Roulette is a casino game in which players bet on numbers or groups of numbers. The game’s house edge is lower if you place “outside bets,” which cover large groups of numbers.
The croupier throws a ball into a rotating wheel and then pays the winners. The dealer then clears the table and resets betting for the next round.
Origins
The origins of roulette are somewhat elusive. Some have claimed that it was invented by 17th century French math wizard Blaise Pascal while he was trying to create a perpetual motion machine. This is a bit of an exaggeration because roulette as we know it today began to take shape around a century after Pascal’s time, and was most likely created through the gradual merger of rules from a variety of different games that were already popular in Europe at that time, including the English game Roly Poly and the Italian games Hoca and Biribi.
Some historians believe that roulette evolved from a wheel used in the Italian game of Biribi. This theory makes more sense than some of the other tales about roulette’s creation, such as the one that claims that the game was invented by Roman soldiers who played a similar game with shields that had symbols written on them.