|
The first form of roulette was devised in 18th century France. The roulette wheel is believed to be a fusion of the English wheel games Roly-Poly, Ace of Hearts, and E&O, and the Italian board games of Hoca and Biribi, and then the name roulette from an already existing French board game of that title.
The game has been played in its current form since as early as 1796 in Paris. The earliest description of the roulette game in its current form is found in a French novel "La Roulette, ou le Jour" by Jaques Lablee, which describes a roulette wheel in the Palais Royal in Paris in 1796. The book was published in 1801. An even earlier reference to a game of this name was published in regulations for French Quebec in 1758, which banned the games of "dice, hoca, faro, and roulette." (ref. Roulette Wheel Study, Ron Shelley, 1986.)[1]
In 1842, fellow Frenchmen François and Louis Blanc added the "0" to the roulette wheel in order to achieve a house advantage. In the early 1800s, roulette was brought into the U.S. where, to further increase house odds, a second zero, "00", was introduced. In some forms of early American roulette 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.
The payout on any of the numbers including the zeros and the eagle was 27 to 1. In the 1800s, roulette spread all over both Europe and the U.S., becoming one of the most famous and most popular casino games. Some call roulette the "King of Casino Games", probably because it was associated with the glamour of the casinos in Monte Carlo. (François Blanc actually established the first casinos there.)
A legend tells François Blanc supposedly bargained with the devil to obtain the secrets of roulette. The legend is based on the fact that the sum of all the numbers on the roulette wheel (from 1 to 36) is 666, which is the "Number of the Beast."
|
