Everything you need to know about the iconic Roulette wheel

Can you name something that has spun around more times than planet Earth? We can – the iconic Roulette wheel!

Whether you’re a regular Roulette player or you’re yet to spin the well-known wheel either in person or virtually via an online casino platform, we wanted to tell you more about it. 

This includes how this wheel came to be, how its popularity has helped its trajectory through the years to remain a popular game for casino players, why there’s two variants of the wheel and how it became known as a casino classic.

So, scroll down to travel through time and see where Roulette began, and its journey to modern day.

Where it all began

Let’s travel all the way back to the year 1655, where French inventor, mathematician, physicist and so much more, Blaise Pascal, is working on trying to create the world’s first perpetual motion machine.

Unfortunately, Pascal’s quest didn’t go too well for the science world… However, being a man who liked to dabble in a bit of gambling, he found a way to use his blueprints for the perpetual motion machine in a way he hadn’t planned.

It was here, that the first-ever blueprints for the wheel we all know and play today were born, which makes us think – where would Roulette be today if this experiment didn’t happen or had actually gone to plan?

Where the two variants came from

In the blueprints of Pascal’s wheel, numbers contained both a single zero (0) and a double zero (00) as well as the usual 1 to 36.

However, in today’s Roulette world, there are two variants of wheels, one that contains both sets of zeros (0 and 00) and one that only features the single zero (0). These are known as the American and European wheels.

But how did we end up with two variants? It’s all down to the Blanc brothers, Louis and Francois, in 1843.

Wanting to find a way to draw casino players away from their competitors and into their own establishment, Louis and Francois Blanc decided on doing something that would change Roulette forever – removing the double zero pocket, which lowered the house edge in the process. 

This new wheel became a big hit with players in Europe, which is how it became known as the European wheel. However, when this new variant travelled across the sea and onto the American shore, players weren’t as keen about the new variant as those in Europe, so the original single and double zero wheel became known as the American wheel.

Roulette today

Bringing it back to the modern day, Roulette is now available to play both within casino establishments and online via virtual and live-streamed games.

Plus, thanks to modern technology, players have a choice of wheel variant when playing online, whereas if you were to play in person, many casinos only offer one variant or the other.

Do you prefer one wheel over the other? Are you more of a European wheel kind of player, or an American wheel?