Roulette is one of the biggest, most widely played table games in history. It’s no surprise that nowadays millions of people visit casinos both inside actual casinos and on online casino websites in order to try their hand at guessing where the little white ball will land throughout the numbered spinning wheel.
But where exactly did such an interesting game originate from? We know it’s from the early 1700s and that it was first seen in France, throughout its age-old casinos, but the story goes a little bit further than that.
Roulette’s ancestry
In the 1600s, a simpler version of the game was created by coincidence during the 1600s by a famous physicist that went by the name of Blaise Pascal. You wouldn’t believe it if we told you that he accidentally created it while trying to design a perpetual motion machine – which means a machine that recycles the energy emitted when moving, harnessing the exerted energy in order to use it to generate more movement.
Later on, the true roulette mechanism as we know it today was first designed as a mashup between a 1720s gaming wheel and a game called Biribi, which originated in Italy.
The more time passed, the more people started to get to know about the game, and the more it started to show up across casinos scattered around the whole world, until it eventually became so popular, that it is now a necessity for every casino on the market to offer roulette tables to the public.
Roulette Nowadays
Fast forward to today and you will come across roulette tables in every casino you visit. And it’s not just the physical casinos on the streets. You can play hundreds of different variants and versions of Roulette online, wherever you are, whenever you want, and even on your smartphone.
The game is now more accessible than it ever was, and therefore to play the best version of it might be a bit difficult due to the countless options we have. This means it’s crucial to do some research in order to learn more about online casinos that offer roulette to players and choose the right one.
Different Variants of Roulette Today
The game of Roulette has grown and developed along with our advancements in every other sector over the years. This means that different variants of the game were created in order to cater to different sets of preferences, and we will go through the most popular ones in order to help you find your preferred variant.
European Roulette
European Roulette is the most popular version of the game. It is also known as the standard roulette, with the most familiar setup out of all the variants. You get the classic 1-36 in red and black, and a single green zero. This green zero is there to give the house their little bit of edge over the player, in order to get a little bit above a 50% chance of coming out on top. The table gives you options to bet on a single number or on groups of numbers, and if you guess it right, your payout comes at an equivalent of the odds of your bet.
American Roulette
The American Roulette table is very similar to the standard Euro. The main difference is the extra green slot with the extra zeros (the “00”). This gives the house a bigger edge over the player, which means European Roulette might be more favorable to the player since realistically, you are closer to 50/50 odds when playing the European version. Casinos mainly created this variant to increase their profits, meaning this specific variant of the game is not very favorable with players, compared to different variants.
Lightning Roulette
Lightning Roulette is a special modern variant of online roulette which can be found in all the world’s greatest online live dealer casinos. It was designed by developers Evolution gaming and has become a favorite across the whole world, thanks to its impressive jackpot potential due to its special lightning bonuses. Every round, 3 random numbers are picked off of the table and struck by lightning, and if you by any chance hit that number and the ball lands on it, you’ll come out with a massive bonus win, which could be anywhere from 50x to 500x your bet on that number!
Mini Roulette
Mini Roulette is just a simplified version of the standard Roulette, where instead of 37 or 38 numbers, you get 13. This makes it a bit different. Another thing to notice with mini roulette is that if you don’t bet on zero and the ball lands on it, instead of losing your bet as one does in regular roulette, you end up taking half your bet back, which is pretty good I must say. This feature is also commonly seen in another variant called French Roulette, which is played with 37 numbers on a slightly differently styled table.
