ROULETTE ARTICLES

The game of Roulette was born in France in the seventeenth century. Its father was a renowned mathematician called Blaise Pascal. Pascal has made several contributions to the world of mathematics.

The game was quickly picked up by gamblers as one with a lot of prospective. The first mention of the game was seen in a novel by Jacques Lablee named La Roulette, ou le Jour, which talked about a casino called Palais Royal that had a Roulette wheel in around 1796. He described the arrangement of the game as “...two betting spaces containing the bank's two numbers, zero and double zero.” And the house pockets as “There are exactly two slots reserved for the bank, whence it derives its sole mathematical advantage."

Although the game of Roulette remained unchanged for quite a long time, two Frenchmen in the year 1842 added a zero to the existing numbers from 1 to 36. These were ace gamblers Francois and Louis Blanc. Legend has it that these two men bartered their soul with the devil to acquire the secrets of the game of Roulette. The reason behind it is the fact that when all the numbers in the Roulette wheel are added they sum up to 666, the number of the beast.

Soon after this change in the layout of the roulette wheel, gambling got banned in France. As a result Francois Blanc along with his family shifted to the sole city where gambling was still legal- Monte Carlo. This place soon developed into a hub of gamblers from all over the Europe. The game’s popularity reached its peak during this period and people started calling it the “King of Casino Games”.

Gradually towards the end of the eighteenth century the Roulette wheel made its way over the Atlantic Ocean into the United States of America. First played in New Orleans and then spread across Mississippi, the game then travelled towards the west. Extensive cheating got involved in the game here from both the sides of the player and the dealer. Thus the wheel was now placed n the top of a table and sold the betting rules were simplified. This came to be known as the American version of the game. Since the American one is simpler this form of game is the one which is more popular across the world today. However the double zeros that were introduced in the wheel are only a part of games played in the USA, the single zero roulette is played everywhere else in the world.