With the seemingly endless amount of different video slot machines there are out there, and, of course, the variety of different versions of poker there are to choose from, you would be excused for thinking that roulette may be a classic but it doesn’t really offer much in the way of variety. And, sure enough, in comparison to, say, esports or video slots, roulette’s current form is mostly set in stone. It’s a classic for a reason.
Still, there are actually a few varieties of roulette out there and though the differences are usually subtle, they do make for some different playing experiences.
Live Online Roulette
Starting with the most recent and arguably most drastic revolution in roulette (if you’ll pardon the pun), live online roulette combined the accessibility and convenience of online gaming with the thrill of playing roulette live at a casino. It had to wait until internet speeds were fast enough and steady enough to support video streaming, but once they were, online live roulette was the inevitable result.
American/ European Roulette
Depending on where you’re from, you might find yourself taken aback by the roulette wheel you will find in another part of the world. If you’re American visiting Europe, you might be surprised to see that the roulette wheel only has a single green slot numbered zero, if you’re the opposite, you might find it strange in your visits to Las Vegas that the roulette wheels there have two green slots, one for the familiar 0 and one for the rather meaningless 00.
It’s a small difference to be sure, but that extra green slot gives the house a significantly higher advantage in the US. making it just that much more difficult to win by betting on theoretically 50/50 bets like odds and evens or red and black.
Multi-Ball and Multi-Wheel Roulette.
These two variations on roulette effectively just take the base game but add extra balls or wheels to make the betting more nail-biting than ever and more enjoyably chaotic as your hopes are spread across different balls or even whole other wheels at the same time. The game still works exactly the same as conventional roulette but by just making it an option to play a bunch of roulette games at once, casinos were gifted with a wildly popular alternative to their usual roulette tables.
French Roulette
Yes, the French have their own version. French roulette is mostly the same as the European version, but with a few new twists. One of the biggies is that in French Roulette, if the ball lands on the green, the player only loses half of their bet rather than the full thing. More than that, if the ball stops at zero, and players bet on odds or evens, they get the chance to win their money back. Known as the “En Prison” rule, the dealer marks the player’s original bet, and if it comes up again in the next spin, they get their bet back.
