The best bet in roulette is on a European roulette table which offers the en prison option. This reduces the house edge by half again, making it only 1.35%. Here’s how it works: On a European roulette game with the en prison rule in effect, your even money bet becomes “imprisoned” when the ball lands on the zero. Roulette Strategies Although there is a great number of roulette strategies, in general, they can be categorized into two large groups. The first group includes strategies based on a progression that is determined once the outcome of the last spin is revealed. In other words, the bet changes in accordance with the result of the last spin. If a long-term roulette strategy to win does exist, it would not work on traditional roulette. It just might work, however, on no zero roulette or a casino with a towering table limit. Other strategies do not directly pass off as a system in the strictest sense.

What you will find below is a full and comprehensive list of the different roulette strategies we’ve written about, as well as tips and other pieces of information that you may find useful.

For each strategy, we’ve gone into great detail on the rules, progressions, odds of a losing run and the maths behind them. You’re welcome to test them out on our free roulette games for as long as you like.

Before we get into the various strategies, it would be best to make a few things clear. Roulette is a mathematically perfect game in favour of the casino. The house edge for European roulette is 2.7% and for American roulette it’s 5.26%.

The only way a roulette strategy could be truly effective and a guaranteed winner over the long term of play would be if it was able to eliminate the house edge and put the odds in your favour. There’s no such strategy for roulette. While that may be disappointing, please read on because the information below is the best and most detailed that you’re going to find.

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Roulette Strategy Without Hype and False Promises

If you’ve searched online for a system before, you’ve probably noticed that there’s a lot of junk out there with websites talking about “best winning systems” “guaranteed to win” “exploits casino flaw” “suck cash on autopilot” and many more.

You won’t be finding any of that rubbish below, just real world strategies and tips, without the hype and false promises. You can read about all of those systems/software programs that guarantee easy winnings in our roulette system reviews.

The whole point of a roulette strategy is to first of all manage your bank roll, and secondly to increase your odds of winning over the short term by betting large to win small. For example, several of the strategies below involve increasing bets after a loss and continually increasing them until you get a win.

By doing this, you are betting large amounts (the bets added together after each loss) to win a small amount because after your previous losses have been covered, there will only be a small profit. Quite often with progressive systems, hundreds of £/$/€ are wagered to win just 1 £/$/€.

Something else to consider is that you will have more winning sessions than losing sessions, but your wins will be small (while risking more) and on the occasions when you lose, your losses will be far greater than your wins. That is the risk of gambling and roulette is no different.

With all that said, here are the different roulette strategies we’ve written about. This list is by no means conclusive; we do add to it and we’re always open to adding ideas from our readers, so feel free to contact us if you think you have a strategy that we could write about and would be of interest to our readers.

Martingale Roulette System – This is a system that involves increasing bets after a loss until you get a win. It is commonly used on Red or Black but it can be applied all over the table if you have the correct progression. Not only have we gone through every bet, we have tables showing the overall loss at each stage and we’ve shown you the odds of going on a bad losing run i.e: 10 Reds in a row when you’re betting on Black.

Reverse Martingale – Also known as “Paroli”, this is a positive progression system where you increase your bets after a win in the hopes of riding a winning streak while keeping the losses to a minimum when you go on a losing run.

D’Alembert Roulette System – This is a strategy that is based on even chance bets. It’s a relatively safe system to use (like any strategy there’s risk involved though) and if you have as many wins as losses you will have a nice win.

Reverse D’Alembert – This is the opposite of the regular D’Alembert (above). The main downside of this system is that you need more wins than losses in order to be successful.

Fibonacci Roulette System – This is an interesting strategy that uses a slower rate of progression than the Martingale by winning back losses over several winning spins rather than one. It’s possible to have considerably more losing spins but still come out on top, providing of course that you don’t go on an extended losing run over a short space of time.

Reverse Fibonacci – Another example of a system having the rules flipped around to create a “reverse” version. In our opinion, this one isn’t as good as the normal Fibonacci which we covered above.

Labouchere Roulette System – This is sometimes called the cancellation method because you construct your own betting line and cancel numbers off it as you win. It is slightly more complicated than most other strategies and may require some practice to get your head around it.

Cover The Table – On this page we talk about several different ways that you can cover large portions of the roulette table such as betting on 35 numbers, betting on 17 splits and so on.

Best Long Term Roulette Strategy Games

Flat Betting – On this page we talk about the upsides and downsides to flat betting which means betting the same amount on every spin with no progression.

