The roulette wheel has long been the subject of many theories and myths regarding its design and structure. Many players have been wondering if the numbers on the roulette wheel were arranged in random or were placed in a mathematical or scientific sequence. Some players even study the arrangement of numbers on the wheel, hoping to discover strategies and tactics that can make them a winner.
Unfortunately for many players, winning in roulette is not a matter of skill, but of luck. The numbers on the wheel were strategically placed to give about the same odds of winning no matter where you place your bets. Fortunately, however, the randomness of the roulette wheel gives everyone an equal chance of winning.
There are two versions of the roulette wheel; the American wheel and the European wheel. The European wheel is the original roulette wheel, with numbers from 0 to 36. The American wheel, on the other hand, is not much different from the European wheel except that it has a double zero (00) as well as a single (0), which means that there are 38 numbers in total. Another difference between the two versions is the house advantage. American wheels have a slightly higher house advantage of 5.26% than the 2.70% of the European wheel.
The typical roulette wheel looks like a large bowl with slanted walls and several pockets or compartments. After the wheel stops spinning, the ball comes to rest on any of the pockets ranging from 0 to 36 (with an extra 00 in American wheels) and colored alternately in red and black (green for the zeros). If the ball lands on the pocket with the number or color you bet upon, you win a prize depending on the kind of bet you placed.
The online roulette wheel found in online casinos is not different from Las Vegas roulette wheels, with basically the same numbers and colors. However, instead of a real wheel spinning and a real ball landing randomly on a pocket, it is the computer’s random number generator (RNG) that determines where the ball comes to rest in the online roulette wheel. The RNG used in these online roulette wheels works in about the same manner as those used in slot machines. With each play, the random number generator software generates thousands of numbers a second which are then processed to come up with the number where the ball comes to rest. So your chances of winning in online roulette are practically the same as in Las Vegas casinos.
Now that you have understood how the roulette wheel works and what your odds of winning are, you don’t have to pay attention to all those so-called roulette strategies promising to help you win big. The only real strategy in roulette is to keep your fingers crossed and hope that the ball lands on the pocket you’ve betted on.
