Legend has it that the game was brought to Europe by French Dominican monks who discovered the game while on a missionary quest around Asia. The wheel underwent a few modifications in the 14th century and in 1655 Blaise Pascal – the famous mathematician and scientist refined the wheel. It became widely used in casinos.
It was two more Frenchmen – Francois and Louis Blanc – that introduced the zero and the double zero. Finally the standard roulette wheel had arrived.

It was the Americans who made the next evolutionary change to the roulette wheel when they introduced a zero and a double zero to the standard 36 number reel.
This wheel gives the house an advantage of 5.26%. The European wheel with only one zero, gives the house a greatly reduced advantage of just 2.7%.

The roulette wheel layout is surprisingly sophisticated. All the numbers, including the low, high, odd, and even, are alternated and spaced out across the wheel. The three colours: red, black, and green are also alternated and divided.
In a typical roulette wheel layout, when you add all the numbers together, you get a grand sum total of 666.

However, if you add just the 18 odd colours, you only achieve a total of 342. This makes it impossible to achieve perfect mathematical balance. To overcome this, manufacturers you have the two zeros, 0 and 00, arranged opposite each other and coloured green to distinguish them from the other numbers.
The rest of the 18 numbers are then alternated on each side of the two zeros. The single-zero or 0 is between two black numbers and as the wheel progresses, the colour alternates until you end with two red numbers on each side of the double-zero or 00.

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