How to Play Roulette at Home: Rules, Bets and Payouts

Roulette is the simplest casino game to learn and the one that draws a crowd: a spinning wheel, a ball, and everyone at the table watching the same number. It is also an easy game to run at home for a party or a casino night.

The wheel

A roulette wheel has numbered pockets from 1 to 36, alternating red and black, plus green zero pockets:

• European wheel: a single 0 — 37 pockets.
• American wheel: a 0 and a 00 — 38 pockets.

The dealer spins the wheel one way and the ball the other. Where the ball comes to rest is the winning number.

Placing bets

Players place chips on the felt layout, which has the numbers 1 to 36 in a grid of three columns, the zero (or zeros) at the top, and the outside bets around the edge. Bets go down before the spin; the dealer calls "no more bets" as the ball slows.

Inside bets and what they pay

• Straight up — one number: 35 to 1
• Split — two touching numbers: 17 to 1
• Street — a row of three: 11 to 1
• Corner — four numbers meeting at a corner: 8 to 1
• Six line — two rows, six numbers: 5 to 1

Outside bets

• Red or black, odd or even, 1–18 or 19–36: even money, 1 to 1
• Dozens (1–12, 13–24, 25–36) and columns: 2 to 1

The zero is neither red nor black, odd nor even: when it comes up, the outside bets lose. That is where the house edge comes from.

Hosting roulette at home

• One dealer spins, calls the result, collects the losing chips and pays the winners.
• Give everyone the same stack of chips at the start, and play for the chips. The biggest stack at the end wins a prize.
• Use different chip colours for each player if you can, so bets on the same number are never confused.
• Set a table limit so one player cannot bet the whole stack on red in the first five minutes.

A note on money: playing for chips and prizes is the usual way to host. Laws on home gambling for money vary from place to place, so if real money or a charity night is involved, check the rules where you live first.

A little history

Roulette — "little wheel" in French — took shape in eighteenth-century France. The single-zero wheel was popularised in the German spa casinos of the nineteenth century and then at Monte Carlo, and the double-zero wheel became the American standard.