Annabel walks you through the three wheels you'll meet in London, and the one to avoid.
Editorial illustration for the lesson on roulette rules and variants, in the Mayfair Casino School.
Roulette rules and variants
Annabel Cavendish
Editor · 14 May 2026
The Wheel Is the Whole Story
Start with the hardware, because everything that follows flows from it. A European single-zero roulette wheel has 37 numbered pockets: 0 through 36. An American double-zero wheel has 38 pockets: 0, 00, and 1 through 36. The single additional pocket on the American wheel is the entire reason its house edge is 5.263% rather than 2.703%. The games are otherwise identical: same dealer, same table, same ball, same payouts for every bet category. The extra pocket costs you roughly double the house edge for the same entertainment, with no corresponding improvement in the game experience.
The European wheel's edge calculation is straightforward. A straight-up bet pays 35 to 1. If the game were played on a fair wheel with no house edge, it would pay 36 to 1: there are 36 other possible outcomes, and a fair return compensates for all of them. The casino pays 35, keeping the 36th pocket's equivalent value: 1/37 = 2.703%. Every bet on the table reflects this same fraction, as the algebraic identity embedded in the payout schedule. On an American wheel the fraction is 2/38 = 5.263%. The payouts are the same; the denominator is larger.
The Year London Had No House Edge
Here's the part that most roulette histories skip. For roughly a year in late 1967 and into 1968, roulette in London was, from a mathematical standpoint, the most favourable version of the game ever offered in a licensed casino. It had no house edge on even-money bets.
The legal background is this. Scotland Yard issued a warning to London casino operators on 30 December 1967 that any roulette wheel containing a zero might be prosecuted under the Betting and Gaming Act 1960. A House of Lords ruling had indicated that the zero made roulette a game of unequal chance, which conflicted with the Act's requirements for licensed gaming. The implication for operators was stark: keep the zero and risk prosecution, or remove it and run a fair game. Several London rooms removed their zeros. For the duration of that legislative ambiguity, even-money London roulette was a fair coin flip: no zero, no edge, no advantage to the house on red or black.
The Gaming Act 1968 resolved the situation. It explicitly permitted the modest house edge as a term of the new licensing compact, establishing the regulatory framework that governs every UK table today. The Act's parliamentary debates, recorded in Hansard for the Gaming Bill of February 1968, address the zero question directly. Every single-zero wheel in a London casino today represents the product of that parliamentary decision: a legal acknowledgement that a small house advantage is permissible as the commercial basis on which licensed gaming operates.
Where to Find Which Wheel in London
The London casino floor is not uniform. Three meaningfully different roulette propositions are available within the M25, and the difference between them is several thousand pounds per year at regular stakes.
European single-zero tables run at most London venues: the Hippodrome Casino in Leicester Square (the UK's most-visited public casino, per its own published visitor figures), Les Ambassadeurs in Hamilton Place, the Park Tower in Knightsbridge, Wynn Mayfair at 27-28 Curzon Street (formerly Aspinall's, acquired by Wynn Resorts in early 2025), and others. These carry 2.703% on all bets.
Empire Casino at Leicester Square runs American double-zero roulette exclusively. The address is Zone 1 Central London. The mathematics is 5.263% on every bet, on every table, at all times. This is not a subset of their offering; it's the entire roulette floor. A player who sits down at the Empire by accident is paying double the Mayfair standard for the same physical experience in the same postcode.
La Partage is available at Aspers Westfield Stratford, which applies it on its European single-zero tables, reducing even-money bets to 1.351%. That's the best available edge at a UK land-based casino floor on standard table games. The Gambling Act 2005, which created the UK Gambling Commission and the current licensing regime, does not require La Partage but permits it: it's a venue decision, not a regulatory mandate.
French Roulette at the Grande Table
The canonical French roulette experience runs at the Casino de Monte-Carlo's grande table: a €5 minimum and €2,000 maximum per bet, with both La Partage and En Prison available when zero lands on even-money bets, per the Casino de Monte-Carlo's published information. French roulette at the Monte-Carlo is the context in which La Partage was formalised as a rule: the Societe des Bains de Mer, which has operated the Casino de Monte-Carlo since 1863, established the convention that has since migrated to European floors globally. The edge on even-money at the grande table: 1.351% with La Partage, approximately 1.39% with En Prison. The production design is different from a London venue. The mathematics is the same.
The Cost of Getting the Wheel Wrong
The edge difference between the three London options isn't abstract. At £100 per spin on even-money bets, 50 spins per hour, across a four-hour session: you wager £20,000. At Aspers on La Partage (1.351%), expected session cost is £270. At a standard European table (2.703%), expected session cost is £541. At the Empire's American table (5.263%), expected session cost is £1,053. The sessions feel similar: same four hours, same number of bets, same stake. The expected cost triples from the best to the worst option. Across twelve such sessions per year, the cumulative expected difference between La Partage and American double-zero is approximately £9,400 at £100 per spin. At £200 per spin, the figure approximately doubles. The wheel you choose before your first bet determines your expected annual cost more than any other decision you'll make at the table. Every subsequent decision, stake sizing, bet type, session length, operates within the constraint that the wheel has already set.
