How To Play Roulette At Home
Standard Roulette consists of a spinning wheel, a betting table, a ceramic ball spun by a croupier, and a series of wager options available to each player. Before each round, simply place your wager in chips on the Roulette table, and watch the croupier spin the wheel with the Roulette ball in motion in the opposite direction. The two types of roulette games are American and European; the games are basically the same and there is no difference in how to play. While European roulette offers players 37 numbers in total and has only one green space on the wheel, American roulette gives the player an additional betting option by adding a green 00 to betting layout. Online roulette also allows a user to be at home will gambling. You can stay in your bed and be winning money. This information is to inform about the game of roulette and how it is played. Also about online roulette and how you can play different variations that give the house a lower probability of winning thus paying more money out.
Most casinos I visit only have one or two roulette wheels, and they usually aren’t busy. You can play roulette at online casinos, and big land-based casinos still offer it. Roulette has been a staple at in-person casinos for a long time, and I don’t see it going away anytime soon.
But one of the biggest problems roulette has in the United States is the double zero, or American, wheel. I cover this in more depth in the next section, but the house edge is almost twice as high on a double zero wheel than when you play on a single zero wheel.
Even a single zero roulette wheel has a house edge higher than many other casino games. This means that you lose faster than when you play other games and have fewer winning sessions. This is why roulette isn’t one of the most popular choices at the casino.
Another issue with roulette is the game doesn’t offer a chance to win a big amount on a single spin of the wheel. The highest payout on the table is for a single number wager, and it only pays 35 to 1. In comparison, many slot machines offer 1,000 to 1 to 100,000 to 1 or higher for the top possible payout on one spin.
All of these things have led to roulette being placed toward the bottom of the casino game pecking order. This is why you don’t see professional roulette players often. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t learn how to play roulette like a pro. Here’s a list of four ways to play roulette like a professional.
1 – Only Play Single Zero Wheels
One of the best things about roulette is you don’t need to worry about strategy. Every bet on a single zero roulette wheel has the same house edge, so in the long run it doesn’t matter what you bet on. The only strategy consideration in roulette is to always play on a single zero wheel, and never play on a double zero roulette wheel.
Single zero roulette wheels have a house edge of 2.7% on every available wager. Double zero wheels have a house edge of 5.26% on every bet but one. The single exception on a double zero roulette wheel is the basket bet, where you bet on the 0, 00, 1, 2, and 3. The house edge on the basket bet is even higher than 5.26%.
Even when you limit your roulette play to a single zero wheel, the house edge is higher than many other casino games. Here’s a list of other casino games available with a lower house edge. Some of these games require the use of specific strategies to achieve a lower house edge.
- Blackjack – Depending on the rules, you can play blackjack with a house edge of less than .5% to 2%.
- Baccarat – The banker bet has a house edge of 1.06% and the player bet has a house edge of 1.24%.
- Craps – The pass line bet in craps has a house edge of 1.41% and the don’t pass line wager has a house edge of 1.36%.
- Video Poker – Many video poker variations have pay tables that offer a house edge under 1%.
In addition to the games listed above, many poker players and sports bettors are able to play with an edge of less than roulette offers. This includes a small percentage of bettors who are able to play with a small edge overall in these games.
The only way to play roulette is using a single zero wheel. It doesn’t offer a house edge as low as some other games, but it’s the only worthy option if you play roulette. A single zero roulette wheel using French rules, which include “en prison” is even better, but it still doesn’t eliminate the house edge.
2 – Manage Your Bankroll
When you play a game like roulette that has a specific house edge, the fact is that your bankroll is going to go down as you play. Your bankroll is going to fluctuate up and down, but over time, it always goes down when you’re playing a game with a house edge.
This means that if you want to keep playing, you have to eventually add more money to your bankroll. But in the short term, you need to do everything you can to manage your bankroll so you can play as long as possible. Two ways to help with this are covered in the next two sections.
You learned in the last section that the house edge on a single zero roulette wheel, no matter what bet you choose, is 2.7%. But do you know how this translates into actual losses?
If you make $1,000,000 worth of bets playing roulette over the course of your life, a 2.7% house edge means you’re going to lose $27,000. The way you determine this is to multiply the house edge of 2.7% times $1,000,000.
You can use this formula to determine your expected loss for any period of time, based on how much you risk at the roulette table.
Here Are a Couple Examples:You bet $10 per spin and play 50 spins every hour. This is a total risk of $500. When you multiply $500 times 2.7%, you get an expected loss of $13.50. This means that on average, you’re losing $13.50 every hour you play.
You bet $100 per spin and play 100 spins per hour online. This is a total risk per hour of $10,000. $10,000 times 2.7% is an expected loss of $270.
You can’t change the house edge, but you can control how much you risk and how many spins you play. In order to play longer, you need to risk less and/or play fewer spins. This is the only way you can manage your bankroll playing roulette.
3 – Use the Players Club
One way to help manage your bankroll is to sign up for the players club. When you use the players club, the casino tracks your play and gives you rewards.
