Roulette Strategies: Basic Strategy

To discuss issues of betting strategy with Roulette it is first important to understand that it is purely a game of chance. You may well have heard the story of ‘the mans who broke the bank at Monte Carlo' - a gifted engineer called Joseph Jagger who skilfully exploited a bias on a Roulette wheel to clean up - but since that time land-based casinos have been fastidious in routinely checking the balance of their Roulette wheels to prevent it happening again! When it comes to the Roulette games you can enjoy in the best UK online casinos, the software engine of the game uses independently certified random number generators to derive their results, so there is also no possible ‘bias' – every number on the Roulette wheel has an equal probability of being the outcome of a spin.

In the absence of any bias, no skill can be applied to predicting the outcome. However, strategic play is possible by considering which bets attract the lowest house edge to determine which payouts represent the truest reward for the risk of the bet.

Once observation you can make from breaking down the bets to reveal the associated house edge is that European Roulette is strategically a smarter choice than American Roulette which, by virtue of its Double Zero, has universally higher house edge values for the equivalent bet type.

You may well read up on the Internet about strategies based on multiple Straight bets, or The ‘Martingale System' but be wary of these – they invariably require very large bankrolls to stand a chance of working and ignore the issue of ‘table limits' which defeat them. Our opinion is that the wisest strategy is to combine good money management with choosing bets attracting a low house edge. In Roulette, and especially European Roulette, a number of bet types have a nice, low house edge so you can have considerable fun mixing up the bets you make, without surrendering much advantage to the house.