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If you want to become a savvier player at the roulette tables, you must familiarise yourself with the roulette rules. These affect every bet you place.

This classic casino table game is one of the oldest games available in land-based and online casinos. However, to beginner online roulette players, the table can feel somewhat daunting, with so many betting options on the wheel and the unique roulette layout to get to grips with.

Roulette Rules: The Basics

There are several aspects to the game of roulette that you need to master, especially when it comes to staking real money. It’s not just the roulette wheel you have to think about, it’s the different ways to stake, when you can and can’t stake, and what you could win when the ball lands in your favour.

The Object Of The Game

To win at a round of roulette, you must put a stake of money on a desired number or collection of numbers. You do this by placing roulette chips of your chosen value on your selected number(s). Put simply, the object is to predict where you think the ball will land on the roulette wheel and bet accordingly.

All winning chips are returned to winning players, plus extra chip payouts in accordance with the table odds. All losing chips are taken by the table dealer and retained by the house. Of course, when you play live roulette online, the transfer of winning and losing chips happens digitally and in an instant, to accelerate your gameplay in between spins.

Basic Rules To Master

First, you’ll need to master the dynamics of the roulette wheel. Depending on the variant of roulette you choose to play you’ll have 37 (including the single zero) or 38 (including the double zero) numbers on the wheel. There will also be some differences in terms of your roulette table layout, or the way you place your stakes.

The Roulette Table Layout Explained

When we talk about the table layout, we’re referring to two things – the layout of numbers on both the roulette wheel and of the numbers on the table where you place your chips.

So, let’s briefly talk about the numbers. A typical roulette wheel will have a minimum of 36 numbered pockets. Additional ‘special’ numbers have been added to the wheel over time, too. For instance, a green single zero pocket is included in the European version.

These additional pockets were added to help the house increasing its edge. If you’re interested in how to calculate this in a game of roulette, you need to work out the following calculation:

(Odds Against Winning – House Odds) x Probability Of Success

For a roulette wheel with 37 pockets the calculation would be:

(36/1 – 35/1) x 1/37 = 1/1 x 1/37 = 1/37 = 0.0270270 (2.70% when multiplied by 100)

For roulette wheels with both a single zero and double zero, creating 38 pockets, the house edge almost doubles to 5.26%, which is why single-zero roulette tends to be more popular with players.

All About Red And Black

One thing you’ll notice on any roulette wheel layout is that the pockets alternate between red and black numbers. That’s designed to give you, the player an almost 50/50 chance of landing red or black. Why do we say almost? Because the addition of the single zero and the double zero makes it impossible for the probability of the ball landing on red or black to be exactly 50%.

As the payout odds of on red or black are even-money (1:1), this is where the house edge tips in favour of the casinos.

All About The Numbers

Taking a quick look at a
roulette wheel with 37 numbered pockets, you’ll probably notice that the
numbers are by no means in a specific order. This is to avoid any potential
bias of results over the long-term from a single roulette wheel.

In single zero roulette, the numbers are laid out clockwise in the following sequence: 0, 32, 15, 19, 4, 21, 2, 25, 17, 34, 6, 27, 13, 36, 11, 30, 8, 23, 10, 5, 24, 16, 33, 1, 20, 14, 31, 9, 22, 18, 29, 7, 28, 12, 35, 3, 26.

The positioning of the numbered pockets on a double zero wheel, also known as American roulette, is laid out very differently. The sequence is designed to create a level playing field, with the single zero and double zero positioned on opposite sides of the wheel:

0, 28, 9, 26, 30, 11, 7, 20, 32, 17, 5, 22, 34, 15, 3, 24, 36, 13, 1, 00, 27, 10, 25, 29, 12, 8, 19, 31, 18, 6, 21, 33, 16, 4, 23, 35, 14, and 2.

As you can see, with single zero roulette wheels, the low and high-value numbers alternate as much as possible. You’ll very rarely spot two low or high numbers next to each other on the wheel. That’s in stark contrast to double zero roulette wheels, which are less balanced, with many instances of low and high numbers positioned next to one another on the wheel.

