Roulette is the game in which a ball launched onto a spinning wheel comes to rest in one of its numbered pockets. The name is French and means "little wheel". Today's rules and bets are described on the Roulette page; this article deals only with how the game took shape, as the sources reconstruct it.
The Pascal legend
The most widespread story about the origin of roulette centres on the French scholar Blaise Pascal. According to James Masters, author of a guide to traditional games, the most popular version says that Pascal invented roulette in 1655, during a monastic retreat; another version credits an anonymous monk. Masters considers the identity of the inventor an open question. The Wikipedia encyclopedia, for its part, notes that "many historians" link Pascal to a primitive form of the game, arising from his search for a perpetual motion machine.
The written mentions on which historians rely appear only in the 18th century.
The first written mentions
As with many games, the earliest mentions of roulette are in legal documents that ban it. In England, the act known by its regnal year as 18 Geo. II, of 1745, contains the earliest appearance of the word: it refers to "a certain pernicious game called Roulet or Roly-Poly" that was "daily practised", and forbids places kept for playing it. On the other side of the Atlantic, a decree of 1758 for New France (the territory later to become Canada) expressly prohibited "dice, hoca, faro, and roulette".
Also in England, towards the end of the 18th century, a game called E.O. (for "Even–Odd") was played with a wheel and a ball similar to those of roulette. Masters sees E.O. as a possible ancestor of roulette, but points out that the absence of earlier mentions makes the link uncertain.
Another frequently cited candidate is the Italian game biribi. Masters quotes the memoirs of Giacomo Casanova, dated 1763, which describe a board with thirty-six compartments and numbers drawn from a bag; Casanova remarked that the rules gave the bank "an enormous advantage". Because biribi had neither a wheel nor a ball, Masters regards it as a distant cousin rather than a direct ancestor.
Paris and the wheel with zero and double zero
For the modern form of the game, the reference point is Paris at the end of the 18th century. A French novel by Jaques Lablee, published in 1801, describes a roulette wheel at the Palais-Royal in 1796. According to Masters, the wheel used in France around 1800 already had two pockets reserved for the bank: zero and double zero.
After 1789 the Palais-Royal had become the place where gambling in Paris was concentrated. The historian R. T. Barnhart shows, in a study published in 1992, that by 1791 the building housed over a hundred illicit gambling operations with dice and cards. In 1806 Napoleon legalised the main clubs, to bring the situation under control and to raise taxes for the state. The clubs were closed in 1837, when the opponents of gambling prevailed; according to the same study, the National Guard was called out to evict gamblers who refused to leave.
Homburg: the double zero disappears
The twin brothers François and Louis Blanc, born in France, opened a gaming house in 1841 at Homburg, in Germany (today Bad Homburg vor der Höhe). There the wheel lost its double zero. The year of the change differs between sources: 1842 according to Masters, 1843 according to the English-language Wikipedia. The German-language encyclopedia attributes the decision to Louis Blanc.
One pocket fewer for the bank means a smaller house edge on every bet, but it does not remove it.
Monte-Carlo
According to the portal of the Monegasque government, François Blanc (1806–1877) obtained in 1863 the privilege of operating games in the Principality of Monaco, after his experience at Homburg. In 1866 Prince Charles III gave his name to the new town that had grown up on the Spélugues plateau around the casino: Monte-Carlo.
The single-zero wheel then became the usual one in European casinos, while North America and the Caribbean kept the wheel with zero and double zero. Masters stresses that the double zero is not an American invention: the French wheel of around 1800 had both zeros, and in America it was kept that way.
What the mathematics shows
The history of the wheel explains why two main variants exist today. European roulette has 37 pockets (0 to 36), and the house edge is 2.70%. American roulette has 38 pockets, and the house edge rises to 5.26%.
The edge comes from the fact that payouts are calculated as if the zero pockets did not exist. The player's decisions (which bet, how much, for how long) change only the size and pace of the average loss; the house edge remains. More in House edge and RTP and Betting systems.
Sources
- James Masters, "Roulette, EO and Roly Poly", online guide to traditional games.
- Wikipedia (English), article "Roulette".
- R. T. Barnhart, "Gambling in revolutionary Paris — The Palais Royal: 1789–1838", Journal of Gambling Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 1992 (abstract in the PubMed database).
- Wikipedia (German), article "François Blanc".
- Government of the Principality of Monaco, "Histoire et Patrimoine" section, pages "François Blanc" and "Fondation de Monte-Carlo".