European roulette, explained

Roulette is the quickest game in the city to learn and the hardest one to argue with. The ball drops into one of 37 pockets: 1 to 36 and a single green zero. You bet on where it lands, and every bet on the table — a number, a dozen, red — pays a little less than its true odds. The gap is the same for all of them: 1/37, or 2.70%.

That one number explains most of this section. It is why no bet is “better” than another in the long run, why systems that change the size of your bets cannot change the result, and why a European wheel beats an American one.

• How to play — the layout, where a chip goes, the 20-second betting window and a sample round settled chip by chip.
• Payouts and odds — all bets in one table with true odds, probability and the house edge, plus call bets and combined bets.
• Bet calculator — build any set of bets and see what each number does to you, your average loss and your chance to be ahead after 10, 100 or 1,000 spins.
• European vs American — single, double and triple zero wheels compared in numbers.
• Martingale and systems — a million simulated sessions for each of six systems at our table limits.

Everything here is written for the roulette in Anubis City: European rules, three tables from the Scribes’ (chips from 100) to the Pharaoh’s (from 10,000), and a wheel that runs on a schedule — 20 seconds for bets, then it spins for everyone at the table. There is no La Partage, no racetrack and no real money: you play with free debens. The game itself is described on the European roulette page.

New to roulette? Read the first guide, then open the calculator and lay out the bets you would like to make. Ten minutes with it will teach you more than an evening of guessing.