Oscar’s Grind – This is a Red/Black system that play in stages of four and aims to get a profit of 1 unit for each betting cycle. It increases bets after every win and they remain the same after a loss.

Red And Black Strategies – This is a page that contains links to all the different strategies that we’ve covered that can be used on Red or Black which are by far the most popular bets.

Dozens And Columns – Here we talk about two different betting systems that can be used on either the dozens or the columns. The first is designed for betting on just one dozen or column, the second is for betting on two at the same time.

James Bond Roulette System – Used by Bond himself, not in any of the films, but in the written novels. This is a system that covers 2 thirds of the table, plus the 0. It could be described as another strategy to cover the table but due to it’s notoriety, we’ve given it it’s own page, complete with a diagram, examples and whey you shouldn’t use a progression.

FOBT System – Short for fixed odds betting terminal, these machines are found in bookmakers throughout the UK and they are big business. Here we discuss whether or not there are any systems that can be applied specifically to them and then we go into whether or not it’s possible to cheat on them. Spoiler Alert: it’s not.

Roulette Computers – These are cheating devices that, realistically, can only be used in real casinos. Without doubt, the use of an effective computer is the best and easiest way to win at roulette, but finding such a device is difficult. Then there’s the fact that in many countries and jurisdictions, they’re illegal and you will end up in jail for using one, so for this reason, we can’t recommend them.

Roulette Tips – Here is a collection of 8 roulette tips that should be helpful to new or intermediate players. You won’t find anything new or ground breaking here, but we truly believe that this is the best collection of tips that you’re going to find on the Internet. The reason for that is because we keep it real, we don’t make false claims about “winning a fortune” like other websites; we just give useful tips to help you understand the game.

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Roulette, like most other casino games, isn’t a game where you can realistically expect to get a mathematical edge over the house.

In a sense, this means that all roulette strategies are equally worthless.

But, I’m writing a series of blog posts about good and bad strategies for various casino games, and roulette is a mainstay, so I can’t leave it out.

Most of what I’m going to look at in this post involves analyzing how to avoid the worst bets at the roulette table so that you’re at least dealing with a respectably low house edge.

Understanding the House Edge in Roulette

Playing roulette for real money is easy. You have a wheel with 38 numbers on it. 18 of them are black, 18 of them are red, and two of them are green. The two green numbers are 0 and 00, so they don’t count as high/low or even/odd, either.

If you guessed that the green 0 and the 00 are the reason the casino has a mathematical edge over the player, you’re in the front of the class.

Here’s why:

Suppose you bet on every single number on the roulette wheel. You’d be guaranteed a win because you’ve covered all the numbers.

But you’d lose money.

The payout for a single number bet in roulette is 35 to 1, so you’d win 35 units on the bet you won.

But you’d lose 37 units on the 37 losing numbers, for a net loss of two units.

More About the House Edge in Roulette

It wouldn’t matter if you chose a different combination of bets, either. You could bet on red, bet on black, and place a single bet on each of the green numbers. You’d still see a net loss no matter where the ball landed.

If you bet on black and win, you lose the bets you had on red and the bets you had on each of the green numbers.

If you bet on red and win, you lose the bets you have on black and the bets you had on each of the green numbers.

If you bet on green and win, you still lose the bets you had on black and red and on the other green 0.

Repeat this often enough, and eventually, you’ll lose all your money.

The variation of roulette that I’ve been using for this example is called “American roulette.”

But it’s not the only variation of roulette in the world.

Finding and Playing on Single Zero Roulette Wheels Is a Good Roulette Strategy

The American roulette wheel has two green numbers, but European roulette only has a single green number. This lowers the house edge.

That number, by the way, is always expressed as a percentage, and it’s an estimate of how much you’re going to lose on each bet.

In American roulette – the wheel has two green numbers. Those, in a sense, represent the house edge, which is 5.26%.

Every time you bet $100 on a roulette spin, the house expects to win an average of $5.26.

That’s an average over time, though. You obviously can’t lose $5.26 on a single bet, but when you average out all the wins and losses, that’s the number you’ll wind up with if you get a huge number of bets.

In the short run, anything can happen, but in the long term, the Law of Large Numbers will ensure that your results start to resemble the mathematical expectation.

So, if you can find a roulette game that only has a single zero on it, the house edge is only 2.70% instead of 5.26%.

