Roulette Around the World: A Journey Through Casino Culture

September 8, 2026By maverickbirdPosted in Travel Extras, Travel Guides, Travel Tips

I’ve a soft spot for the objects a place invents to handle its money. The Christmas markets here in Cologne hand you a mug with your Glühwein and take a deposit for it, so that by January every kitchen in the city has one mug too many. Roulette rooms have their own version of the mug, and they’ve never agreed on what it should look like. Follow the chips, and you get a decent tour of the game, from Monaco to a studio with a webcam.

Paris and the Principality

The version I find most theatrical is dealt at the Casino de Monte-Carlo. French roulette there needs three croupiers and a table manager, and every chip on the table is identical. The house’s own rulebook admits that identical chips “give the game a certain theatrical aspect”, meaning the croupiers have to remember whose money is whose. The croupier calls “faites vos jeux” to open the betting and “rien ne va plus” to close it, and at Monte-Carlo’s tables the even-money bets lose only half when the ball lands on zero. Entry is nineteen euros, and the dress code is mostly a list of what’s banned: shorts, torn jeans, flip-flops, sportswear. The game had arrived from Paris, where Napoleon legalised the Palais-Royal gaming houses in 1806 so that he could tax them, and where the reformers who finally shut them at the end of 1837 needed the National Guard to clear the arcades.

Cafe Consulat in Montmartre

Baden-Baden, Nevada, Macau

Germany’s roulette begins with that French ban. Jacques Bénazet, who had held the Paris gaming concession, took the lease on the Baden-Baden Kurhaus in 1838 as the Paris houses closed, and his son Édouard had its halls rebuilt in the 1850s in the manner of the French royal palaces. The tables closed at the end of the 1872 season under laws passed in Berlin and stayed shut for more than sixty years. Baden-Baden collects its money at the door: five euros to get in, ten to hire a jacket if you’ve arrived without one, and you must be twenty-one, three years older than Monaco asks. Spa towns have charged for the air since before there were casinos in them; Bad Honnef, upriver from me, grew up round a mineral spring in the 1890s.

Nevada’s custom is on the chips: they carry no value at all. Gambling became legal statewide on 19 March 1931, when Governor Fred Balzar signed Assembly Bill 98, and the state’s regulations still exempt roulette from the rule that a chip must show what it’s worth. You buy a colour, and it’s yours for as long as you sit there. The wheel those chips go on is the American one, with its two zeros. An 1868 New York edition of Hoyle describes it with a zero, a double zero, and an eagle; the eagle has since been dropped, and the double zero is still there. The Gaming Control Board counted 391 roulette tables in July 2026, and in the twelve months to then they won a little under 375 million dollars, about seven cents of every table-game dollar in Nevada.

Macau, the only one of these I’ve walked through, and whose casinos have out-earned Las Vegas for years, deals the European wheel to a harder rule. The official rules describe 37 compartments, the single zero, but without Monaco’s mercy: when the ball lands on zero, everything on the layout except a bet on the zero itself goes to the house. The same wheel as Monaco’s, but a zero there costs you the lot.

Macau

The Wheel in the Studio

The latest roulette rooms are studios in Riga, Malta, and Tbilisi, where Evolution, the biggest of the companies behind the live tables on European phones, keeps its main floors. The wheels in them are physical. A person stands at one, spins it, drops the ball, and a camera sends the result to your phone; the chips are a number in the corner.

Not every dealer on a screen is live, though. Pre-recorded formats – such as Real Roulette titles, hosted by a presenter and filmed in advance – use software to pick the winning number before playing back the matching clip. Dedicated tables for live roulette online, sit right alongside them in modern lobbies, but they feature a physical wheel turning in real time, with the ball dropping now rather than last spring.

The Christmas market gives you your deposit back when you return the mug. No roulette room has ever offered that, in Monaco or Riga or anywhere else, and the studios haven’t changed it either. If I had to pick, I’d take Nevada, where at least the colour is yours while you’re sitting there.

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