Roulette has a fascinating yet murky history, full of myths and rumours. No one is entirely sure how roulette began, though Blaise Pascal, a 17th Century French mathematician is credited by some with inventing the roulette game. It’s said that he was trying to find ‘perpetual motion’ and engineered a device in a form of a big wheel for his experiments. One of his friends had a good idea to use this device for gambling.
Other stories say roulette was created in China and brought to Europe by Dominican monks who were trading with the Chinese.
Some tales say that Francois Blanc, who founded the first casino in Monte Carlo, sold his soul to the devil for the secret of roulette. If you don’t believe this, then please note that the sum of all the roulette wheel numbers is 666.
Who knows exactly what the truth is? But the name ‘Roulette,’ is a French word meaning Small Wheel which indicates that the roulette game, as we know it today, probably originated somewhere within the French culture.
Whatever the truth of its origins, what we do know is that Roulette in the layout we see today first appeared in 1765 in Paris. In 1861, a casino was opened in Monaco that became the capital of gambling business after the ban of casinos in Europe in 1873. French emigrants imported this roulette game into the USA and the first American casino appeared in New Orleans in 1800.
The European Roulette Wheel consists of 36 numbers and a 0. When the roulette game was introduced to America, extra zeroes were added to the American tables to give the operators a higher ‘edge’. American roulette tables still use both the single zero ‘0’, and the double zero ‘00’, but have dropped the triple zero ‘000’ that was introduced as it made the game too hard to win, and roulette players stayed away in droves.
Now, every casino in the world has a roulette wheel. Roulette is popular because it is simple, easy to play, exciting and thrilling.