Roulette Betting Systems

The beauty of roulette is that you can stake on as many numbers as you wish if your bankroll allows. Though if you opt in to live casino offers and promotions, there may be limits placed on the amount of numbers you can cover in any game round, so always check the terms and conditions.

If you want to cover several single numbers or multiple groups of numbers, you can do so freely. There are three different types of bets you can make – inside bets, outside bets, and announced bets.

Inside Betting

Look at the standard roulette table layout and you’ll see that the main layout is comprised of the numbers zero through to 36. The other areas on the side of the table layout are specifically reserved for betting on groups of numbers – more on that shortly.

When you stake on an individual number or cover several numbers at once, these bets are known as inside bets. There are seven main inside bets you can make at any time:

1. Straight or straight-up
   A bet placed on a single number, such as red 7. Chips are placed inside the square of the number you want to stake on.
    
2. Split
   A bet placed on two numbers adjacent to one another on the roulette table, such as red 14 and black 17. Chips are placed on the connecting line between the two numbers.
    
3. Street
   A bet placed on three numbers located on the same line of the table. Chips are placed on the outer corner of the row of three numbers you want to stake on. An example is a bet on the row including 4, 5 and 6.
    
4. Six Line
   A bet placed on two adjacent lines of numbers. Chips are placed on the connecting outer corner between the two lines you want to stake on, such as the two rows containing numbers 28 – 33.
    
5. Corner
   A bet placed on a cluster of four numbers in a square. Place your chip in the middle of the four numbers. An example is a square containing 15, 18, 17 and 14 (looking at them clockwise).
    
6. Trio
   A bet placed on three numbers including single zero or double zero. Chips are positioned on the line connecting the single zero or double zero with the two additional numbers 1 and 2, or 2 and 3.
    
7. Basket
   A bet placed on the numbers zero, 1, 2, and 3. Chips are placed on the outer corner of the table connecting zero and 1.

Outside Betting

All outside bets made on the roulette table are placed outside of the field of numbers. Outside bets cover the sectors that span larger groups of numbers than you can otherwise cover with multiple inside bets. With outside bets, you can cover virtually half the numbers during a single spin, compared to just six with a single inside bet.

For all these bets, choose your outcome and simply place your chip/s in the square marked with the bet you want.

1. Odd/Even

    

2. Red/Black

    

3. 1 to 18/19 to 36

    

4. Dozens
   A bet placed on whether the 1^st 12, 2^nd or 3^rd 12 on the table.
    
5. Columns
   A bet placed on whether the next number the ball lands on will be within the first, second, or third column of the table. Chips are placed inside the first, second, or third “2 to 1” squares next beside numbers 34, 35, and 36 respectively.

Announced Betting

Most commonly found in French roulette and some European roulette games, there are additional announced bets that can be made. These are a combination of different numbers, and usually, you’ll find a secondary table aside from the one where you can place inside and outside bets. Here are the five announced bets:

1. Voisins du Zero
   A bet placed on the single zero and seven numbers either side of the zero, comprising a trio bet on zero, 2, and 3, five split bets on 4 and 7, 12 and 15, 18 and 21, 19 and 22, 32 and 35, one corner bet on 25, 26, 28, and 29.
    
2. Le Tiers Du Cylindre
   Translated to English as “one-third of the wheel”, this bet covers six different split bets on 5 and 8, 10 and 11, 13 and 16, 23 and 24, 27 and 30, 33 and 36.
    
3. Orphelins
   A bet placed on all the numbers not covered by a Voisins du Zero bet or a Le Tier Du Cylindre bet, spanning eight numbers and known as the orphans. It consists of a straight-up bet on 1 and four split bets on 6 and 9, 14 and 17, 17 and 20, 31 and 34.
    
4. Jeu Zero
   A bet covering all three neighbours of the single zero on either side of the wheel. It consists of a straight-up bet on 26 and three split bets on zero and 3, 12 and 15, 32 and 35.
    
5. Neighbours
   A five-number bet covering 26 and its two neighbours on either side.

Roulette Payouts And Odds

Inside bets tend to have much larger payouts than outside bets. That’s because they cover no more than six numbers per spin. Meanwhile, outside bets can cover half of the numbers on the wheel during a single spin, so the odds of winning on any single number is increased.

