beat. You spin a wheel that has 38 possible outcomes, and you bet on various aspects of what that outcome might be — the number, the color, whether it’s a high or low number, whether it’s an even or odd number, etc.
It might seem like there are a bewildering number of bets to choose from, but most roulette bets are more straightforward than you would think.
Unlike some casino games, though, figuring out how to play roulette at home can be a challenge. After all, it requires some specialized equipment that most people can’t afford, wouldn’t know where to buy, and wouldn’t have room to store.
This post looks at several different ways you can play roulette at home.
A Quick Roulette Tutorial
Here’s a quick tutorial about how to play roulette anywhere, at home or in the casino.
The game has two moving parts — a spinning wheel that sits in a bowl and a metal ball that spins around the edge of the bowl. Eventually, friction and gravity cause the ball to fall into one of the pockets on the spinning wheel.
Gamblers have a variety of bets they can place, all of which win or lose based on some aspect of the number where the ball lands.
On a standard American roulette wheel, you have 38 numbers — 0, 00, and 1 through 36, inclusive. The 0 and the 00 are green. Half the other numbers are black, and the other half are red.
You can bet on which color comes up. You can bet on whether the number that comes up is odd or even. You can bet on whether the number is low (1 through 18) or high (19 through 36). You can bet on multiple numbers at one time, or you can bet on ranges like first, second, or third (1-12, 13-24, or 25-36).
You can even bet on a specific number coming up. The less likely you are to win one of these bets, the more you win.
For example, if you bet on a specific number and win, you get paid off at 35 to 1. If you bet on black, you get paid off at even money.
The payouts vary based on the bet, but it’s beyond the scope of the post to get into every possible bet and payout. Also, you can find the information elsewhere on this site.
The Magic of Home Roulette Sets
When I worked as a sales manager at Expedia, I liked to have contests for the salespeople. My favorite was “casino day.”
I had a toy casino set with a deck of cards, some dice, and a miniature roulette wheel and layout. There was a craps layout on the other side. The way we played the game as a sales contest was to give you your choice of bets from the casino games available, and if you won your bet, you got an extra $100.F
This would be the best way to play roulette at home, by the way — find a miniature casino equipment setup that includes a roulette component.
The variety of home casino games available is staggering if you search a site like Amazon. You can find everything from budget games where the odds are probably not remotely what you’d expect them to be to something just short of a full-sized casino table and everything in between.
You can spend between $100 and $500 and get something you’ll be proud to play with your friends and family during your next home casino night or party. I also found some interesting drinking games you could buy that were roulette-themed.
I have a friend named Tom who was into do-it-yourself projects (he was also a fine poker player). He once spent weeks building his own smoker from scratch. He said it was far more trouble than it was worth, and he said it was harder than he expected.
I suspect that building your own casino-quality roulette table might be a similarly daunting project, but if you want to give it a try, you have plenty of options to choose from on the internet. All you have to do is search YouTube for phrases like “DIY roulette table” and follow the instructions.
You can find plenty of blueprints and instructions on various websites just by doing a search of Bing or Google, too.
Free Casino Game Software
If you like video games, you have another option. You can buy one of the many free casino game software programs available. Hoyle Casino seems to be one of the most popular on a perennial basis. It’s a brand-name, and they seem to release an updated version of their software every year.
Sometimes, they have variations. For example, one year they released “Hoyle Casino 3D,” where all the graphics are in 3D. These programs range from $5 to $20 depending on how old the release you’re buying is.
They all offer multiple casino games you can play on your computer for fake chips. You can’t play any of these games for real money. Instead, you’re given a number of free chips within the game that you can use to play with.
As to whether these games duplicate the odds, probability, and house edge of the real live versions of these casino games, I don’t know. I suspect that they do not. These games want to encourage you to play, so my guess is that the odds are stacked in your favor.
In that respect, I think these games act almost like advertisements for the casino industry.
Still, if you want to play casino games like roulette in front of a computer screen, this is one option.