Players clubs are different and offer different levels of rewards from casino to casino. Common rewards include free meals and free merchandise. But you might also be able to earn free hotel rooms, free travel, cash back, and free play opportunities.
Anything you earn from your play through the players club represents something that you don’t have to pay for.
If you earn cash back you can use this to directly supplement your bankroll. Other perks, like free meals save you money that you can use to supplement your bankroll.
Most land-based casinos offer some sort of players club, and you should always sign up before you play roulette. Some online casinos also offer perks, but that perks that you get when you play online are different from the perks you get when you play in land-based casinos.
4 – Play Online Roulette
Online roulette offers two things that you don’t get when you play in land-based casinos. The first thing is that you control the speed of the game. You can play as many spins per hour as you want, based on how fast your internet connection is and how fast you can press the spin button. But this also means that you can slow down and play fewer spins every hour than you play in a land-based casino.
Remember the formula you learned earlier about multiplying your total amount risked times the house edge. The minimum bet amount is usually lower when you play roulette online, so it’s one of the best ways to manage your bankroll.
The other benefit of playing roulette online is that you can usually get a bonus. A bonus increases the size of your bankroll, which lets you play longer. This is another way to help manage your bankroll.
If you have $200 to play roulette with and receive a $200 bonus, you double your bankroll. When you combine this with slower play and smaller bets, you increase how long you can play by a large amount.
With a $400 bankroll included in your bonus, you can play for a long time using small bets. If you bet $5 per spin and play 40 spins every hour, your expected loss is only $5.40 every hour. This means you can play around 74 hours before you run out of money.
An online roulette bonus isn’t going to eliminate the house edge, but it does let you play longer on the same amount of money.
Conclusion
Playing roulette like a pro is all about playing with a house edge that’s as low as you can find and managing your bankroll. The best option is to always play on a single zero wheel, and play online at a slow pace with small wagers and a big bonus.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.When it comes to ease of play, roulette is hard to beat. You spin a wheel that has 38 possible outcomes, and you bet on various aspects of what that outcome might be — the number, the color, whether it’s a high or low number, whether it’s an even or odd number, etc.
It might seem like there are a bewildering number of bets to choose from, but most roulette bets are more straightforward than you would think.
Unlike some casino games, though, figuring out how to play roulette at home can be a challenge. After all, it requires some specialized equipment that most people can’t afford, wouldn’t know where to buy, and wouldn’t have room to store.
This post looks at several different ways you can play roulette at home.
A Quick Roulette Tutorial
Here’s a quick tutorial about how to play roulette anywhere, at home or in the casino.
How To Play Roulette Online
The game has two moving parts — a spinning wheel that sits in a bowl and a metal ball that spins around the edge of the bowl. Eventually, friction and gravity cause the ball to fall into one of the pockets on the spinning wheel.
Gamblers have a variety of bets they can place, all of which win or lose based on some aspect of the number where the ball lands.
On a standard American roulette wheel, you have 38 numbers — 0, 00, and 1 through 36, inclusive. The 0 and the 00 are green. Half the other numbers are black, and the other half are red.
You can bet on which color comes up. You can bet on whether the number that comes up is odd or even. You can bet on whether the number is low (1 through 18) or high (19 through 36). You can bet on multiple numbers at one time, or you can bet on ranges like first, second, or third (1-12, 13-24, or 25-36).
You can even bet on a specific number coming up. The less likely you are to win one of these bets, the more you win.
For example, if you bet on a specific number and win, you get paid off at 35 to 1. If you bet on black, you get paid off at even money.
The payouts vary based on the bet, but it’s beyond the scope of the post to get into every possible bet and payout. Also, you can find the information elsewhere on this site.
The Magic of Home Roulette Sets
When I worked as a sales manager at Expedia, I liked to have contests for the salespeople. My favorite was “casino day.”
I had a toy casino set with a deck of cards, some dice, and a miniature roulette wheel and layout. There was a craps layout on the other side. The way we played the game as a sales contest was to give you your choice of bets from the casino games available, and if you won your bet, you got an extra $100.F
This would be the best way to play roulette at home, by the way — find a miniature casino equipment setup that includes a roulette component.
The variety of home casino games available is staggering if you search a site like Amazon. You can find everything from budget games where the odds are probably not remotely what you’d expect them to be to something just short of a full-sized casino table and everything in between.
You can spend between $100 and $500 and get something you’ll be proud to play with your friends and family during your next home casino night or party. I also found some interesting drinking games you could buy that were roulette-themed.
I have a friend named Tom who was into do-it-yourself projects (he was also a fine poker player). He once spent weeks building his own smoker from scratch. He said it was far more trouble than it was worth, and he said it was harder than he expected.
I suspect that building your own casino-quality roulette table might be a similarly daunting project, but if you want to give it a try, you have plenty of options to choose from on the internet. All you have to do is search YouTube for phrases like “DIY roulette table” and follow the instructions.