The below table shows the payout odds of each main roulette bet:

Does this all make sense? Try your hand at live roulette today!

If you feel like you now have a good grasp of the available bets you can make at the roulette table, strike while the iron is hot and put your knowledge to the test with a few rounds of online roulette at LiveRoulette.

Our hugely engaging live streamed roulette games are managed by professional dealers, with minimum bets allowing you to stake as low as €0.10 per chip.

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Claim Sportsbook Betting Bonuses

As a Canadian sports bettor, the multitude of sportsbooks available to you will always work in your favour. Simply put, sportsbooks are competitive and are therefore willing to offer you a great deal – as a new player or otherwise. If there’s one piece of advice every sports bettor should know, it’s to take advantage of promotional offers.

The best sportsbook bonuses are usually welcome offers given to new players, with commonplace deals predominantly being ‘deposit matches’. When a book offers a ‘deposit match’ bonus, it’s usually a certain percentage up to a certain amount.

For example, let’s say ‘X Sportsbook’ is offering all new players a ‘50% deposit match bonus of up to $500’ on initial (meaning first-ever) deposits. If you were to deposit $250 you would receive $125 in bonus bets, whereas a maximum deposit of $500 would net $250 in bonus bets.

It’s important to note that if you were to initially deposit more than $500, you would still only receive a maximum of $250 in bonus bets – as that’s the specified limit. For those who may be wondering what ‘bonus bets’ are, they’re simply bet credits that can be used to place wagers on any sport.

The specification of ‘bonus bet’ is to remind players that you cannot withdraw these bonus amounts as real cash. For example, if you deposited $400 and received a $200 deposit match bonus, you cannot then withdraw $600 cash. The only way to turn bonus bets into real cash is to win a wager with them.

Deposit match bonuses are sometimes offered to existing users as well, but ongoing promotions for returning players can be any number of other incentives. One of those perks is called an ‘odds boost’, which gives you a larger payout on favourable betting markets.

For example, if a ‘Connor McDavid anytime goal’ markets boosts its odds from -110 (favourite) to +140 (underdog) as a part of a promotional special, you’re in line to win a significant amount more than you would have if the odds hadn’t been boosted.

In short, these bonuses are everywhere, and sportsbooks make them easy to find. Don’t be afraid to make an account with multiple books to take advantage of several offers at once. It’s completely legal, so long as you only make one account per book per person.

Go Line Shopping

Similarly to bonus hunting, finding value by line shopping is best done by having an account with multiple sportsbooks. That said, you don’t need to start off by signing up for 10 different books. Take your time, and build things up slowly until you’re feeling confident in your understanding of this concept.

The best way to think about line shopping is to simply think of it as price matching. People are always looking to get the best price on everything whether it be groceries, cars, or even vacations. Sports betting is no different as books will have similar odds; however, the slight variations are how you can ensure you’re maximizing every dollar you wager.

The last section spoke of ‘boosted odds’, and line shopping is a good way to boost them on your own terms by finding discrepancies amongst different books. For example, say you want to place a futures bet on the Edmonton Oilers to win the Stanley Cup. ‘Book A’ has that wager at +500 odds, ‘Book B’ has it at +520, and ‘Book C’ has it at +550.

It may not seem like much of a difference, and in a vacuum, it isn’t. To show the difference it can make, let’s say you have $50 you’d like to bet on this market. A winning bet with Book A at +500 would return $300, Book B would payout $310, and Book C would earn you $325.

As you can see, the gap is subtle, but why settle for a $300 payout when it could be $325? All because you took a bit of time to find the book with the best odds. As mentioned before, you don’t need to have an account with a crazy number of books.

The above example involves using just three, and you never know when a book might make a mistake, which is easy to identify when you’re shopping (comparing) odds against the field.

Watch The News

This last tip may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people place poor bets because they simply couldn’t be bothered to look at context. The first reason to watch the news is due to injuries. Books will often refund single bets affected by a late injury announcement prior to game time, but it can really mess up a multi-leg parlay.

