Global Sports: Basic Information On The History Of Roulete

Friday, August 27, 2010

Basic Information On The History Of Roulete

By Sean Armstrong

Roulete was first devised in 18th century France. Blaise Pascal introduced an early form of the game in the 17th century while searching for a perpetual motion machine. The wheel is generally believed to be a fusion of the Italian board games of Hoca and Biribi, English wheel games Roly-Poly, Reiner, Ace of Hearts, and E.O., and "Roulete" from a French board game that already existed.

The game has been played in its present form since as early as 1796 in Paris. An early description of the roulete game in its current form is found in a French novel La Roulete, ou le Jour by Jaques Lablee, which describes a roulete wheel in the Palais Royal in Paris in 1796. The description included the house pockets, "There are exactly two slots reserved for the bank, whence it derives its sole mathematical advantage." It then goes on to describe the layout with, "...two betting spaces containing the bank's two numbers, zero and double zero." The book was published in 1801. An even earlier reference to a game of this name was published in regulations for New France (Qubec) in 1758, which banned the games of "dice, hoca, faro, and roulete."

In 1843, in the German spa casino town of Homburg, fellow Frenchmen Franois and Louis Blanc introduced the single "0" style wheel in order to compete against other casinos offering the traditional wheel with single and double zero house pockets.

In some forms of early American wheels - as shown in the 1886 Hoyle gambling books, there were numbers 1 through 28, plus a single zero, a double zero, and an American Eagle. According to Hoyle "the single 0, the double 0, and eagle are never bars; but when the ball falls into either of them, the banker sweeps every thing upon the table, except what may happen to be bet on either one of them, when he pays twenty-seven for one, which is the amount paid for all sums bet upon any single figure."

In the 1800s, the game spread all over Europe and the U.S.A., becoming one of the most famous and most popular casino games. When the German government abolished gambling in the 1860s, the Blanca family moved to the last legal remaining casino operation in Europe at Monte Carlo, where they established a gambling mecca for the elite of Europe. It was here that the single zero roulete wheel became the premier game, and over the years was exported around the world, except in the United States where the double zero wheel had remained dominant.

A legend is told of Franois Blanc bargaining with the devil to obtain the secrets of roulete. This is based on the fact that adding up the values of all the numbers on the wheel (1 to 36) is 666, the "Number of the Beast".

In the U.S., the French double zero wheel slowly spread north from New Orleans, and then westward. It was in the west, due to rampant cheating by both operators and players, that the wheel was eventually placed on top of the table to prevent tampering devices being hidden away in the table or wheel, and the betting layout was simplified. The game slowly evolved into the American style, different from the traditional French style. The French game evolved with style and leisure in Monte Carlo, while the American game evolved in gambling dens across the new territories. The American style had simplified betting and fast cash action, either with a single or double zero wheel, and this is what now dominates in most casinos around the world.

Early in the 20th century, there were only two casino towns of note; Monte Carlo, which used the traditional single zero French wheel, and Las Vegas, which used the American double zero wheel. By the 1970s, casinos began to flourish around the world, and in 2008 there were several hundred casinos worldwide offering roulete games. The double zero wheel can be found in the U.S., the Caribbean, and South America, while the single zero wheel is dominant elsewhere.

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