Casino Trivia – What Do You Know about Roulette?
In this article, we've gathered some fun casino facts about roulette to impress your friends with. Or you could organise a roulette trivia night with your fellow roulette fans and use the article to come up with the questions.
Below, you will see all our latest blog articles about fascinating facts about gambling. This may be one of the best-liked categories in our blog because it's pure entertainment. Nothing ground-breaking – only light-hearted roulette reads to pass your morning coffee with.
Roulette Trivia – 10 Questions and Answers about Roulette
Let’s jumpstart our casino trivia quiz with this list of the most popular roulette questions and answers. We’ve narrowed down the questions to just 10 because this is usually the biggest number of questions in a trivia round. But further down this article, you will be able to find more facts about gambling. The roulette trivia questions below have been sorted in ascending order of difficulty:
| 2️⃣ How many roulette games are there? | Two |
| 🆚 Which roulette has better odds? | European |
| 📖 Where does the name come from? | French for ‘little wheel’ |
| 👩 How do you call the dealer in roulette? | A croupier |
| ⚫ Can I buy roulette chips at the Cage? | Nope |
| 🍸 Can I have a drink at the roulette table? | Absolutely not |
| 🤵 Is roulette James Bond’s favourite game? | No. It’s poker |
| 🤑 Can roulette be beaten? | Not according to Einstein |
| 😈 Why is it calles the Devil’s game? | The numbers add up to 666 |
| 🃏 Is roulette always played with a wheel? | Not in California |
How many of these did you get right? To consider yourself a roulette trivia expert, you should’ve scored above 7. And if your score is a total disaster, you might want to start with the basics and learn how to play roulette first. Now, for those of you who’d rather dig deep into a subject, we’ve expanded the explanation of the casino trivia questions and answers above:
1. How many roulette games are there?
Oh, that’s an easy one. There are two roulette variations, American and European roulette. Both can be played online and offline. The European roulette online is slightly more popular. In the classic European roulette ruleset, you have a single-zero pocket, and the number sequence on the wheel is different from the American variation.
Amefrican roulette casino tables are quite popular too. While the classic American roulette variant is notoriously famous for being disadvantageous to the player, there are many innovative games with added features and side bets online that can be quite entertaining to play.
2. Which roulette has better odds?
If we compare the roulette odds of the two variations, you will clearly see why European roulette is better. It has odds of 2,7% compared to 5,26% in the American game.
The worst roulette bet is the five number American stake on 00, 0, 1 red, 2 black and 3 red, which comes with a house edge of 7.89%.
The best roulette bet you can make is the even money, which is not exactly 50-50 but still gives you the highest chances of winning. Bet on even/odd, black/red or high/low and statistically, you have a 46,37% chance of winning.
3. Where does the name come from?
Where my language nerds at? If you fall in this category, you would rather google search for ‘etymology of the word roulette’, rather than ‘roulette meaning’, but you’ll end up with roughly the same explanation.
Nerdistically speaking, roulette comes from the Old French ‘roelete’ meaning ‘little wheel’. If we go even further back in time, we will trace the origin back to the Late Latin ‘rotella’, which is diminutive of Latin ‘rota’ standing for ‘wheel’.
Simply put, it’s all about the ‘wheel’ in different archaic languages. But you can’t argue that ‘roulette’ sounds so much more sophisticated than ‘wheel’.
4. How do you call the dealer in roulette?
Why is a blackjack or poker dealer just a…dealer, while they are a croupier in roulette. Well, that’s the French word for ‘dealer’. Not that it makes any difference but, let’s admit it, croupier sounds much more sophisticated and elegant. Here are some more lesser-known casino fun facts and roulette terms.
All the jargon in roulette makes you feel like you are a member of some exclusive club. Did you know that there’s a special term for the marker? It’s a dolly. Or when the croupier restacks the chips? It’s ‘mucking’. Or that each croupier has a ‘dealer signature’, meaning they have a different rhythm or a way of spinning the wheel. When the players think they’ve noticed one, they try to predict where the ball will fall and place bets in certain sections of the wheel. This is known as ‘section shooting’.
5. Can I buy roulette chips at the Cage?
Few people realise that roulette chips cannot be bought or traded for cash at the casino cashier, aka the Cage.
This is because they are different from all other chips.
You buy them at the roulette table from the croupier. If a spin is in play, you will have to wait. Interrupting the croupier is not a good idea.
Your chips will come in a unique colour so that everyone knows who bets what. We know that the most exciting part of winning a roulette wager at a land-based casino is collecting your chips. Just remember that you may retrieve your winnings only after the dealer removes the dolly from the table.
6. Can I have a drink at the roulette table?
Not unless you are playing online roulette. In which case, you could even have a plate of lasagna while playing roulette, if you see fit.
Roulette etiquette in land-based casinos is very strict and bringing your martini to the table would be severely frowned upon, no matter what James Bond movies made you believe.
But don’t worry. While putting your glass on top of the felt is a no-no, many tables have built-in drink holders into the table railings where you can put your martini. Generally speaking, anything that can mess up the felt like ashtrays and liquids should be avoided.
7. Is roulette James Bond’s favourite game?
Not really. Although the 007 is occasionally seen playing roulette, blackjack or craps in the different movies, his game of choice would be poker.
James Bond’s author Ian Flemming, on the other hand, was an avid roulette player, particularly favouring the the Labouchere system. That may sound contradictory to you if you’ve ever heard of the the James Bond Roulette Strategy.