You can find plenty of blueprints and instructions on various websites just by doing a search of Bing or Google, too.
Free Casino Game Software
If you like video games, you have another option. You can buy one of the many free casino game software programs available. Hoyle Casino seems to be one of the most popular on a perennial basis. It’s a brand-name, and they seem to release an updated version of their software every year.
Sometimes, they have variations. For example, one year they released “Hoyle Casino 3D,” where all the graphics are in 3D. These programs range from $5 to $20 depending on how old the release you’re buying is.
They all offer multiple casino games you can play on your computer for fake chips. You can’t play any of these games for real money. Instead, you’re given a number of free chips within the game that you can use to play with.
As to whether these games duplicate the odds, probability, and house edge of the real live versions of these casino games, I don’t know. I suspect that they do not. These games want to encourage you to play, so my guess is that the odds are stacked in your favor.
In that respect, I think these games act almost like advertisements for the casino industry.
Still, if you want to play casino games like roulette in front of a computer screen, this is one option.
Online Roulette Games for Real Money
The other option for playing roulette at home is to find an online casino which offers roulette for real money. These games also offer free versions of their games where you can play for free chips, but they also have the option to play for real money.
Many online casinos require you to download a software client before playing their games. These tend to have the most realistic sound effects and graphics. The download can be used to play for free or for real money.
Other online casinos now offer no-download versions of their games. Usually, they have a more limited selection of instant play games to choose from, but roulette is almost always on the menu.
Be careful, though. I have no evidence to support this, but here’s my suspicion.
Sometimes the odds on the free games are tilted slightly to the players’ advantage.
Remember that the casino’s goal is to get you to sign up for a real money account and gamble real money. What better way to do that then to subtly mislead you into thinking that your odds of winning are better than they actually are?
You’ll also find online casinos which specialize in live dealer casino games, or webcam casino games. These are games that are played using actual casino equipment. They usually hire beautiful, exotic young women to work as dealers and croupiers for such games.
You place your bets via a special interface, and you can even chat with the ladies running the casino games.
Many players feel more comfortable playing such a game because they suspect the casinos of altering the odds of their software-based games. They figure that it’s harder to alter the odds on an actual roulette wheel.
I have my doubts about that, but that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying the experience of playing roulette on a real roulette table with a real roulette wheel via webcam if that’s what floats your boat.
For that matter, the house edge for a standard American roulette wheel is already 5.26%. Why would the casino need to cheat by tilting the odds further in their favor?
Mathematically, they’re going to make massive amounts of profit anyway.
Appropriate Roulette Strategy for Playing at Home
If you’re playing roulette online for real money, you have some strategic options to consider. These mostly have to do with which game you choose.
And the best you can hope to do is find a game where you lose your money more slowly.
For example, most online casinos offer a single-zero roulette game. Instead of having 38 total numbers on the wheel, this wheel only has 37 numbers. Your probability of winning a single-number bet on such a game improves from 1/38 to 1/37, but the payout (35 to 1) remains the same.
This reduces the house edge from 5.26% to 2.70%, which is a major difference.
The layout of the betting surface is slightly different, but you should be able to figure it out.
An even better rule that’s available at some online casinos is the en prison or la partage rule. In a game with this rule in place, the house edge is further reduced to 1.35%.
Here’s how that rule works.
When you place an even-money bet on such a table and lose, your bet is placed “in prison.” On the next spin, if it still loses, you’ve lost the bet.
But if it wins on that second spin, it’s returned to you (albeit with no winnings).
You can easily see why this game is superior to the standard game where you just lose a bet when you guess wrong.
The other thing to keep in mind is that this rule is only in effect for the outside bets that pay off at even money. This means that any other bet at this virtual roulette table is a sucker bet.
Finally, be careful of which online casino you sign up for. Not all online casinos are honest. They don’t usually cheat at roulette, though.
The more common way for an online casino to cheat is by interfering with your ability to cash out. They have various ways of doing this, but you can read about people’s experiences with that sort of behavior by checking out any major casino player forum online. Gamblers who have experienced delays in their cashouts are usually not shy about sharing their experiences with the rest of the internet.
The editors of this site, by the way, have spent hours researching reputations so that they could only recommend trustworthy, legitimate gambling sites at which to play.
Conclusion
If you want to learn how to play roulette at home, you have multiple options. You can buy a makeshift smaller casino-game set via Amazon for as little as $100.
Or you can make your own roulette game if you’re a DIY-er. Just search the plans and instructions and get to work.
You can also play on a computer. You can play games like Hoyle Casino, which have no real money option, or you can sign up for a free, play money account at an online casino.
You can even play for real money on the internet. You have multiple options for this, too — software-based games, instant play games in a web browser, or real roulette games played with live dealers via webcam.
How To Play Russian Roulette
You have far more options for home roulette games than I initially thought. In fact, I might have even missed a couple of options. If so, leave a message and let me know what I forgot and should have included.
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