History of Roulette - Origins and Development

April 04, 2009 | Article Category: Roulette

0 Comments For those entering a casino for the first time, one of the classic casino games, roulette, is bound to attract their attention. The betting looks complicated, but is fairly simple to understand, while the roulette wheel, with its little ball spinning around and slowly bouncing into place is watched with much breath-holding and anticipation. The question on many minds is 'Where did it come from?'

As with other well-known casino games, the exact origins of roulette are somewhat unclear. However, a fair amount is known about the development of the game. The word roulette is a French word, which means "small wheel." The following are the most well-known legends tied to the origins of the game.

The Spinning Wheel
It seems that the origins of using a spinning wheel as a gaming device began in the Greco-Roman period with the Greeks and Roman soldiers. Although it is possible that it might have begun earlier in history, this is the earliest time in which games using a spinning wheel can be traced.

Roman soldiers used a chariot wheel in order to play games. They used to place an arrow on the ground which pointed to the pre-marked winning space on the wagon wheel.

The Greek soldiers used a shield which revolved around a metal point. On its surface, there were ten spaces marked. When the shield returned to a stationary position, the winning space was decided by a pre-marked point on the ground.

Roulette Timeline
In more modern times, Roulette can be traced back to the 1600s. Roulette reached America in the 1800s where the roulette wheel was slightly altered. The popularity and spread of roulette increased in both Europe and in America in the 1800s.

1655 - France

It is likely that Blaise Pascal, a French scientist, was the one to invent the first roulette wheel. He developed it because he loved perpetual-motion devices.

1800s - United States

In the early 1800s, around the time that roulette came to the United States, the zero (0) and the double zero (00) were added to the roulette wheel. The game had become more popular, and the zeros increased the house odds. The 00 was introduced in America.

1842 - France

Francois and Louis Blanc added only a single zero (0) to the roulette wheel in order to increase the house odds.

1873 - Monte Carlo

Six clerks, working undercover, were hired by Joseph Jaggers to go to the Beaux-Arts Casino in Monte Carlo. They recorded the outcome of the roulette wheels at the casino and managed to discover that the ball landed on one number more than others. $450,000 was won by Jagger using this information before he was caught by the management of the Beaux-Arts casino.

1891

Although some years later, Fred Gilbert wrote a song about Joseph Jaggers called "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo."

1900s

Throughout the 1900s, there were a number of different systems used to try and beat the roulette wheel, ranging from Thorp and Shannon's analogue device to help players bet on the most favored 'octant,' to the computer system which the Eudaemons used in Las Vegas. Thorp and Shannon's device had a hardware failure, and the Eudaemons, although they made some money, abandoned their project when their handheld device burned a hole in one of the group-member's hands. Gonzalo Garcia-Pelayo in Casino de Madrid in Spain used a computer to predict where roulette wheels were likely to stop. Within a couple of years, he won over one million dollars.

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