Online Roulette Games for Real Money
The other option for playing roulette at home is to find an online casino which offers roulette for real money. These games also offer free versions of their games where you can play for free chips, but they also have the option to play for real money.
Many online casinos require you to download a software client before playing their games. These tend to have the most realistic sound effects and graphics. The download can be used to play for free or for real money.
Other online casinos now offer no-download versions of their games. Usually, they have a more limited selection of instant play games to choose from, but roulette is almost always on the menu.
Be careful, though. I have no evidence to support this, but here’s my suspicion.
Sometimes the odds on the free games are tilted slightly to the players’ advantage.
Remember that the casino’s goal is to get you to sign up for a real money account and gamble real money. What better way to do that then to subtly mislead you into thinking that your odds of winning are better than they actually are?
You’ll also find online casinos which specialize in live dealer casino games, or webcam casino games. These are games that are played using actual casino equipment. They usually hire beautiful, exotic young women to work as dealers and croupiers for such games.
You place your bets via a special interface, and you can even chat with the ladies running the casino games.
Many players feel more comfortable playing such a game because they suspect the casinos of altering the odds of their software-based games. They figure that it’s harder to alter the odds on an actual roulette wheel.
I have my doubts about that, but that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the experience of playing roulette on a real roulette table with a real roulette wheel via webcam if that’s what floats your boat.
For that matter, the house edge for a standard American roulette wheel is already 5.26%. Why would the casino need to cheat by tilting the odds further in their favor?
Mathematically, they’re going to make massive amounts of profit anyway.
Appropriate Roulette Strategy for Playing at Home
If you’re playing roulette online for real money, you have some strategic options to consider. These mostly have to do with which game you choose.
And the best you can hope to do is find a game where you lose your money more slowly.
For example, most online casinos offer a single-zero roulette game. Instead of having 38 total numbers on the wheel, this wheel only has 37 numbers. Your probability of winning a single-number bet on such a game improves from 1/38 to 1/37, but the payout (35 to 1) remains the same.
This reduces the house edge from 5.26% to 2.70%, which is a major difference.
The layout of the betting surface is slightly different, but you should be able to figure it out.
An even better rule that’s available at some online casinos is the en prison or la partage rule. In a game with this rule in place, the house edge is further reduced to 1.35%.
Here’s how that rule works.
When you place an even-money bet on such a table and lose, your bet is placed “in prison.” On the next spin, if it still loses, you’ve lost the bet.
But if it wins on that second spin, it’s returned to you (albeit with no winnings).
You can easily see why this game is superior to the standard game where you just lose a bet when you guess wrong.
The other thing to keep in mind is that this rule is only in effect for the outside bets that pay off at even money. This means that any other bet at this virtual roulette table is a sucker bet.
Finally, be careful of which online casino you sign up for. Not all online casinos are honest. They don’t usually cheat at roulette, though.
The more common way for an online casino to cheat is by interfering with your ability to cash out. They have various ways of doing this, but you can read about people’s experiences with that sort of behavior by checking out any major casino player forum online. Gamblers who have experienced delays in their cashouts are usually not shy about sharing their experiences with the rest of the internet.
The editors of this site, by the way, have spent hours researching reputations so that they could only recommend trustworthy, legitimate gambling sites at which to play.
Conclusion
If you want to learn how to play roulette at home, you have multiple options. You can buy a makeshift smaller casino-game set via Amazon for as little as $100.
Roulette At Home Rules
Or you can make your own roulette game if you’re a DIY-er. Just search the plans and instructions and get to work.
Strategy For Roulette At Casinos
You can also play on a computer. You can play games like Hoyle Casino, which have no real money option, or you can sign up for a free, play money account at an online casino.
You can even play for real money on the internet. You have multiple options for this, too — software-based games, instant play games in a web browser, or real roulette games played with live dealers via webcam.
You have far more options for home roulette games than I initially thought. In fact, I might have even missed a couple of options. If so, leave a message and let me know what I forgot and should have included.