Roulette History

The game of roulette is one of the oldest gambling games in history. The name roulette is the French word meaning “small wheel”. During the Greco-Roman era, a spinning wheel was used as a means of gambling. This was one of the first versions of roulette. Later, Roman soldiers used a chariot wheel as a method of gambling. To this purpose, the Romans placed an arrow on the ground and would then spin the wheel. The arrow would point to the winning space on the wheel, much like a Roman version of Wheel of Fortune. Even the Greeks had a type of roulette except they used a metal shield instead of a chariot wheel. The shield had ten spaces marked on it. The Greeks would spin the shield and then a designated point on the ground would point to the winning space when the shield stopped moving.

The idea of a spinning wheel used as a game was not limited to just recreational gambling. Unfortunately for the victims, the Chinese used it in their torture. This practice involved tying a man between two rotating wheels. One wheel was in front of his chest and the other was against his back. The wheels had sharp, spikey points around their edges. The Chinese would lay bets either against the wheels or for them. The victim would draw a lot that specified the size of the wheels used against him. If he chose the largest wheels, he would likely get cut in half. If the victim chose the smallest wheels, then he would probably survive with only minor cuts.

The French mathematician Blaise Pascal was thought to have invented roulette sometime around 1655. The game was a result of his trying to create a perpetual motion device. The device didn’t work but the game was an unimagined but successful product. However, there are some who believe the French Dominican monks invented the game around the same time as a means of breaking up the monotony of living inside a monastery. It wasn’t until the French Revolution nearly a century later that the early version of roulette became popular. There were two versions back then; the Italian version of Hoca and the English version of E-O (Evens and Odds).

Hoca was very popular in Europe during the 17th Century. Cardinal Mazarin, the chief minister of France, had Hoca casinos built in order to raise money for the royal treasury. The Hoca wheel had 40 cups on it that the ball could fall into. But 3 cups on that wheel were marked as house cups. If the ball fell into one of those three cups, then the house would win all bets. That was a good way to increase the treasury quickly and probably one of the biggest house advantages in history. While Hoca was played in Europe, E-O was widely spread throughout England. E-O used a wheel roughly about four feet in diameter (although some accounts vary) and had 20 niches marked with and E, and 20 niches marked with an O. Players would wager on either evens or odds. There were also two other holes, one for even and one for odds. If the ball fell into one of those holes, the house took all bets against the other letter. So if the ball fell into the hole for odds, the house won all bets for evens. That is another example of a good house advantage.

No one really knows when Hoca and E-O evolved into the modern version of roulette, nor when the game acquired its French name, but by the end of the 18th century, it was a widely popular game all throughout France and Europe. Catherine the Great of Russia was said to have several roulette wheels within her royal palace. Selim III of Turkey had a custom-made roulette wheel crafted for his palace after he learned about the game from French soldiers when Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798.

During the early 1800’s refugees from France fleeing the persecution of the French Revolution, brought the modern roulette game to England where it eventually replaced E-O. Later in 1842 two Frenchmen, Francois and Louis Blanc, added a 0 to the numbers of the roulette wheel, thus the numbers now go from 0 to 36. By adding the 0, the two Frenchmen gave the house a bigger advantage. An interesting bit of trivia is that there is a story that Francois and Louis struck a deal with the devil in order to learn the secrets of the roulette wheel because if you add up all the numbers that make up “36”, you get “666”, which is the number of the Beast. Also around this time, France outlawed gambling so Francois opened up the first casino in Monte Carlo and roulette became the most popular game there.
By this time the European game had become much as it is today. The refugees also brought the game of roulette to Louisiana, which during this time period was the gambling center of the newly formed United States. From New Orleans the game spread out to other cities but also changed along the way. The game now featured a picture of an American Eagle instead of 000 and there were only 28 numbers on the layout. But this Americanized version gave the house too high of an advantage at first and had to be modified. Because of widespread cheating by both gamblers and operators, the wheel had to be placed on top of the table so everyone could see the machine’s devices. This eventually evolved into the Americanized style version of roulette. Since then, the game has flourished all over the world. The single 0 game is dominant over Europe while the 00 game is played in the USA, the Caribbean, and South America.

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