As the American and European roulette have different number of slots on roulette wheels, their rules are not identical, and you have to know their nuances if you want to play Roulette and win. There’s also a so-called French Roulette, and its layout is absolutely different from the one we are used to, but as this variant isn’t so widespread, let’s concentrate on the American and the European Roulette.

The American Roulette layout looks as follows:

As you can see, the main difference of its layout is an additional zero space, on which you can place bets. As far as the roulette wheel is concerned, it has 38 numbers and they are situated in the way which allows to achieve the best balance between black and red, high and low, even and odd numbers. The scheme of the Roulette wheel looks this way:

This scheme is used to calculate the approximate payouts in American and European Roulette:
payout = (36 ? n) / n
The house edge in American roulette is a bit more than 5% while in the European roulette it is 2 times lower. I see no need to insert the bet odds scheme table in this post, but if you want to play American roulette, you need to have a look at it to understand what chances you have when bet on different numbers. You may use one of the popular Roulette betting systems for a start to feel more confident. When you feel more confident and start to “feel the game”, you may try to introduce some variations in the systems and, finally, create a betting system of your own. You must remember that you may learn to play only when you are playing, so try to play American Roulette online to see what the game is like in general.

As I promised in my last post, in our next articles devoted to the casino games Roulette we’ll concentrate on Roulette history, rules and betting techniques. To start with, I’d like to mention the thing, well-known to any casino player. But I don’t want our accidental visitors how want to learn to play casino games to rack their brain trying to guess what I’m talking about, so remember: there are 2 main types of Roulette game: American Roulette and European Roulette. The European Roulette has been known since the end of the 18th century. Paris was the center of Roulette obsession at that time. I must say that the Parisians were in general fond of playing gambling games and it took the authorities of this passionate city a lot of effort to forbid gambling.

The early form of American Roulette wheel had 31 slots – the ones numbered from 1 to 28 and 3 additional symbols:
1. a Single zero
2. a Double zero
3. and an American Eagle – the symbol of American liberty.

The American eagle symbol gave additional edge to the house, so a European who wanted to play casino games in the USA might be quite surprised with low Roulette winnings.

Present-day American Roulette wheel has 2 green pockets (zero and double zero) and slots numbered from 1 to 36, that’s why it’s often called “double-zero wheel” as contrasted to “one-zero” European Roulette wheel.

The cloth, which covers the Roulette table, is known as “the layout”. Single zero layout is known as French one, and double zero layout is called American layout. If you want to play casino games at an online casino, you’ll have an opportunity to try both the variants of Roulette, as most online casinos carry both American and European Roulette. I always advise to start playing casino games with their easiest variants, so learn to play European game Roulette first, then pass to a more complicated casino game – American Roulette.