One green zero versus two: the house edge you choose
Roulette—French for “little wheel”—lets players bet on a number, a cluster, red or black, odd or even, or high or low. A croupier spins the wheel one way and a ball the other until the ball drops into a coloured pocket. A single green zero or an extra double zero decides how hard the bank presses.
Likely descended from Italian Biribi, the game reached its present form in Paris by 1796; Jacques Lablee’s novel La Roulette, ou le Jour (published 1801) already describes bank slots for zero and double zero at the Palais Royal. New France regulations banned roulette as early as 1758. Late-1790s Paris wheels painted single zero red and double zero black before green became the house colour in the 1800s. François and Louis Blanc introduced a single-zero wheel at Bad Homburg in 1843 to undercut double-zero rivals; after Germany abolished gambling in the 1860s they made Monte Carlo the single-zero capital, while American tables kept the double zero.
Some early American wheels even offered numbers 1–28 plus zero, double zero, and an Eagle house slot. Cheating along the Mississippi pushed the wheel onto the tabletop and simplified layouts into today’s American style. By the early twentieth century Monte Carlo embodied French single-zero play and Las Vegas the American double-zero wheel; online casinos arrived by 1996 (often traced to InterCasino), and by 2008 hundreds of venues worldwide offered the game. Double-zero layouts still dominate the Americas and Caribbean; single-zero rules prevail elsewhere.
Pockets run 0 through 36. In ranges 1–10 and 19–28, odds are red and evens black; in 11–18 and 29–36 the colours flip. American wheels add green 00. Inside bets pick exact numbers or tight clusters; outside bets cover broader properties with smaller payouts but better odds—and usually lose on zero. Dealers freeze the layout with a dolly marker while paying winners. California bans traditional roulette yet allows a house-banked card variant using a randomised 38-card deck.
Blaise Pascal is often credited with a seventeenth-century precursor while chasing perpetual motion, and English “EO” (Even/Odd) wheels of the late eighteenth century rhyme with the same family tree.
Source: Roulette
