The history of Roulette is a little vague but it is widely understood that its origins come from old English, Italian and French board games. The modern game of Roulette (French for "little wheel") as we know it was developed in the mid eighteen hundreds in France and remains as popular today as it was then.

It was around this time that the Prince of Monaco, King Charles III, commissioned two famous gambling speculators to run operations at his newly built palatial Casino at Monte Carlo. The twins, Francois and Louise Blanc developed the game into the modern equivalent of Roulette and it became a sensation in this new bourgeois paradise of opulence.

It is said that this version of the game is the most successful (for the house that is!) and that the secret to their success was a deal that Francois had struck with the devil. This is a popular tale made even more intruiging by the fact that all the numbers on the wheel add up to 666, the number of the beast.

Even more interesting are the numerous systems that exist for playing the game. If you search on the web you will be swamped by the sheer volume of different systems that claim to beat the wheel. Save your money, there is no casino in the world that is bothered about these systems. What gamblers dont understand about the game is that every single spin of the wheel is independant of every other spin. Many of these systems are based on probabilities, and that just doesnt work with something as random as roulette.

In the long run the house always wins, ask the decendents of the Blanc twins who were left an inheritance of over 200 million francs!

Saying this though there have been cases of very shrewd gamblers taking advantage of an inexperience dealer or faulty wheels to tip the balance in their favour. Most famous was a petty thief and swindler named Charles Wells, who took all the money from the tables at Monte Carlo in 1891, prompting the infamous song, "The Man That Broke the Bank in Monte Carlos".

The game remains as popular now as it was hundreds of years ago. Today it conjures up images of James Bond characters with beautiful girls hanging on their arms, sipping martinis and making croupiers nervous. Little it seems has changed since those devilishly cunning french twins conspired with Baelzebub to take all our money!