Another way injury news can help is by shedding some light on which teams may have a better chance to win than the odds indicate. For example, the Toronto Maple Leafs are favoured to win over the Montreal Canadiens, but late news comes out that the Leafs will be starting their backup goalie.

Sometimes, the odds won’t reflect this change right away, and you could then place a bet on the Canadiens to win as underdogs, even though the team’s chances of winning just greatly increased. It can sometimes be hard to take advantage of these brief windows, but watching platforms like ‘X’ for breaking news is a great way to potentially take advantage of inaccurate odds.

This advice works for player props as well. For example, if Auston Matthews is a late scratch for the Toronto Maple Leafs and Max Domi is promoted to the first power play unit, his chances of getting a point have skyrocketed. In these instances, don’t spend too much time line shopping, as submitting the bet before the odds change is the best way to strike while the iron’s hot.

We hope these tips will help you improve your sports betting game. Good luck!

Sources

If there’s a poker play we haven’t learned, then up-skilling to a better strategy can feel great. Improving our luck, however, is impossible. Luck doesn’t care about how hard you’ve been working on your game, whether you’re having a good day or a bad one, or whether you’ve lost your last ten coin flips.

Luck is an unfeeling acquaintance we cannot escape and must be treated as such. Dealing with a ‘bad beat’ can be difficult, but with our helpful hints below, you’ll be in the best possible place to get over that slice of bad luck and play your A-Game in the next hand:

• Keep Some Perspective
• Understand the Odds
• Put Bad Beats to Work
• Find Your Focus
• Post-Match Analysis
• Perform a Ritual
• Focus on the Next Hand
• Know When to Fold ‘Em
• Stay Calm and Walk Away
• Check Your Account(ability)

1. Keep Some Perspective

While all the following tips and hints apply and can help, it’s important to remember your place in the world. If you’ve lost a hand of cards, you’re already lucky. The chances are pretty high that you’re reading this on a $400 smartphone, laptop, or tablet. Given that 50% of the world’s population lives on less than $7 a day, you’re already in an immensely privileged position. Understanding that in the game of life, you’ve basically been dealt a premium pair can go some way to reducing the magnitude of your feelings about any given bad beat.

Before you play poker, think of the worst situation that could happen. Let’s say it’s a $5 entry tournament, and at the final table, you’re all-in with pocket aces for a chip-leading pot with 6 people left. If you win, it’s very likely that you’ll go on to win $1,000. If you lose, you’re going out for just under $100. That’s a $900 swing, or to put it another way, 180 buy-ins.

I’ve been in this position. I was playing someone with pocket tens, and they hit a ten on the river. Then another player showed their hand with a ten in it. They hit a one-outer to effectively cost me the best part of a thousand dollars in equity. So, what was my takeaway here? Did I stay calm? Not at the time. Do I still recall how it felt? Absolutely, it stung like a wasp on a hot summer’s day.

But taking a look around me helped. I was sitting at a laptop I owned, in a house I could afford to rent, with food and comforts all around me. Getting some perspective isn’t easy when you’re in the moment, but it can help you immediately focus on the game as just that – a game. You’ll still have whatever you had before you set aside the buy-in. Losing at cards will happen, losing at life is, for some, inescapable. Gratitude is the pathway to bad beats hurting less.

2. Understand the Odds

What is a bad beat in poker terms? For such a popular expression, the actual boundaries of qualification for the phrase to be justified are blurry, to say the least. If you qualify a bad beat as a committed pot where you are the favorite with all your chips in the middle, and then the other player overtakes your hand to win, then you’re going to experience bad beats a lot of times, possibly over and over in the same tournament or cash game session.

If you get your chips into the middle with aces against kings pre-flop, then getting beaten is an outrageous piece of bad luck, right? Well, not really. You’re a 4:1 favorite before the five community cards, which means one time out of five, you’re meant to lose. That’s not the case in every hand, of course, but to truly appreciate the odds, you’ve got to look at the long-term picture.

If you can understand the odds for situations you’ll frequently find yourself in, then the individual bad beats won’t feel so impactful. They should start to become more of a consistent pattern and part of a larger truth, that poker is essentially one long game. Over time, luck will even out.

