The History of Roulette
Roulette has been with us for an awful long time, several hundred years in fact in numerous different guises. In fact the actual word “roulette” stems from the word “roué” which is French and an Italian word “ette” which in that language means small. In fact even though modern roulette is somewhere in the region of around 250 years old, the actual concept of it stems back even further than that and as far back as the ancient Greeks.
On the subject of roulette terms, we then come to the word “croupier”. A croupier is another French term for the operator of a roulette game. The term in later years was used to mean a dealer who operated all casino games. In fact a croupier in France is also a term for a riding instructor whose job it was to sit behind a trainee rider and tutor them in that fashion.
It has long since been understood that the modern origins of roulette stem from a game called “Hoca” which was prevalent around mainland Europe in the 17th Century. So roulette has been around for a long time in various forms and has also used different versions of the game mixed together to form hybrid variations.
The game as it is played today in England for example uses the term “American Roulette” as it is dealt similarly to how it is inside American casinos. But yet the wheel itself has a French number sequence and many French betting terms are still in common usage.
All this can seem rather confusing to a beginner who sees that something is called “American” only then to hear French terms like “tier” being used. Into the latter half of the 18th century, the modern version of the game could be seen in numerous different locations across Western Europe in France, Germany and Belgium.
The single zero version of the game was introduced in 1843 in Homburg in Germany in an attempt to attract customers across from the double zero wheels that were prevalent in other European cities. Today both single and double zero roulette wheels are in use in the United States although the single zero wheels often get left in reserve unless requested by high rollers who refuse to accept the far greater house edge of the double zero wheel.
As roulette punters became more and more sophisticated and as did casino gambling, there became a need to increase the level of roulette wheel technology. This then led to the introduction of the modern low profile wheels in the 1980’s which were designed to combat wheel bias and visual prediction methods.
There was a very famous case in 1986 where an American businessman used a team of wheel clockers to locate biased roulette wheels inside casinos in Atlantic City. He found one and subsequently took that casino for nearly four million dollars. So roulette has a long and very colourful history indeed from the European aristocrats to the rough Wild West frontier towns of the 1800’s to what it is today.
The glitz and glamour of Las Vegas and Monte Carlo are a long way away from where the game originated from even though the old riverboats do still have their charm. Now we are entering into a whole new era with games like slots and roulette appearing on the internet and even on our own televisions, one wonders where it will all end?
Carl “The Dean” Sampson
