Roulette’s Evolution: From 18th-Century France to Modern Casinos
The game of roulette has been with us for a long time, with roots going back to pre-revolutionary France. There is a reason this popular gambling game has been going strong for more than 300 years.
Roulette Origins
Roulette was almost certainly born from the need to convince gamblers of randomness. That need probably came from the constant scams and hustles of gambling games in the early part of the eighteenth century. Games like Biribi were quite common in Italy and Southeastern France in the first half of the 1700s and were notoriously crooked.
Biribi was played on a board of thirty-six to seventy numbers, at least in Genoa, where none other than Giacomo Casanova wrote about it in his memoirs. It was similar to modern roulette in that you bet on the various numbers and lines of numbers.
However, the winning number or numbers were drawn from a bag that allegedly held a sample of all the numbers or harlequins on the board.
Sleight of hand and gangs working together to steer the gullible were typical, and the game had become much like Three Card Monte today, a game only played by the drunk or rubes. It’s here that the history of roulette gets a bit muddy.
Blaise Pascal was a preeminent French mathematician and philosopher who died far too young in 1662. He worked on many mathematical and applied mathematical systems during his extraordinary life.
He is widely attributed with introducing the concept of expected value not only to gambling but also to insurance and other actuarial models. Moreover, Pascal is often mentioned in articles about the history of roulette games scattered across the internet.
Interestingly, despite his contributions to mathematics, Pascal is perhaps best known for Pascal’s Wager, a philosophical argument for belief in God.
It’s safe to say his work did touch on probability and the mathematics of house advantage. In his studies of the laws governing perpetual motion, he also invented a wheel that would much resemble today’s modern spinning roulette wheel.
Still, the many articles crediting Pascal with inventing roulette are mostly hyperbole.
While almost certainly not Pacal, someone who saw one of his spinning wheels and realized it could be used in convincing gamblers of true randomness in a wagering game was also a genius. And that is the more probable beginning of roulette origins.
This rotating wheel and spun ball falling into segmented slots would spark a gambling game that would separate bettors from untold billions over the next three centuries.
Its popularity would come down to its simplicity. It looks and acts like a game that lets the fates look down and choose a number.
Early Versions
Early versions of roulette likely appeared in France from about 1720 on under the name Cavaglone. The French cracked down hard on the rising popularity of gambling games, making all of them illegal in 1741, and over the next 60 years or so before the Revolution, the Monarchy would tighten gambling laws for the lower class.
But at Versailles, the King would elevate gambling, including early forms of roulette, to a singular passion among the aristocracy. Believing that diversions, including gambling, kept his ruling class from plotting against him, Louis the Fourteenth would bring gambling and hedonism to almost an art form in itself before it was all brought crashing down on the head of Louis the Sixteenth in 1793.
It’s quite likely that these intervening decades in the French court, far from prying eyes, is where roulette came into the form we find today. In any case, not long after the Revolution in 1796, we have a vivid description of the game at the Palais Royal.
It is fully formed and the same game that we play today, right down to the two zeros on the wheel, giving the house its advantage and 38 pockets of alternating colors, even and odds and highs and lows.
The fact that we don’t see roulette mentioned very much from the 1750s until after the Revolution could be that the French gendarmerie did a great job keeping the cities of France safe from the debauchery of gambling, but more likely, it was widely available, just not discussed in public until after 1792.
As for Versailles and the Aristocrats, voluminous records were lost during the worst of the Terrors. But it would seem likely that the Sun King’s court was at least partly responsible for the modern game of roulette we find today.
Roulette Rolls Around The World
As mentioned in the novel La Roulette, ou le Jour mentions the roulette wheels in Paris having two zeros and describes how that gives the bank its edge. This brings up the second biggest myth behind Pascal taking bets on his newly minted roulette well at some church fair in the 1660s in Rouen.
This concerns the use of single zero wheels in Europe today vs the double zero wheels found throughout North America, especially in Nevada. The consensus has been that when French settlers and traders operating out of New Orleans first brought roulette to North America, they brought over the single zero wheel from the continent.
But the greedy riverboat captains who carried the game up the Mississippi, through the mining camps of the Rockies and cow towns of the Midwest, and out to Nevada and California took the chance when given to add a zero and double their house edge.
