Although the origins of Roulette are most certainly French, there were several other gambling games played with a ball and a slotted wheel that pre-dated it. One of the earliest was called “Roly Poly,” a game popular in England in the 1720s that allowed players to wager on which slot the ball would land in. The Roly Poly wheel featured two slots marked for the banker, which would cause all player bets to lose if the ball landed in either of them.

In 1739, the British Parliament outlawed Roly Poly, so a new game called E/O, or “Even and Odd,” took its place. This innovation employed a wheel with forty unnumbered black and white slots, with one of each color representing the banker. It was strictly an even money game. Whenever a bank slot came up, bets were collected from the losing color and no payouts were made on the winning color, which resulted in a small advantage for the house.

The French Hybrid

In 1745, E/O was introduced to France. Seeking to add their own twist to it, the French changed the colors of the wheel to Red and Black and renamed it “roelete” or “small wheel.” They also introduced a much more balanced and smoother-spinning wheel mechanism, which was based upon the prototype for an unsuccessful perpetual motion machine invented back in 1655 by French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662).

About the same period, gamblers in southern France were discovering another imported game. This one was an Italian lottery-type game called biribi that had become wildly popular in Genoa. Central to the game was a board displaying 36 numbers that correlated to a similar number of marked balls kept in a leather pouch. Players would place bets on the board to indicate which ball they thought would be drawn at random by the dealer.

Sometime between 1760 and 1789, biribi and roelete were merged. The slots on the wheel were made to conform to the board layout, with 36 alternating numbers colored red and black. Two slots were still retained for the banker.

This new game of “roulette” quickly caught on following the French Revolution (1789–1799), when anti-gambling laws were relaxed. At the Palais Royale in Paris, Roulette became the primary form of amusement. The “small wheel” was soon exported to the resorts of Spa in southern Belgium and later on to the casinos of Monte Carlo. It also found its way to New Orleans by 1803, around the time of the Louisiana Purchase.

One Game, Two Wheels

As noted above, the original French Roulette wheel had 38 numbered slots, also known as “pockets,” of which 18 were colored red and 18 black. The remaining two were the bank slots, zero and double zero, and they were colored green. This was the wheel that reached America, fascinated the crowds in the French Quarter of New Orleans, made its way along rivers on paddle wheelers, and became a regular feature of saloons and gambling parlors of the Old West, just ahead of the Gold Rush Era (1848-1865).

Meanwhile, a couple of enterprising brothers, Francois and Louis Blanc, were said to have made a pact with the devil in 1842 in order to come up with a way to draw more players to their Roulette games. The secret they supposedly traded their souls for was a simple one: eliminate the double zero. A 37-number wheel would give the bank just one winning slot, offer players better odds, and subsequently draw more bettors.

Needless to say, the single-zero idea caught on, first in Germany and then Monaco and France. As the European wheel evolved everywhere to the 37-number version in the latter half of the 19^th century, the original 38-number layout remained unchanged in the United States and has ever since been known as the “American wheel.” Today, both varieties can be found in casinos the world over.