Actually, in ‘Casino Royale’, the British agent does take a shot at roulette and even comes up with his own betting system to overcome the odds. Since the book was published, the strategy has become very popular and is referred to as ‘the James Bond system’.
8. Can roulette be beaten?
Although there are many roulette strategy systems you can use, none of them guarantees 100% success. After all, this is a game of chance, not a equation.
Speaking of math, there’s a famous quote by Einstein saying that: “No one can win at roulette unless he steals money from the table while the croupier isn’t looking.’. Ouch. The genius was really intrigued by roulette.
After trying to work out strategies to beat the odds, he finally admitted that this was an impossible task. Or rather, that there is no mathematical trick to help you always win at roulette.
9. Why is it called the Devil’s game?
Because no matter which version of roulette you play, if you add up all the numbers on the roulette wheel, you will get 666.
The ‘number of the Beast’ is from the Book of Revelations in the Bible (13:15–18). There’s a lot of controversy as to what it means and why exactly 666 is the mark of the Anarchist and you can read a tone of articles on the internet about it.
One thing we know for sure is that a lot of gamblers are superstitious. This leads us to the second theory about the unfortunate nickname of the game. Players who lose are often so angry that they say that the game must be a creation of the Devil.
10. Is roulette always played with a wheel?
The US is the country with the most controversion gambling laws. Under the Californian gambling law, commercial casinos can legally offer only card-based table games.
Hence, the creation of the ‘California Roulette’ variation, which uses cards instead of a wheel. Americans are really creative when they have to outwit their bizarre gambling laws, huh?
California roulette is based on the American variation ruleset. Instead of a wheel, you’d be using a deck of 38 cards with different numbers and suits. An automatic machine will shuffle the cards, and the dealer will show the winning card to determine if you win based on your bet on the table.
Roulette World Records – Crazy Records Set at Casinos
Ready for some mind-blowing roulette world records? You’ve probably heard that the Guinness Book of Records started out as a way to settle pub fights. And since we are getting you ready for a roulette trivia night, we thought it might be a good idea to have these at hand in case an argument gets a little too heated. Here are the 5 most popular casino fun facts:
- 🥇 Biggest Roulette Win – The name of the former New Castle Football Club owner, Mike Ashley, should ring a bell for those of you who are football fans, but he is also popular as the person with the biggest roulette win. The billionaire entrepreneur hit a huge win in 2008. He won £1,3 Mil in a single spin after betting on black 17 (another Bond fan here). After the deductions, he ended up with ‘just’ £820,000. I mean, it’s hard to feel bad for him, but still, the taxes are a nightmare!
- 🏆 Largest Roulette Wheel – Casino Du Liban in Jounieh, Lebanon, set a Guinness World Record for the Largest Roulette Wheel. The wheel was actually built in 2017, but the manufacturers did not suspect that it may be a record-breaking one, so it remained undiscovered until 2019. The interactive roulette whee is on the ceiling of the casino, and it is operated electronically. It measures 8,75 m in diameter.
- 👑 Longest Croupier Marathon – Another Guinness Record set by the professional Estonian croupier Intan Pragi, who spun the roulette wheel in Olympic Casino more than 1650 times in 48 hours. This officially made the Tallin citizen a record-holder for the Longest Marathon Croupier shift.
- 🙌 Hitting the Same Number – In 2012, Rio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas celebrated the very unlikely event of a roulette wheel hitting the exact same number seven times. Can you guess the chances of that happening? They are the staggering 114 billion to 1. The lucky number was 19. What’s even wilder is that after seven consecutive hits, the same number appeared again in the ninth spin. The sequence was broken in the eight spins by the number 15.
- ⭐ Longest Streak of One Colour – Ever heard of the concept of Gambler’s fallacy? Here’s a great example of it. Back in 1943 marked the longest recorded streak of one colour in roulette in American casino history. Red hit the astonishing 32 consecutive times. So anyone thinking their colour has to hit soon because hitting red so many times defies the odds was greatly disappointed.
Top 10 Casino Fun Facts
We are going to give 10 more quick facts about gambling before we wrap this article up. These are just random casino trivia facts that we’ve gathered throughout the years of playing. Most of them are just curious pieces of information, and others will give you some food for thought. Did you know that:
- 🏛️ The first casino was Casino di Venezia.
- 🎰 Slots are the most popular casino game.
- 🔎 The word casino comes from Italian, ‘casa’ means a house.
- 🃏 Blackjack has the best odds with a house edge at around 1%.
- 🔒 There used to be a casino in the Nevada State Prison for the inmates.
- 🚫 Citizens of Monaco can’t gamble at Casino de Monte Carlo.
- 🏯 Macau is the world’s gambling capital, not Las Vegas.
- 🌇 The biggest casino is the Venetian in Macau.
- 🕐 There are no clocks in a casino so that players can spend more time playing.
- 👎 Robert Maxwell lost £1,5 in 3 minutes, making him the biggest roulette loser!
Now that you’ve gathered more than 25 casino trivia questions and answers , it’s time you show off your knowledge. Go to a pub quiz, give all the smart alec answers and become a roulette trivia champ! Or you can just annoy everyone at home by quoting random casino facts for a whole week. Whatever works best for you!
FAQs
We are going to wrap our casino trivia guide with some of the most common questions about roulette. Pro tip: If you are using this article for your pub trivia night and you know that the teams are made up of gamblers, you could use these questions for the jackpot round because this should be considered expert level trivia.
