Roulette is on one the most popular casino games. That’s why it is only natural that Roulette has always been a subject of much controversy. Why do so many people play Roulette and can’t stop? People both win and lose and go on playing. People from all over the world, from all types of backgrounds play this game.

Roulette is a table game, which has a mechanical device, a wheel, as the main element. Nobody can tell you for sure when or where the game appeared and who was the inventor of this popular game. But officially the game of Roulette appeared in the 16th century in France and it became popular in the USA in the early 1980s. There exist two well-known variants of this game: the American and the European Roulette. The main difference between these two Roulette variants is the number of pockets. There are 37 pockets in the European Roulette and 38 pockets in the American Roulette. So, if you have a choice play the European Roulette as you have more chances to win. Though professional gamblers say that it isn’t very important which of the two you play. The objective of the game is to predict the number of the pocket in which the ball will stop.

So, is Roulette a game of a chance or a game of a skill? Some Roulette players say that it is next to impossible to know in advance in which pocket the ball will land and that Roulette is a game of luck. According to this view point Roulette is a game, which helps you to check how your intuition works. It is only your intuition that suggests what to do. Other gamblers say that Roulette is a game of a skill and experience and that one has to be a pro to win. Such gamblers use some Roulette strategies, which they think, help them to win. In fact there exist a lot of strategies. Looking through the books about Roulette I have found about 150 strategies. Can you believe it? Moreover all these strategies are said to be very effective and useful. Then if all of them are so effective how can one choose at least one strategy to use in the game of Roulette? Well, let’s take at least three most popular strategies, see how they work and check out their efficiency.
One of the oldest and the most popular Roulette strategies is that of Martingale. His strategy has always had followers among the gamblers. Martingale’s strategy was very popular in France in the18th century. The main point of this system is that you double your bet after each loss. So according to this strategy the first win recovers all previous losses and wins a profit equal to your initial bet. If you win you have to make an initial minimum bet again. But if you use this strategy there are at least two notes you must always bare in mind. First of all you never know how long you will be losing. Secondly, there is a maximum table limit, which will no let you double your bet without end. So it can happen that you haven’t won yet, but you can’t double your bet any more. If it happens you will lose a lot. I personally believe that this strategy is mostly based on avoiding losses and hardly on making money.
The second strategy, which was also very popular, was invented by Jagger who was an engineer. The strategy is based on the idea that the Roulette wheel can’t be ideally balanced. As a result there are pockets in which the ball stops most often. Of course, you can spend most off your time examining the wheel, the pockets in which the ball stops most often, but it doesn’t mean that you will predict the number for sure. This hint is well-known, that’s why from time to time the casino regulate the Roulette wheel. They can regulate the wheel without you noticing it. I came to the conclusion that it is next to impossible to predict the pocket in which the ball will stop using this strategy.
The last strategy we are going to review was represented by Thomas Donald. The main points of his strategy are the following: the sum of money you are ready to play with has to be 3000 times more than your initial bet; every time you lose you have to increase your next bet; every time you win you have to decrease your next bet. The strategy is based on the idea that during a certain period of time the number of losses and wins is nearly the same. The only and the main weak point of the strategy is that you never know when the period of losses or wins starts or ends. Moreover you must have a lot of money and time to play using this strategy.
So as you can see yourself even the strategies are based on a chance. Then how can we speak about Roulette as a game of a skill and experience? Moreover we would have hardly got to know about these ‘effective’ strategies if they really worked.

By Kate Vasilyeva
article writer