© 2026 Ninefold Ventures LLC, d/b/a 6-Lab. All rights reserved.
© 2026 Ninefold Ventures LLC, d/b/a 6-Lab. All rights reserved.
Roulette is played at a table with a dealer. This preview covers how the game works and what to watch for before 6-lab shows you the exact numbers that separate a play from a pass.
Games, paytables, and promotions change over time. This guide reflects information last updated July 18, 2026. Always verify current conditions yourself before you play.
Roulette is a table game played against a wheel, not a machine -- a dealer spins a numbered wheel one direction and rolls a small ball the opposite way, and players bet on where the ball will land before the spin. It's one of the oldest games still on a modern casino floor, with roots tracing back to 17th- and 18th-century France, and it comes in a few standard variants that differ in exactly how many numbers are on the wheel -- a detail that matters more to your odds than almost anything else about the game.
Each roulette round starts with a betting period, during which players place chips on a felt layout marked with numbers 0 through 36 (plus 00 on American wheels) and a set of grouped and named bets around the edges. The dealer spins the wheel in one direction and releases a small ball into a track running the opposite direction; as the ball loses momentum, it drops into the spinning wheel and eventually settles into one of the numbered pockets. Once it lands, the dealer marks the winning number, pays out winning bets, and clears losing ones before the next round of betting opens.
The single biggest difference between roulette variants is how many zero pockets the wheel carries. American wheels have both a single 0 and a double 00, for 38 total pockets; European wheels drop the 00, leaving 37 pockets. That one extra pocket changes the math meaningfully -- the house edge on most bets works out to roughly 5.26% on an American wheel versus about 2.7% on a European wheel, since the payout odds on every bet stay the same while the number of losing pockets goes up. French roulette typically uses the same single-zero wheel as the European version but adds rules like "la partage" or "en prison," which return half (or the whole) of an even-money bet when the ball lands on zero, pushing the house edge on those specific bets down further still.
The numbered grid itself is the "inside" of the layout, where players can bet on a single number (straight-up), a line between two numbers (split), a row of three (street), a block of four (corner), or a six-number block (six line) -- each paying more the fewer numbers it covers. The "outside" bets sit around the edge of the grid and cover broader groups: red or black, odd or even, high (19-36) or low (1-18), a full column of twelve numbers, or a dozen (1-12, 13-24, 25-36). Many European tables also have a curved "racetrack" diagram next to the main layout, used for betting on groups of numbers that sit physically next to each other on the wheel rather than the number grid.
Roulette's invention is commonly traced to 17th-century France, with the game's name literally meaning "little wheel." Popular history often connects it to mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal's experiments with a perpetual-motion device, though the direct link between Pascal's device and the gambling wheel is more legend than documented fact. The game spread through European casinos over the following two centuries before crossing to the United States, where the added double-zero pocket became the standard American variation still found on most U.S. casino floors today.
More games you can identify the same way, from a single photo.