Guide to the European Roulette
European roulette is one of the oldest casino games; it has been played in its current form for hundreds of years. In all that time you’d think roulette players would have separated fact from fiction, but if anything the game’s long history seems to lend itself to rumors, suspicions and myths. Below we explore one of European roulette’s most important facts and also one of its most harmful and prolific fictions.
European Roulette Is Better than American Roulette
This is no myth. European roulette really is the fairest incarnation of the game. Though the double zero wheel is actually the original layout of the game, the single zero wheel that is now the hallmark of European roulette was popularized in Monte Carlo late in the 19th Century. The double zero wheel remained the standard in America, hence the designations of European and American roulette based on the number of slots on the wheel.
So why is European roulette better? Believe it or not the addition of an extra green space in American roulette nearly doubles the house edge on all bets. Conversely then the use of only a single green space in European roulette translates to a much lower overall house edge (approximately 2.7%). Add in the en prison rule, and you’ve found the best roulette wheel currently available.
Breaking the Wheel
Back when roulette was played on handmade and even factory-made roulette wheels, it was common for the games to break down over time, creating a bias. Regular roulette players would watch hundreds of games and record the outcomes in order to discover these biases. (That’s why pencils and paper are still sometimes provided at live roulette tables.) The players would then use betting systems designed to exploit these biases.
While today’s live casinos are quick to replace any wheels showing wear, online European roulette does away with the potential for bias altogether by using randomization software that perfectly mimics live roulette’s ideal, unbiased results. That means that the game will never break down and therefore will never show a bias, making breaking the wheel impossible and rendering betting systems useless.