That’s the certainty of probability added to time, or rather the sample size of your situation getting bigger over time. If you can find peace in bad beats through understanding the chances of it happening again over time, things can really improve. Before you thought of it in those terms, what were the chances of that happening?

3. Put Bad Beats to Work

One of the biggest gifts we can give you about bad beats is almost not looking at them as bad beats. If you’ve just been one-outed, we can appreciate that sounds pretty crazy. But it’s not. If you never get a bad beat, you never check the odds, look at the perspective you have on the game of poker, or appreciate a bad beat.

That’s right, we said A-P-P-R-E-C-I-A-T-E. Here’s the twist: if you don’t get it in good, then you can’t be bad beaten. If you’re the outside chance, then you’re the one doing the dirty. That should feel better, right? Wrong. It only feels better when you win a bad beat, and since you got it in bad, you’re going to lose most of the time. You got a bad beat? That means you got it in good, meaning you’ll be winning most of the time.

That feels better already, doesn’t it? Phil Hellmuth once said, “If there weren’t luck involved, I would win every time.” While The Poker Brat might have been stretching the truth a little, he has a point. The bad beats hurt the 17-time WSOP bracelet winner because he tries to put himself in positions where he’s the favorite. Without fortune, poker would be like chess, a game based entirely on skill.

While this would still be interesting, it would hardly make it one of the most popular and entertaining games on Earth. As Rick Bennt once said, “In the long run there’s no luck in poker, but the short run is longer than most people know.”

4. Find Your Focus

This is one piece of advice that you may well have heard before, but definitely need to hear again. Regaining your focus after a bad beat can be a difficult, sometimes dizzying experience. So many emotions flood your senses when you face a bad beat that processing them can be very tough.

Someone else is raking in your chips, for a start. They’re overjoyed at having won a big stack of chips through luck alone. Their feeling is euphoria. Despondency is a natural opposite that you must welcome into your system, process, then overcome as quickly as possible. In order to do so, you may well struggle to find a mental foothold, but the image of trying to place your feet on solid ground after falling is an apt one.

A bad beat can feel exactly like that. You’ve climbed the mountain, gone your opponent all-in and at risk with the worst hand, then they make a set with their underpair, and you ask yourself why you worked so hard to put yourself on that pedestal.

Picture yourself up a literal mountain. You’re about to reach the peak when someone comes up behind you and trips you up. Hey, maybe it’s even the wind or uneven ground. But it’s not like you tumbled all the way to the ground. You’re still up the mountain, you’re still climbing.

Even if you busted a tournament or lost a cash game session’s buy-in, you haven’t lost everything. Pick yourself up, stand your ground, learn what you can do better, and accept that you fell, but now you’re back on your feet and going to keep moving forward.

5. Post-Match Analysis

All the other ways you can get over bad beats deal primarily with the physical or mental senses that are knocked off balance after you are dealt a dose of bad luck. Rebalancing focus, leveling your emotions, appreciating your privilege. Each of those deals with improving your overall mood. That’s very important. It will aid you in the long term in dealing with bad beats. But there’s something else you need to hear, and you’re not going to like it.

You might have made a mistake. Even in a hand where you were bad beaten, there are ways you could have changed the course of the hand. Let’s use an example here and adjust where the chips go into the middle. Let’s imagine that you have 25 big blinds and are holding pocket jacks. The chip leader – your enemy in the hand – has pocket tens. In the first scenario, you shove pre-flop, they call and hit a ten on the river to knock you out of the tournament.

Bad beat, huh? Awful luck, and you need to go into all those recovery scenarios you’ve already read about. Now imagine that instead of shoving pre-flop, you plan a ‘stop and go.’ You know that the chip leader likes to flat call with middle-ranking pairs a lot of the time and almost never plays ace-high. When the flop lands A-4-2, having three-bet rather than shoved pre-flop, getting a call, you then shove the flop.

Pocket tens now don’t look so good for the chip leader, and he folds, never getting to the river, never hitting the ten, and losing a substantial pot to you instead. You just rewrote a bad beat. The good news is that in almost any scenario at the poker table, there’s a different way to play it.

