Roulette and baccarat carry an aura of elegance. Movies typically portray players in designer clothes making massive bets.
Pennsylvania casinos have no formal dress requirement, so anyone feeling swanky can plunk down money on these games. Here's what you should know before making a bet:
The table has 38 spaces, numbered one through 36 plus zero and double zero. One through 36 alternate red and black; the zeroes are green. The dealer rolls a ball around a continuously spinning wheel, and the ball falls into a numbered slot to determine a winner. The ball goes in the opposite direction of the wheel and must circle it at least four times before dropping.
You can bet on an exact number, a group of numbers, whether the winning number will be red or black, even or odd. You may place bets while the ball is spinning, until the dealer declares "no more bets."
The house edge is 5.26 percent.
As with most games, the house makes its money by the difference between the payout for a winning bet and the odds of that bet winning. Say you bet $1 on No. 22 for 38 consecutive spins, and each number on the board comes up once. You would have bet a total of $38 and you would be left with $36 -- the $35 you won when your number came up plus the $1 bet you got to keep on that spin.
If you were getting paid true odds, you'd still have the $38 you started with. The $2 difference is the house edge. The numbers won't be spread so perfectly in the course of only 38 spins, but they will over a longer period. That's how the casino makes money.
Most roulette tables post the results for the past several games, but don't pay attention to them. Each spin is independent, so the odds that the next spin will be red or black have nothing to do with what happened on the last 10, 20 or 100 spins.
Each roulette player uses different-colored chips. This prevents mixups about who made a winning bet. Players' chips are not necessarily the same value. One player might buy in for $100 and receive 100 blue chips, each worth $1. Another might buy in for $1,000 and receive 200 brown chips, each worth $5. The dealer uses a token to mark the value of each color.
This is a version of James Bond's game from the Sean Connery days, but without the tux and tiaras. "Mini-bac"is played at a blackjack-sized table instead of the big tables in the Bond movies.
The game reminiscent of blackjack, in that the winning hand is determined by the point value of the cards in it. The game has only two hands, "banker" and "player." Before the deal, bettors wager on banker, player or tie.
Player and banker get two cards each. There is no decision-making in whether either takes a third card. That is determined by the hands' point value.
Face cards count zero and aces count one. Two through nine are face value. Busting is impossible. If a hand totals 10 or more, its value is the amount over 10. For example, a hand of 8-5 has a value of three.
A "natural" is a two-card total of eight or nine.
Winning bets on player pay 1-to-1. Winning bets on banker pay slightly less, since casinos charge a 4 percent or 5 percent commission or vigorish. When the hands tie, bets on banker or player push.
To make payouts easier to figure, the dealer uses markers indicating how much commission a bettor owes. The commission is collected at the end of a shoe or when the bettor leaves the table.
Wizardofodds.com puts the house edge at 1.06 percent on the banker bet, 1.24 percent on the player bet and 14.4 percent on the tie bet. With a house edge that high, don't bother betting on tie.
How do you pronounce the games featured this week?
According to dictionary.com , the game with the spinning wheel is rue-LET and the game from the old James Bond movies is bah-ka-RAH. Both words are of French origin. In general, the last letter of French words is not pronounced. So the "T" is roulette is sounded out and the "T" in baccarat is not.