As speculation goes, one could see how that might be a pretty good guess. But as it turns out, the truth is even more interesting.
Roulette had actually been played in France since at least the early 1700s as a double zero game. It is still being played as a double zero game when it suddenly pops back up in public in the 1790s.
When Napoleon legalized many Parisian gambling clubs in the early 19th century, roulette brought in an enormous sum for both the casino operators and the tax man.
It had become so popular that when anti-gambling crusaders finally forced the laws to be changed, Paris had to call out the National Guard to evict all the gamblers from the clubs. We have countless descriptions of the game, as it was played in over 100 Parisian gambling halls at the time, and all involved two zeros on the wheelhead.
This is where the Magician of Homburg comes in. Francois Blanc and his brother ran away to follow the carnival when they were quite young.
To say that they quickly picked up the natural grift that comes with circus life is an understatement since by the tender age of 28, Francois and his brother had started a bank in Bordeaux.
There, they had a bit of a misunderstanding about the legality of paying a telegraph operator to let them front-run ahead of news about French government bonds before the information reached others. It was such a new grift; laws weren’t yet on the books, and they only paid a fine.
Looking for new adventures, they are soon turning their creative minds for both gambling and marketing towards the tiny town of Homburg in the Duchy of Luxemburg, a country of only 3000 citizens and absolutely zero in the way of prospects.
But with the Blanc brother’s vision and a brand new legal casino on the border of Germany and France, both of which had recently outlawed gambling, the future looked pretty bright for the tiny Duchy.
In fact, Bad Homburg was transformed almost overnight into a European spa and gambling town that would thrive as a European social center for nearly another hundred years under the schemes of Francois, who would soon earn the Magician of Homburg sobriquet for the town’s amazing turnaround.
While gambling was illegal in France and most of Germany, Francois did have competition from other spa towns that were allowed to keep casinos in Germany, like Baden Baden, as well as the illegal casinos still dotting the French countryside.
Convinced by the works of Bernouilli’s Golden Theorem that even a small house advantage would eventually lead to significant wins, Francois came up with the idea of only placing one zero on his roulette wheel as a way to set himself above his other competitors.
In 1863, when Fracois Blac moved his operations to Monte Carlo, he took his single zero game with him, and he once again transformed a barren ragtag municipality into a world-class gambling destination.
In the span of just those first five years, he had royalty and aristocrats from around the continent, visiting the tiny nation of Monaco and losing over $2.5 million francs to his casino
When he died in 1877, Mont Carlo regularly won over 5 million Francs yearly. His vision of offering a better bet eventually wiped all the double zero wheels from Europe, where they simply couldn’t compete.
Besides his vision of Monte Carlo, which still lures millions of gamblers every year, he left us with this quote, though it is important to note that his French surname Blanc would translate as White in English.
Essayez rouge, essayez noir, c’est toujours Blanc qui gagne (Try red, try black, it’s always Blanc (white) that wins)
A New Age for Roulette
In the 21st century, almost three centuries since the beginning of roulette wheel history, we find ourselves in an odd predicament. We no longer need a physical wheel. Using computers and random number generating (RNG) software, we can model the randomness of a roulette wheel.
It is done in such a way that no supercomputer could tell if the roulette number history we presented it with was from an actual physical roulette wheel or from inside another computer somewhere.
And for about a decade, from 2000 until the early 2020s, most of the best roulette sites on the internet used Random Number Generators(RNGs) to simulate spins on their roulette games.
But as the decade has progressed, there has been an enormous rush back to the original physical wheel spun by a live dealer, and the results streamed over the internet instead.
These so-called live dealer games now make up more than half of all betting on roulette games online, and as the technology improves and becomes more mobile-friendly, that number is likely to grow.
Even Monsieur Pascal would probably find it fascinating that with all of the technological advancement and the thousands of man-hours and tens of millions of dollars invested in software that can mimic the true randomness of the universe pop, he would much rather play a wooden wheel with a spinning “ivory” ball, and a rotating disc.
Whatever the future of brick-and-mortar casinos and the new and ever-evolving online gambling dens, it seems inevitable that the more things change, at least when it comes to roulette, the more they stay the same.