Maybe you don’t know the chip leader’s ranges as well as we just described. Maybe it’s aces against kings. Not every bad beat can be avoided. But some can. Admitting that to yourself and considering different ways to play out the scenario you just endured is elite-level thinking. So why not do it?

6. Perform a Ritual

“If you’ve come this far, maybe you’re willing to come a little further.” Do you know who said that? It wasn’t a poker player, but a character in a movie. Still need another clue? It’s perhaps the most popular movie of all time. Well done at the back with your hand up; it’s the line that Andy Dufresne writes to his friend Red when he is guiding him from prison parole to the mystical Zihuatanejo on Mexico’s Pacific coast.

We say the same thing to you now. If you’re prepared to take our advice, then we’d encourage you in the direction of a ‘recovery ritual.’ Many athletes practice this. Think of the tennis player who bounces the ball seventeen times before he serves. Or the footballer who taps his helmet three times before waiting for the snap. Elite athletes have rituals, so why not poker players? It turns out they do.

Often these will center around breathing, cognitive tricks, and positive affirmations. Mindfulness, yoga, and other breathing exercises can assist you in doing this too. Whatever your ritual, it’s worth remembering that this needs to be something you can call on wherever you are. If you’re at home playing online poker, then performing ten star-jumps and reciting the words to Viva La Vida might work for you.

At the live felt in a casino, this same ritual could lead to you being escorted from the premises, especially if they’re not a Coldplay fan. Maybe it’s to breathe deeply three times, consult a few words of encouragement on your cell phone, and clench and unclench your toes. That’s what Bruce Willis does in Die Hard when the plane is coming in to land. If it’s good enough for Bruce, it’s good enough for us.

QUICK TIPS:

7. Focus on the Next Hand

If you want to overcome a bad beat quickly in poker, then playing the next hand well as quickly as possible can sometimes be the answer. Investing the chips might be painful, but that immediate switch of focus on new cards and possibly new opponents is a naturally cleansing thing for a poker player. Right back on the horse, you could win the next hand, of course, but you might also distract yourself successfully enough to process the bad beat’s emotional hit without realizing it.

8. Know When to Fold ‘Em

Kenny Rogers once sat on the set of a mocked-up train carriage surrounded by antiques and with a straight face, told us that we needed to know when to fold them. This is simplistic advice in the music video for The Gambler, but while the slightly Wild West-tinged guidance should come with a heavy dose of salt, there is some truth in it. If there’s the potential for a bad beat and you’re not sure how to play a hand other than to put yourself in the firing line of it, it might be worth folding the cards and walking away. Just don’t hit the whiskey bottle like the old man in the Kenny Rogers song.

9. Stay Calm and Walk Away

If you’ve tried everything else in our guide to overcoming bad beats and still need a solution, there is only one that remains, and that is to walk away. Pick up your remaining chips if you have any, keep your dignity, act polite and friendly, and leave the table. The renowned poker writer Tommy Angelo once said, ‘Quitting is the easy part. The hard part is standing up.’ You have to leave the felt and commit to pressing the quit button to do so. Sometimes it really is the only sane choice.

10. Check Your Account(ability)

Do you have a special poker-playing friend in your life who you can unload a bad beat on and get great advice delivered in a sympathetic manner? If not, then you should try to find one, but we’ll spin this on its head and suggest that you should be the friend you’re after. Then whoever you help is more likely to be there for you when you’ve just bubbled a poker tournament, lost a cash-game buy-in, or lost with aces against pocket deuces again to the same guy who did it one orbit ago!!!! It always helps to share a problem, and it can be so much easier to dissect it with someone next to you.

Conclusion

Dealing with bad beats in poker is a challenge that every player faces at some point in their journey. However, by keeping perspective, understanding the odds, putting bad beats to work, finding your focus, and following a recovery ritual, you can not only weather these storms but also use them to your advantage.

Post-match analysis and seeking accountability from fellow players can further enhance your skills and resilience. And, remember, it’s crucial to stay calm and know when to walk away when the going gets tough. These strategies not only improve your poker game but can also have a positive impact on your overall outlook on life.

So, the next time you face a bad beat, take a deep breath, regroup, and get back in the game – because the journey is often more rewarding than the destination.