Key numbers
Wheel / Rule
Pockets
Edge (all bets)
Edge (even-money)
London example
European single-zero
37
2.703%
2.703%
Hippodrome, Les Ambassadeurs, Wynn Mayfair
European + La Partage
37
2.703% (inside)
1.351%
Aspers Westfield Stratford (confirmed)
American double-zero
38
5.263%
5.263%
Empire Casino, Leicester Square
Zero-free (1967-68)
36
0% (even-money)
0%
Historical; several London rooms briefly
Annabel
0:000:00
Welcome to the lesson on roulette rules and variants.
I'm Annabel, and before we get into systems, edges, and all the genuinely interesting mathematics to come in later lessons, I think it's worth spending a moment on how the game actually works, how it got here, and why not every roulette table in the world is the same proposition.
Let's start with the wheel, because the wheel is the whole story.
A European roulette wheel has thirty-seven numbered pockets: zero through thirty-six.
An American wheel has thirty-eight, because someone in the nineteenth century decided to add a second zero, marked double-zero, which increased the house's take without requiring any other change to the game.
The house edge on a European wheel is two point seven percent on every bet you can place.
The house edge on an American wheel is five point two six percent on almost every bet you can place.
If you sit down at an American wheel by mistake, you are paying roughly double for the same entertainment.
This is not a subtle difference.
Now, here is the part that most histories leave out.
For a brief period in late 1967 and into 1968, roulette in London was, from a mathematical standpoint, the most favourable version of the game ever offered in a licensed casino.
Scotland Yard had warned London operators that any wheel containing a zero might be prosecuted under the Betting and Gaming Act 1960, following a House of Lords ruling that the zero made roulette a game of unequal chance.
The implication was remarkable: legal London roulette, for roughly a year, was played on zero-free wheels.
No zero means no house edge on even-money bets.
The casino was effectively hosting a fair coin flip.
The Gaming Act of 1968 resolved the situation by explicitly permitting the modest house edge as part of the licensing compact that governs every London table today.
The practical consequence for you, sitting in London today: the Empire Casino at Leicester Square runs American double-zero roulette and explicitly says so in its house rules.
If you happen to be nearby and fancy a spin, know that you are paying five point two six percent house edge rather than two point seven.
That is a meaningful difference.
The address does not improve the mathematics.
La Partage, which we cover in its own lesson, halves the house edge to one point three five percent on even-money bets when zero lands.
Aspers at Westfield Stratford is one of the few UK land-based casinos that publicly confirms La Partage on its European tables.
A player who knows to ask for it there is playing a materially better game than a player at any standard London European table, let alone an American one.
The wheel manufacturers are worth knowing about, because they shape what you are actually sitting at.
The two names that matter on any serious casino floor are Cammegh and TCS John Huxley.
A Cammegh Mercury 360 uses four in-rim sensors and an open data protocol; the casino can pipe the results directly into its own analytics.
A TCS Saturn uses three sensors and has proprietary Drop Zone Detection built in at no extra cost, outputting to TCS's own console.
The practical difference for you as a player is that both systems are logging every spin and watching for statistical anomalies.
The days of exploiting an unmonitored wheel are well and truly over at any venue running modern hardware.
The Continental, Cammegh's heritage wheel with a shallower ball track and deeper pockets, is the one you'd find in a Monte Carlo salon, and it behaves rather differently to a Mercury 360 in ways we will discuss when we get to wheel physics.
There is one court case worth knowing about, because it reshaped English law considerably.
The casino refused to pay.
The case went to the UK Supreme Court, reference UKSC sixty-seven, and the ruling came in 2017.
Ivey lost.
Lord Hughes concluded that what Ivey had done was stage a carefully planned sting, having instructed the croupier to orient the cards in a way that gave him information asymmetry.
The ruling simultaneously exonerated his subjective belief that he wasn't cheating and declared his conduct legally cheating anyway.
The new Ivey test is now the standard across fraud, theft, and related offences.
One game of Punto Banco rewrote dishonesty law for the whole jurisdiction.
Crockfords itself has since closed, permanently, in late 2023, after a hundred and ninety-five years.
The address was thirty Curzon Street.
A sign on the door directs former members to the Colony Club at twenty-four Hertford Street.
So.
Know your wheel.
Know your variant.
Know your edge.
And if anyone invites you to play American roulette in a basement when a European table is available upstairs, you now know which staircase to use.
