A short history of roulette
Roulette is one of the few casino games whose rules have barely changed in two hundred years. The wheel in a live studio today has the same 37 pockets, in the same order, paying the same 35:1 as the wheel in a Paris gaming house in the 1790s minus one pocket. What has changed is everything around it: where it is played, who runs it, and how fast the spins arrive. This site traces that.
Before the wheel
Games of chance on spinning devices existed in Italy (biribi, hoca) and England (roly-poly, even-odd) through the 17th and 18th centuries. A rotating wheel with numbered compartments and a ball is a natural object, and several games converged on it. The story that Blaise Pascal invented roulette while working on a perpetual-motion machine in the 1650s is repeated everywhere and supported by nothing beyond the fact that he studied rotating devices and probability. He did not leave a roulette wheel behind.
Paris, 1790s
The first descriptions of roulette in its modern form, a wheel with 36 numbers plus a zero and a double zero, a layout with inside and outside bets and the familiar payouts, come from Paris in the final years of the 18th century. A 1796 novel describes the game being played at the Palais-Royal with both zeros. The house's share came from those two green pockets, exactly as it does on an American wheel today.
The single zero, 1843
The Blanc brothers, François and Louis, ran a casino in Bad Homburg and wanted an edge over the competition in Paris and the other German spa towns. They removed the double zero. The house advantage halved, players came, and when gambling was outlawed in Germany in the 1860s François Blanc took the single-zero wheel to Monaco, where the casino at Monte Carlo made it the standard for Europe.
America keeps the double zero
Roulette crossed the Atlantic with French settlers in Louisiana. Early American wheels had a zero, a double zero and sometimes an eagle pocket, giving the house as much as three pockets in 38 or more. The eagle disappeared; the double zero stayed, and the American wheel remains a 38-pocket wheel at 5.26% to this day. The wheel-evolution page covers the mechanical changes.
The twentieth century
Monte Carlo, then the Riviera, then Las Vegas from the 1940s. Roulette became the image of the casino in film and fiction: the ball, the croupier, the green felt. The famous-stories page has the wins, the attempts to beat the wheel, and the handful that worked on wheels that were not quite true.
Britain and the betting shop
Casinos were legalised in the UK in the 1960s and roulette came with them. From 2001 fixed-odds betting terminals put a roulette game, usually a 20p-chip European wheel, in nearly every high street bookmaker, and for a decade it was the most played roulette in the country. Stake limits imposed in 2019 ended that era; the same games had already moved online.
Online, 1996 onwards
The first online casinos offered RNG roulette within a few years of the web. Live-dealer roulette, a real wheel streamed from a studio, arrived in the mid-2000s and became the dominant form at UK sites in the 2010s, with multiplier formats and themed tables following from 2018. The wheel in the studio is the Blanc wheel: 37 pockets, single zero, same payouts, 2.70%.
What never changed
The order of the numbers on the European wheel. The 35:1 on a straight-up. The green pocket as the house's share. Everything a player at the Palais-Royal would recognise is still there; the pace, the stakes and the camera are the only new things.
Questions and answers
Who invented roulette?
Nobody in particular. The wheel probably grew out of 17th-century experiments with perpetual-motion devices and earlier Italian and English wheel games, and took recognisable form in Paris in the 1790s. Blaise Pascal is often credited, inaccurately, for his work on rotating devices.
Where does the name roulette come from?
French for "little wheel". The game was being played under that name in Paris by the end of the 18th century, with both a zero and a double zero on the wheel.
When did the single-zero wheel appear?
In 1843, in the spa town of Bad Homburg, where the Blanc brothers removed the double zero to undercut rival casinos. They took the single-zero wheel to Monte Carlo in the 1860s, and it became the European standard.