That cuts the amount you expect to lose almost in half, so you can have twice as much fun for the same money.

Best Long Term Roulette Strategy Definition

Also, with a lower house edge, you have a better likelihood of going home a winner.

Using Betting Systems Is a Bad Roulette Strategy

A roulette betting system is a set of rules for raising and lowering the size of your bets during a game in an attempt to overcome the odds. These betting systems usually rely on predicting what’s going to happen on the next spin based on what happened on the most recent spin.

For example, the Martingale System assumes that after a loss (or multiple losses), your probability of losing again goes down.

This seems to make sense at first. After all, it’s more unlikely that you’ll lose eight times in a row than it is that you’ll twice in a row.

And you’re not placing a bet on whether the ball is going to land on a losing spot eight times in a row. You’re betting that the ball is going to land on a losing spot on your next spin.

A Specific Example of a Bad Roulette Betting System

The classic example of a roulette betting system is the Martingale System. It’s not the worst gambling strategy in the world. One of the pros of the system is that it’s dead easy to figure out and use. All you have to do is double the size of your next bet when you’ve lost the previous bet.

For example, if you bet $10 on black and lose, you bet $20 on the next spin. If that spin wins, you win back the $10 you lost on the previous spin along with a $10 profit.

If you lose twice in a row, you double your bets twice in a row, too. Now you bet $10, $20, and $40.

Again, if you win the next bet in the sequence, you win back your previous losses along with a profit equal to the amount of your initial wager.

This strategy seems foolproof, and it would be if you had an infinite bankroll and no betting limits.

But you don’t have an infinite bankroll. You have a finite amount of money you can risk at the roulette table.

Also, casinos have betting limits. The most common betting limits I see for roulette tables are a minimum bet of $5 and a maximum bet of $500.

Best Roulette Betting Strategy

Since you’re doubling the size of the bet repeatedly, it doesn’t take long before the next bet in the progression is too big for you to place.

Here’s an example progression:

At most casinos, you won’t be able to place the 8^th bet.

Of course, you probably think a losing streak of seven bets in a row is almost impossible with an even money bet at the roulette table.

But it happens more often than you think. At an average casino, you’ll see at least one losing streak like this at least once a day.

The other drawback to this system is that it guarantees a lot of small wins. After each progression, no matter how much you wager, the most you can expect to profit is the amount of your initial bet.

The amount you risk, though, goes up to staggering amounts rapidly.

Much of the time, the Martingale System will work. If you limit your playing session to about an hour, you have a close to 80% probability of walking away from the table with a winning session.

But it will be a small profit.

The other 20% of the time, you’ll have a large enough losing session to wipe out all the previous profits from the small winning sessions.

Clocking Roulette Wheels and Looking for Biases

The house edge in roulette assumes that you’re dealing with a random game. It assumes that every number comes up 1/38 of the time.

If you found a roulette table where some of the numbers come up more often than that, you could theoretically find yourself in a profitable situation.

If you found a wheel that was imperfect and had a bias toward a set of numbers that came up 1/34 of the time, you’d have the edge over the casino. Those numbers would still have a 35 to 1 payout, so you’d profit regularly just by betting those numbers.

How would you discover a roulette wheel with such a bias?

Strategy For Roulette

You will just clock the actual results at that wheel for a few hundred spins to see if any of the numbers come up more often than they statistically should.

Imagine this scenario, though:

You clock a roulette wheel for hours.

And it turns out that the wheel has no bias.

Now you start over with another wheel, and after several hours of clocking results, you discover a bias.

You go home to get some rest before doing some serious gambling on that wheel.

But while you’re sleeping, the casino replaces the wheel you were clocking yesterday with a new wheel.

Clocking a roulette wheel and looking for a bias is a legitimate advantage strategy for roulette, but it’s not practical. Most people don’t have the time to invest in clocking a roulette wheel.

And even if they do, they’re not guaranteed to find a biased wheel. Modern casinos use modern, state-of-the-art equipment, and it’s usually pretty random.

Conclusion

Let’s be honest. There are no really good strategies for playing roulette.

Betting systems don’t work.

Finding a biased roulette wheel is a longshot at best. It’s impractical, too.

Your best bet is to find a roulette wheel with a single zero and play it instead of the wheel with the two zeros.

But all that does is let you lose your money more slowly.

If you want a real winning strategy for roulette, here’s my best idea:

Learn how to play blackjack or poker instead.