Roulette is a fun and exciting casino game that can be enjoyed by players of all experience levels. Players place their chips on a betting table and wait until the croupier says no more bets before spinning the wheel. There are many different types of bets in roulette, with varying risk levels and payout odds.
Origins
The word “roulette” derives from the French noun roelet, which is itself a contraction of the Latin noun rotella, meaning little wheel. Its circular form is a reminder of the medieval “Wheel of Fortune,” turned by Fortuna to decide human fates. Its duality of being mathematically precise and existentially random gives roulette its unique appeal to gamblers.
The origins of the first roulette game are obscure, but it is generally accepted that Blaise Pascal conceived the concept in 1655, during his quest to build a perpetual motion machine. He merged the two strands of the wheel-and-ball gambling game (roly poly and even-odd) with the number-betting lottery games of bassette and Biribi to create what we now know as roulette. As more and more Europeans moved to America, their gambling traditions followed them, and roulette found its home in New Orleans.