Learning to get past the basics when it comes to roulette betting requires learning a bit of math and a lot of different inside betting options.
The common advice given to players of online roulette is to start with the outside bets and get used to how gameplay works from there before trying to learn how the inside bets work. If you’re the type of player who’s ready to learn some advanced roulette bets, then this is exactly where you need to be.
We do have a quick warning here, however. There is a small learning curve that involves a tiny amount of mental math that you’ll need to overcome before you will be able to put these bets into action with confidence. However, with the approach we’re going to take here, you’ll avoid a lot of the memorization of payouts that bogs down so many players when they try to make the leap to the inside bets.
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The Relative Difficulty of Roulette Payouts
The payouts of the outside bets are pretty easy. The even, odd, red, black, 1-18 and 19-36 bets all have the same 1:1 win. Even the column bets, wagers on 12 different numbers vertically arranged on the table, actually tell you what the payout rate is on the exact where you place the wager (2:1). Aside from this, however, there aren’t any payouts listed on the table, no matter if you’re playing online roulette or playing at a land-based table.
For the inside bets, the payouts are essentially all different, and it’s not productive at all to try to just memorize all of them. Consider the following wagers in European or French roulette:
| Wager Name | Winning Numbers | Payout Rate |
| Straight-up Bet | 1 | 35:1 |
| Split Bet | 2 | 17:1 |
| Street Bet | 3 | 11:1 |
| Trio Bet | 3 | 11:1 |
| Basket Be | 4 | 8:1 |
| Corner Bet | 4 | 8:1 |
| Double Street Bet | 6 | 5:1 |
| Column Bet | 12 | 2:1 |
| Dozen Bet | 12 | 2:1 |
| Snake Bet* | 12 | 2:1 |
| Even Money Bet | 18 | 1:1 |
* Not available in most online casinos.
Consider also that there are several different ways to make each of these types of wagers, and you’ll run into the issue of trying to remember tons of different types of bets along with their respective payouts. If you don’t play roulette often, you’ll forget these payouts and need to remember them all over again, and that’s something we want to help you to avoid with a straightforward shortcut for calculating the payout rate of any of these bets on the fly.
How to Calculate the Payouts of Inside Bets
The following process will show you how to calculate the payout of any inside bet at European or French roulette. It only takes a simple bit of mental division with numbers that will always divide evenly and the ability to subtract by one. Consider the following process:
- Start with 36, the number of non-zero spots on the table.
- Divide 36 by the number of spots on the wheel that will win for the given bet.
- Subtract 1 from that value to get the payout rate.
That’s all there is to it: divide 36 by the number of winning spots and then subtract 1. To give you an idea and to help you to get the hang of it, we’ll work through two quick examples.
Let’s start with a corner bet. This is a wager on four different numbers. Therefore, you’ll divide 36 by 4 to get 9, and then subtract 1 to get 8. This means that the payout is 8:1, and you can verify that by its position on the chart above.
For another wager, consider the double street bet, a wager on six numbers. Divide 36 by 6 to get 6, and then subtract by 1 to get 5. The payout is then 5:1, and you can again verify that by taking a look at the double street bet on our above chart.
It’s worth noting that the above process also works for American roulette for anything but the basket wager. The basket wager is different in American roulette than the other games because of the double zero, and it has a worse payout rate than any other American roulette wager.
The Same Shortcut for Mini Roulette
Even though mini roulette has a terrible payout rate, and players should never play it unless they have some ridiculously good reason for doing so like a juicy promotion or a tournament environment, the same shortcut as above can be adapted to this game as well. The only change you need to make is to start with the number 12 (the number of non-zero spots on the table) instead of 36.
So suppose we want to evaluate the payout rate of a split bet (a bet on two numbers) in mini roulette. Start with 12, divide by 2 to get 6, and subtract 1 to get 5. That tells us that the payout rate for a split bet in mini roulette is 5x. It’s that simple to determine the payout rate for any other wager, but you’ll find there aren’t that many inside bets available in the mini version of the game because of the limited table real estate brought on by the fact that there are only 12 numbers.
Overview
Once you know the shortcut that we have described here, it’s much easier to learn to make the different kinds of inside bets with confidence since you’ll know what the payout rate is ahead of time instead of having to look it up in reference material or simply guess. After you have the hang of this type of advanced roulette betting, you can start building your own advanced strategies using the tier-based method of overlapping winning “zones.”