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The invention of Roulette is quite a disputed story, no one really knows when it was invented, but the most accepted theory about the origins of roulette is that it was created somewhere in the 17th century by a Frenchman who was regarded as a math genius named Blaise Pascal.

It is said that he was trying to create a perpetual motion machine, which anyone who paid attention in the physics lessons is physically impossible, due to it being a machine not needing new energy in order to keep spinning, but back to the history of roulette. (roulettesites.org, 2020)

One of the earlier theories about the invention of roulette brings us back to ancient Rome, it was a time when the roman empire was expanding all over the Mediterranean and Europe, this meant their army had to fight a lot of battles, and therefore the life expectancy of a soldier in the Roman army was quite low.

So, in order to raise morale, the generals let the soldiers have as much fun as possible, this included gambling, a lot of these games revolved around the spinning wheel, therefore, spawning the invention of roulette.

A similar story played out in ancient Greece where the Greek soldiers also gambled a lot one of the games they played was where they took a shield wrote numbers on the inside of it, placed a spear at the side of it and then spun it, where the soldiers would gamble on which number it would hit. This seems a lot like how the game of roulette works.

The roulette game we see today is although these other theories of French origin, also the reason for the name. In the late 18th hundreds Europe saw some strict gambling laws which were a good thing since gambling was illegal before that. But at that time Prince Charles of Monaco was having some economic troubles which led him to open up several casinos in the small country.

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Roulette one of the most popular game with the wealthiest people in Europe at the time. The roulette game which was played there is almost a copy of what we see today, the numbers go from 1-36 with a 0 and double 0. The colors also haven’t changed since they also back then were red and black.

Gambling later became illegal in France again back in 1842, but two Frenchmen Francois and Louis Blanc had tweaked the game, they had removed the 00 from the roulette wheel so they went to Hamburg in Germany in order to promote the new game. This game is what we today know as European roulette.

What we know as American roulette today is the wheel with 00, the reason for it not being removed in America is due to the casino operators which wanted a bigger house edge in order to increase profit, despite the higher house edge the game still became quite popular in the states.

Today roulette is one of the most popular games both in land-based casinos and at online casinos. This game has also evolved into several different games, like the previously mentioned European and American roulette, is there also a version of the game called French roulette. French roulette is really similar to European roulette the difference is that it has fewer betting options.

At online casinos is it also possible to play other versions of the roulette game, for example, one of the most popular live casino games is Lightning roulette from Evolution Gaming, which adds a multiplier to some numbers before the spin has ended, giving you the chance to win really big. (roulettesystems.com, 2020)

Roulette is of course a game of chance, and there isn’t really any strategy which will make you a profit playing roulette in the long term, unlike Blackjack, but most of the other games at casinos are all a game of chance. The house edge at roulette changes depending on which version of the game you play on.

European roulette is the most generous for players, since it has a house edge of 2.70%, compared with American roulette which has a house edge of a staggering 5.26%! The rise or fall, depending on you how to compare them, is due to the 00 which adds to the options that the ball can land on, without increasing the payout of landing on one of the numbers.

Even though roulette is a game completely decided by chance, there have been some attempts at trying to beat the house at the wheel. One of the strategies is a betting strategy which in theory is quite simple.

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You start off with either betting on red, black, odd or even, if you lose the bet you double the value of the next bet. The problem with this strategy is that you need to have quite a big amount of money in your casino wallet since you have to keep raising the bet. In the long term, this also won’t earn you money in the long term.

A more interesting story about trying to win at roulette happened back in the 1970s. Here the was a university group named Eudaemons who started doing some research about how they could win at roulette. They started off with buying a roulette wheel and used a camera and an oscilloscope in order to keep track of the roulette wheel and the ball.

They created a formula with trigonometric functions where they would have to keep track of the rotation of the wheel how many times the ball rotates around in that time, that way they could calculate in which octant of the wheel the ball will land before the betting time closed. This was a very complicated calculation and couldn’t be done by humans in a short enough time span in order to have time to place a bet.

So over two years, they developed a computer which would fit into a shoe. They gave inputs to the computer about how many times the ball passed a specific point on the wheel with their big toe. The computer would then calculate on which octant the ball will land and would send the result back to the player through a vibrating solenoid actuator they had placed on the chest.

The players won quite a lot of money playing roulette where their average profit would 44% for every dollar they bet. The system wasn’t foolproof though. At the end of the lifetime of the group the vibrating part of the system malfunctioned and instead it started sending small electric shocks to the player, she kept playing, but after they ended the session, they found out she had severed quite serious burns. The group disbanded shortly after this with a profit of around $10,000

Hope you learned something about the history of roulette if you want to try it out you can find a perfect roulette casino for you here!