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UK
Casino Times
> Online Roulette - A Beginners' Guide
09 November
2005
Online Roulette - A Beginners'
Guide
Excitement,
glamour, high-stakes tension - nothing better symbolises
gambling in online casinos and offline than the spinning
blur of the roulette wheel. Learn the odds with our guide
for online gambling novices.
The spinning wheel and
clattering silver ball of the roulette table are one of the
most famous images in gambling - so it's no surprise to see
the ease with which the game has made the jump to the online
world.
The basic idea behind
roulette is very simple - a wheel is spun and a small ball
is released to drop into any one of 37 or 38 numbered slots.
Players bet on where the ball will stop. Half the slots
numbered 1-36 are coloured red, and half are black. The 0
slot and (if there is one) the 00 slot are coloured
green.
The number of zeros on the
table is the big difference
between European and American
roulette, the
double zero being the version most often seen in the US.
Both versions can be found in online
casinos and the
wise gambler picks single-zero tables, as the house
advantage is reduced.
Bets can be made on any
individual number, or on many different groups of numbers.
The odds paid on winning depend, unsurprisingly, on the
likelihood of the bet succeeding. A bet on an individual
number pays at 35-1, while 'outer table' bets such as
odd/even or red/black pay at evens.
The zeros are what gives
the house its edge: any of the evens-odds bets lose when a 0
or 00 comes up, and their presence on the wheel mean
players' chances of picking a winning number are rather
worse than the pay-out should they succeed.
Of all the casino games,
roulette is the purest example of mathematical probability
in action. For this reason, there have been many attempts to
calculate a foolproof system that guarantees winning. None
of them works.
Some rely on unfeasibly
large table limits (and ridiculously deep pockets on the
part of the player) to allow cumulative losses to be won
back in one single evens-odds win. Most fail to counter the
inbuilt advantage that the zeros give the house. And a few
are irrelevant to online play, as they depend on finding a
defective wheel that isn't perfectly random, or a croupier
whose ball release motion is predictable over a long period
of time.
In fact, the only safe
thing to say about roulette betting systems is that if you
religiously follow one, betting on all the numbers it says
you should bet on, ignoring all the numbers it says you
should avoid, and betting only the amounts it recommends,
then sooner or later you will lose all your
money.
Given this, roulette is
not a good choice for online gamers who like pitting their
wits and skills against other players and the house, and who
measure their success by the size of their winnings. So why
does it remain so popular?
Partly it's because
players insist in believing, despite all evidence to the
contrary, that somewhere out there is a system which will
beat the house. And there's no denying that few feelings in
gambling can beat the rush when you bet the farm on a single
number and it comes up.
And therein lays the
secret. Roulette is a game for people who love the glamour
and excitement of casino play, and who enjoy staring Lady
Luck in the eye and trying to outsmart her.
The steady grind of a
day-long poker tournament, with its subtle ebbs and flows of
fortune and its unremitting concentration, is not for
everyone. For many gamers, the tense wait as the wheel spins
and the sudden burst of triumph or tragedy as the ball falls
into a slot, are what gambling is all about.
If you want to dip your
toe into the glamorous and exciting world of online casinos,
can savour your occasional coups and are able to look at
your losses as simply the entrance fee, then roulette is the
game for you.
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