Drawing illustrates a gambling hall in Cripple Creek. Note the roulette wheel on the right.
rou·lette, pronounced rü-ˈlet
A term meaning “small wheel,”in French, roulette, is a casino game in which players bet on a number, a series of numbers, the colors red or black or odd and even numbers. After bets are made, the croupier, who collects and pays bets, spins a large wheel with alternating red and black squares that are each marked with a number. The croupier immediately spins a small ball in opposite direction around a tilted circular track that runs along the wheel’s circumference. The ball eventually slows down and falls and into one of 38 (in American roulette) colored and numbered pockets.
By Rosemary Fetter
Although Venice, Italy, actually gave birth to the first gaming parlors, most of today’s casino games – blackjack, roulette and baccarat – originated in France. At the Palace of Versailles, world-weary royalty found solace in gambling, which quickly became the real “sport of kings.” In fact, one historian wrote that during the reign of The Sun King, Louis XIV, three-quarters of the country thought of nothing but cards and dice.
The French Revolution did little to diminish the nation’s infatuation with gambling, although the order of a deck of cards became ace-high instead of king-high as a nod to the proletariat. Roulette first appeared shortly thereafter, a mish-mash of three different games, hocca or bibiri, which is a board/numbers game, combined with the wheel games of roly-poly, ace of hearts and odds and evens.
In roly-poly, played in England as early as 1720, a ball spins around a little wheel with several slots, two of which belong to the banker. Ace of Hearts resembled faro, played with a faro layout and cards painted on a wheel. Both games were popular in England until 1739, when they were outlawed by King George III’s new government.
A similar amusement, odds and evens, soon took their place. This new pastime (strangely called E/O instead of O/E) involved a wheel marked with 40 slots, 20 odd and 20 even, with one of each marked for the bank. If the ball landed on a bank slot it was an automatic win for the house.
The French made some modifications to roly-poly and E/O changing the numbers from black and white to black and red. By 1796, the wheel had been combined with a version of bibiri that had 36 numbers and two 0’s for the bank slots, thus creating the modern roulette. Most of the features of today’s game were by then in place: red/black and even/odd betting, straight and combination betting, column betting and splits and combinations. A 0 and double 0 were marked in green, neither red/black odd or even.
The first written description of a roulette wheel appears in an 1803 French novel La Roulette, ou le Jour by Jaques Lablee and describes a Parisian game in the Palais Royal in 1796. “There are exactly two slots reserved for the bank, whence it derives its sole mathematical advantage,” he wrote, subsequently describing, “two betting spaces containing the bank’s numbers, zero and double zero.”
In 1843, François and Louis Blanc introduced the single “0” roulette wheel, which subsequently became universal except in the United States, where the double “0’ wheel has always been preferred. According to fable, François Blanc made a deal with the devil to solve the mysteries of the roulette wheel, a fanciful notion based on the fact that the numerical sum on the roulette wheel, 1 – 36, equals 666.
Roulette was quite popular in Germany until the late 1860s, when the great gaming houses were forced to close. The Blanca family, one of the casino owners, moved Europe’s last legal establishment to Monte Carlo, where they operated a gaming paradise for the wealthy. European players still prefer the single zero roulette wheel.
The French probably introduced the first North American roulette wheels in Quebec and New Orleans, the latter of which became America’s gambling Mecca after Jefferson bought Louisiana Territory in 1803. By the 1830s, New Orleans and Mobile, Ala. had become the early frontier versions of Vegas and Reno, until Mississippi riverboat gamblers took the game up the river and out West.
During the years following the California Gold Rush of 1848-49, roulette came into its own in the gaming houses of San Francisco, where cheating became so common that the wheel was moved to the top of the table and a simplified layout devised to prevent further bloodshed. When several of the gambling brethren were unceremoniously hanged in San Francisco in 1856, the sporting fraternity drifted toward the east, settling in frontier towns like Kansas City, which became the “new” New Orleans.
In Denver, which ran a close second in terms of vice, a young gambler named Ed Chase offered roulette at the Palace Variety and Gambling Theater in the early 1860s. The game seemed to expand with the mineral strikes and the railroads, moving to the Alaska wilderness by late 1890s.
A rush to morality in the early years of the twentieth century illegalized certain activities that were somewhat unfairly grouped together, like drinking, prostitution and gambling. Games of chance continued to flourish during subsequent eras, including the Roaring Twenties and the World War II era. By the 1950s-60s, roulette was legal only in Las Vegas and Monte Carlo, although the game was still played subversively in certain small western towns.
A resurgence of interest in legalized gambling and its profitable taxation began during the 1970s. Both the interest and the taxes continue today, with roulette usually incorporated into the gaming repertoire after slots, poker and blackjack.
Although numerous betting systems like the Martingale and Fibonacci systems have been devised since roulette was invented, no strategy thus far devised can statistically overcome the house’s advantage. Casinos guard against modern technological devices like lasers by rotating wheels, changing dealers and taking other precautions.
Still, there’s no denying plain old good luck. In the summer of 1891, one Charles Wells from London continuously won all the money from each table he played over a period of several days. The memory of his famous triumph still lingers in the old song, The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.
