Roulette History

A game close to Roulette was already played 2500 year ago in ancient China. A wheel with a spinning ball would be used to determine fate and future.

Roulette as we know it today, was invented in 1657 by Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662) for merely scientific purposes. Roulette means “small wheel” in French. Pascal used the prototype of the roulette to analyse and prove the law of probability. That his scientific tool would serve also for gambling was an additional nice side effect which gave Blaise Pascal the honour of being the inventor of Roulette.

The first known gambling wheel was called “Roly-Poly” and is first mentioned in 1720. It consisted of a horizontally spinning wheel. The first gambling wheels in these times merely allowed simple bets. In order to go around gambling prohibition laws in England, an inventive Beau Nash introduced the Even-Odd bet which was also prohibited in 1745.

Roulette as we today know it was first played in 1796 in casinos in Paris. The game consisted of all known components: the numerations 1 through 36, the 0 and 00. The only difference then consisted in the 0 being red and 00 being black. To avoid confusion the 0 and 00 were at some point assigned the colour green.