Roulette is a classic casino game and one of the most popular table games. Its rules are simple enough for beginners to learn and it has plenty of betting options that make it fun for seasoned gamblers as well. While you may think of roulette as a pure luck game, there are strategies that can increase your chances of winning and help you manage your bankroll better.
Before you start playing, you should establish the size of a betting unit based on your available bankroll. This will be the amount you will bet on each spin. This way, you can keep track of your losses and wins and avoid going broke. The goal is to maximize your bankroll by hitting a certain percentage of wins in each session.
The game of Roullete is played on a circular table marked off with numbers from 1 to 36 and one or two zeros. There are also several other sections affording players a variety of betting opportunities, including red and black, odd and even, high and low. The center of the game is a revolving dishlike device called a roulette wheel. A small ball is spun to come to rest in one of the compartments of the wheel, indicating the winning number and its characteristics: whether it is odd or even, red or black, and between 1 and 36.
In the beginning, a roulette wheel consisted of a solid wooden disk slightly convex in shape with metal partitions known as separators or frets around its rim. Thirty-six of these compartments are painted alternately in red and black and numbered nonconsecutively from 1 to 36. A 37th compartment, painted green, carries the sign of 0, and on American wheels there are two more green compartments representing 0 and 00.
A roulette wheel has a number of symmetries that can be exploited for bets with better odds than others. For example, all the low red numbers are together and the high black ones are separately from each other (the first dozen). A bet on this sequence pays out 2-1 if it wins. Other symmetries exist but they are not as profitable.
When a player places his bets, the dealer clears the table of all losing bets and then gives the winners their chips according to their odds of success. He will also place a marker on the winning number, which can be either an individual digit or a group of digits.