The Roulette Wheel – The True Wheel of Chance

Roulette is considered one of the most glamorous gambling on earth. It doesn’t have the fevered fans that slot machines do, nor does it require the serious strategy and skills that distinguish poker players need.

An elegant and slow paced game, roulette has been used in the backdrop for works of fiction since 1796. But if you have ever wanted to know the inner workings of the roulette wheel then read this article to learn more.

Online roulette has spread this exciting game even further. Along with the software the online casino provides, you can also download and use “roulette companion” applications like Routrack.

The Roulette Wheel

Roulette is a wheeled game in which a white ball is spun around a circle of 36 numbered slots or pockets that alternate between red and black plus a “0” and “00” in “American” style roulette. In the rest of the world, “European” roulette, made famous at Monte Carlo” is the primary style.

The wheel is similar except that a European roulette wheel has only a single 0 for the house to win on. The object of either game is to predict where on the wheel the white ball will land.

Many people, even professional gamblers and croupiers (roulette dealers) think that the numbers along the edge of the roulette wheel are just jumbled together in no particular fashion. In actuality the numbers of arranged in an attempt to alternate odd and even numbers, high, low digits along with the red and black colors.

Since there is no way for the wheel to be arranged in a true mathematically balanced way, in the American version the green “0” and “00” slots are placed on opposite sides of each other with exactly 18 numbers between them. Plus to even out high and low numbers, the sum of each two consecutive numbers of the same color must equal 37 and even numbers must alternate with odd numbers.

And that just the numbering system….

The wheel itself is a modern engineering marvel. The wheel is really a large sloping bowl that rotates around its own axis. The bowl slopes down towards where the pockets or slots are set in.

In a land casino the wheel is crafted from exotic woods, often mahogany for its durability. The bowl is polished by hand rubbing to eliminate any defects. Inside the roulette bowl sets a metal dish where the slots are machined in. A turret with small handles rises from the disk. This allows the croupier to spin the wheel on its precision machined ball bearings for smooth action.

The standard version roulette wheel weighs a hundred pounds and measures 32 inches to 36 inches across. The entire assembly is precisely balanced so the wheel spins freely and the ball lands in a completely random fashion.

A roulette player’s dream is to someday find a biased wheel. This is a roulette wheel that due to some hidden manufacturing defect allows certain numbers to fall more often than others. Of course this biased wheel has to be found before the staff of the casino notices it and removes it from the playing floor.

Unfortunately you won’t ever find a true biased wheel when playing online roulette, since the wheel is a virtual construct. But you can always hope for a tiny programming glitch only you can see!