Roulette
Friday, September 19th, 2008A very popular casino game, roulette means ‘small wheel’ in French and indeed this wheel of fortune gambling game is a perennial favorite with gamers all over the world. The method of playing roulette is simple but the outcome is based entirely on luck.
The player places a either an inside or outside bet on a single or multiple numbers, with colors red, black or green and value of numbers, odd or even. There are 38 colored and numbered pockets in the American roulette wheel (European roulette has 37). To determine whether one has got the winning combination of color and number, the croupier, who conducts the game, spins the wheel in one direction and a ball on the opposite direction along the circumference of the tilted circular track until the ball rests at one of the colored and numbered pockets.
Several strategies have been propounded to crack the mystery of the golden rule of winning at roulette, but the game is essentially based not on skill but chance. One may remember the celebrated Man That Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo in 1891 when he went to the Monte Carlo casino and over a period of several days, won all the money available at the table bank on the given day. Eventually, he confessed his winning had no tactics but only blind luck.
The legends surrounding this popular gambling game are many with some famous movie references. One may remember the trick roulette wheel in the 1942 film Casablanca where the croupier could make the ball come to rest at pocket number 22 at his will. Or part III of the 1998 film Run Lola Run, where Lola places her bet on the same number twice and wins both times to make a fortune, the feat being outstanding because mathematically the odds of winning at the same number consecutive times in a European roulette wheel is 1369-to-1 against.
