The History of Roulette
Doesn’t matter if it’s offline or online roulette, the thrill of putting it all on red and watching that wheel spin is real! As one of the most iconic casino games out there, roulette is known the world over, but what you might not know is its long history and dices with extinction at the hands of bans.
It all begins in France with a wheel, believed by many to have been invented by Blaise Pascal – that was all the rage in many a Parisian casino. There’s an account by Jaques Lablee of a roulette wheel in the Palais Royal in 1796, so it’s clear that the wheel was well received at the time but, nevertheless, the first written evidence we have is from 1758 and it’s a ban notice from Canada.
One of the major things that was held against the game was that, by pure co-incidence, the numbers on the wheel add up to 666 which cast a satanic pall across the perception of the entire wheel. It wasn’t long before bans started to roll out and the roulette wheel was looking scarce across Europe.
Want to know how it survived? Check out the graphic below from Betfair:
