Welcome to another installment of my favorite show, in which I tell you that everything you’ve ever known about casino games is totally and completely wrong! Oh, I love it! This is better than “Game of Thrones”, let me tell you! If you don’t believe me, just wait until we get into our own version of the Red Wedding – trust me, you’ve never seen so many myths about gambling being assassinated to the tune of “Rains of Castamere” before! Seriously though, you’d be surprised about just how many little tips and tricks you pick up on when you’ve been playing casino games for a really long time. They’re not necessarily things that are going to make or break your game (if you have bad luck, then I’m sorry to say, but my advice probably won’t help you), but they’re enough to give you that extra edge you need to turn loss into profit. And one of my absolute favorites has to do with roulette.
Now, let me make one thing absolutely clear first – this trick will not work in physical casinos, alright? Physical locations tend to have only one type of roulette depending on where in the world they are, which is why roulette never really managed to take off in America. The reason, of course, is that American roulette just plain sucks! What, you didn’t know there were differences between the versions of roulette in different regions? Read the title of this article, dude or dudette, seriously! The thing is, there are three main types of roulette – American roulette, European roulette and French roulette. I mean, sure, there’s stuff like “low stakes roulette” or “Deal or no Deal roulette”, but we’re not really going to be looking at those right now.
Online casinos typically have all three main versions of roulette (and by “typically” I mean “literally every single online casino I’ve ever visited has had them”, but I obviously can’t speak for each one in the world), so the question falls down to which one would give you the best odds. The only difference between them lies in the number 0, which, coincidentally, is also the number of girls I’ve impressed with my gambling knowledge! The thing is, that beautiful green zero serves as the house edge – it’s neither red nor black, neither odd nor even, so unless someone has specifically bet on 0 the house takes all of the bets for that particular spin. European roulette only has one Zero, thus giving players a 1 in 37 chance of losing everything to the house.
However, the Americans have decided to get fifty shades of greedy, and as such have actually gone ahead and added a second zero to the roulette wheel – the 00. That way, now we have a 2 in 38 (or 1 in 19) chance of being screwed by the house – significantly bigger than in Europe. Which is why, when faced with a choice between European and American roulette, European is always the right choice (but then again, that is true for most things in life). But what if I told you there’s an even better option? Enter French roulette, which plays exactly like its European counterpart (which makes sense, I mean, France IS in Europe, last time I checked), except for one tiny difference – when the ball lands on 0 and you lose, you actually gain half of your bet back. And sure, that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s an extra advantage that the otherwise identical European roulette simply doesn’t have. So when playing roulette online, French is the way to go!