Few games of chance have inspired as much literary attention as roulette. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Gambler (1866) depicts the psychological torment of a man engulfed by the spinning wheel, and in literature and art the game has become a symbol of both elegance and risk, as well as a metaphor for the unpredictability of life. Mathematically, roulette illustrates the concept of expected value and the inevitability of the house edge; psychologically, it is fertile ground for biases like the gambler’s fallacy. Today, roulette is accessible worldwide with online casinos and a slew of different variations, but its essential format has barely changed for more than two centuries.
Structurally, modern roulette crystallized in late 18th-century Paris, a crucible of Enlightenment commerce and vice, where cafes, arcades, and illicit gaming salons fueled a bustling gambling economy despite royal prohibitions. The earliest unambiguous reference to the game is in Jacques Lablee’s book La Roulette, ou Histoire d’un Jour (La Roulette, or the Story of a Day), published in 1796 and 1801/02. Unlike vague mentions in bans and statutes, this description lays out a fully integrated mechanical wheel with numbered pockets (0 and 00) reserved for the bank and a betting cloth codifying the game’s rules and procedures.
The Parisian wheel’s alternating black and red compartments, with a single green pocket for the house, are now recognized globally as the standard for modern wheels. The betting cloth standardized the layout of inside and outside bets, as well as the convention for marking zeroes with green, now a global convention that distinguishes roulette from wheel-and-ball games of earlier times.
From these origins, the game spread to New Orleans along paddlewheel steamboats on the Mississippi River and then branched out to frontier towns and mining camps. In contrast to Monte Carlo’s elegant salons, roulette’s rough-and-ready spirit made it accessible to a broad range of social classes.
The game’s popularity grew further in the American South, where a legal climate more welcoming to gambling favored roulette. By the mid-19th century, it had become a fixture in taverns and saloons. The game’s appeal lay in its balancing of simple rules and complex betting scales. It offered dramatic swings of fortune and attracted a burgeoning population of urban settlers seeking escape from the realities of slavery and landlessness.
In the United States, the game became a national pastime with the rise of state-licensed casinos. The game’s popularity has continued to grow as it evolved to meet the demands of the market, reflecting changes in economics, culture, and public attitudes toward gambling. Its enduring popularity lies in its ability to balance mathematical precision with existential randomness, an effect accentuated by the fact that no number or combination of numbers has ever won a jackpot. The house edge, calculated as the average of the number of consecutive spins that result in a winning bet, remains an obstacle to gambling enthusiasm, but the game’s allure continues to endure. This paradox is reflected in its role as the iconic symbol of the gambler’s fallacy.
