A Brief History of the Game of Roulette
The game roulette comes from the French word that means, "little wheel." A roulette wheel has thirty-eight numbered pockets -thirty-seven, for the European version. To determine the winning number, the dealer -which is also often called the croupier- spins the wheel in one direction, and spins a small, white ball in the opposite direction, on a track on the wheel. The winning number is the number of the pocket where the ball finally lands in.
The game of roulette, as it is played today, has been described in a French novel written by Jacques Lablee, entitled, "La Roulette ou le Jour." The book was published in 1801, and in the text of the book, a roulette wheel was described in 1796, in Paris' Palais Royal. There is an even earlier mention of the game, but it is not certain whether or not the game being referred to is the roulette that people play today. In a list of regulations for New France -what is known today as Canada- published in 1758, banned games included "dice, hoca, faro, and roulette."
The traditional roulette wheel had a single zero and a double zero pocket. In order for their casino to get an edge over their competition, two Frenchmen, Louis and Francois Blanc introduced the single zero roulette wheel in the town of Homburg, a casino and spa town in Germany. With one less zero pocket on the roulette wheel, a player's chances of winning are raised by a factor of one, and this was a significant draw for many gamblers. Legend has it that Francois Blanc sold his soul to the devil so that he could be privy to the secrets of roulette, because the numbers of the roulette wheel, from one to thirty-six, are said to add up to a total of 666, the "number of the beast," as depicted in the Bible's Book of Revelations.
Indeed, during the 1800's, roulette became an incredibly popular game throughout Europe and the United States. When Germany outlawed gambling during the 1860s, the Blancs moved to one of the last bastions of legal gambling in Europe, Monte Carlo, Monaco, where the last legal casino in Europe also stood. Monaco became a center for Europe's gambling elite, thanks to the Blancs, and it was here that their version of the roulette wheel, the single zero wheel, became one of the greatest draws. It is because of this that roulette is often referred to as the "King of Casino Games."