Roulette, counted pocket by pocket

A European wheel has thirty-six numbered pockets and one zero. An even-money bet — red, black, odd, even, high, low — covers eighteen of them. That is eighteen out of thirty-seven and not eighteen out of thirty-six, and the whole difference between a fair coin and this table sits in that one pocket. It is on the figure above, it is on every real table, and anybody can count it. The most complete records in the register.

This is the only sum on the site that needs no source beyond the table itself, which is why it is here at all. Everything else this register prints comes out of a document somebody published; this one comes out of the wheel.

The same count that makes an even-money bet eighteen out of thirty-seven makes every other bet on the cloth countable too. Nothing here is a source and nothing needs to be: the numbers are printed on the table in front of anybody who looks.

Read the first two columns against the fourth and the single pocket does its work in every row: each payout is priced as though the wheel had thirty-six pockets, and the wheel has thirty-seven.

That is the cleanest statement of the subject anybody can make without a source. A straight-up number is paid thirty-five to one and comes up once in thirty-seven attempts on average; an even-money bet is paid one to one and covers eighteen of the thirty-seven. The zero is not a penalty applied to a bet. It is a pocket that belongs to no even-money side and to no dozen, and every price on the table is set as if it were not there. Rakebit: what is written down.

An American wheel adds a double zero and keeps the payouts unchanged. The even-money bet then covers eighteen of thirty-eight rather than eighteen of thirty-seven, and the straight-up number is still paid thirty-five to one while coming up once in thirty-eight. Two wheels that look identical across a lobby are not the same table, and the difference is a count anybody can make in ten seconds. Chipstars: what is written down.

Which of the twelve records describe live tables at all is in their own description column, and the live-table page covers what the lobby card carries. The count belongs to the wheel and never changes. Everything else about a table does: the smallest stake it accepts, the largest, whether the maximum applies per number or per bet type, and how many seats are open. Those are on the card in the lobby, they differ from table to table inside one cashier, and they are the figures that decide whether a table is usable rather than whether it is fair.

This is the same distinction that runs through the whole site. The wheel is arithmetic and needs no publisher; the limits are a business decision and need one. Where an operator publishes them in advance, they can be read and planned around, and where it does not, no amount of counting will produce them.

No sequence of previous results changes the next spin, and no staking pattern changes the count above. A system that doubles after a loss changes the shape of the session — many small wins and occasional very large losses — without touching the arithmetic that produced it. No system is described or sold on this site.