There are so many brilliant games to play in the casino – you could be looking for a table in the Bellagio to sit down and play a few hands of blackjack, you could be on the train playing slots games at https://casino.betfair.com/c/slots, you could even go for the best of both worlds by playing in the Live Casino. But the one game that sums up the casino better than any other is roulette. Spinning the wheel and seeing where your fortunes land is the most casino game out there – leaving everything in the hands of Lady Luck. But how much do you know about the wheel? Are you familiar with its history and its different parts? The history of the roulette wheel begins in France, in the mid-17th century, with the famous philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal – his work to create a perpetual motion device resulted in the invention of the roulette wheel. Though the wheel couldn’t spin forever, it made it easy to randomise a number as the exact length of a spin and the movement of a ball through the track meant that whatever result you get would be random (assuming the wheel isn’t biased in some way). It wasn’t long before this wheel was decorating many tables in French parlours, with gamblers gathering around to watch the ball spin and place bets on the number that they believe the ball will land on.

However, there was a secret to the wheel that soon began to cause problems. Because there were 36 numbered slots on the wheel, the total of all the numbers came to 666 (the ’Number of the Beast’). This was purely a co-incidence, but it didn’t take long for roulette to become associated with the devil and from there for a gambling ban to start to affect how the game was viewed. This ban spread across Europe, affecting nearly every country – all save for the Principality of Monaco. Two brothers, Francois and Louis Blanc, fled from Germany and took with them a roulette wheel that was a little bit special. It only had a single zero tile, a departure from the style of the time, and one that has now become the hallmark of Monte Carlo!

For more fun facts about the roulette wheel, have a look at this brilliant infographic!