In the mid-1740s a new gambling table appeared at Tunbridge Wells. Oliver Goldsmith, in his life of Beau Nash published in 1762, says it was set up by a man he names only as “C—k”, together with the proprietor of the assembly rooms. The game was called E.O., for even and odd. It used a wheel with forty slots, all but two marked E or O, and an ivory ball run round the rim as the wheel turned. The two blank slots belonged to the bank. Nash took a quarter share.
Apart from the letters, that was a roulette wheel, and it was running in England half a century before the earliest full description of roulette in Paris. So the question of who invented roulette is really a question of who supplied which part.
Before the Roulette Wheel
The Italian claim rests on the betting layout. Biribi, an Italian game, was played on a cloth marked with around seventy numbers. Players staked on numbers, the banker drew a numbered bead or ticket from a bag, and a winning number paid sixty-four times the stake. By the end of the eighteenth century at least one biribi cloth also offered even-money bets on red or black and on low or high numbers. The historian John Eglin sees that cloth as a likely inspiration for roulette.
Biribi travelled. Casanova played it in Genoa in the 1760s, where it was already banned, and it was played in the gaming houses of Paris until they closed at the end of 1837. Another game, hoca, is sometimes named as a second ancestor, but historians disagree about what it actually was. Neither game used a wheel.
Where the wheel came from is less clear. In Britain, the Gaming Act 1744, in force from 24 June 1745, complained of “a certain pernicious game called roulet or roly-poly” as daily practised.
France Shapes the Game
France’s strongest claim is that it put the wheel and the layout together. Jacques Lablée’s novel La Roulette, published in 1801 and set in 1796, describes the tables at the Palais-Royal in Paris with a numbered layout and a wheel with two extra pockets, a zero and a double zero, both kept for the bank. That is recognisably the modern game.
A Game Crosses Borders
The name had crossed the Atlantic much earlier. A 1758 regulation in New France is reported to have banned dice, hoca, faro and roulette.
The next change came in Germany. At the casino in Bad Homburg in the early 1840s, one of the two zeros was taken off the wheel, which cut the bank’s share of every bet by nearly half. American wheels kept both zeros.
From Historical Tables to Modern Play
That difference has lasted. Both wheels are still played today, on casino floors and in online roulette, where the European version has a single zero, as at Bad Homburg, and the American keeps the two that Lablée described in Paris. A third zero appeared on a Las Vegas wheel in 2016.
Roulette is a young game compared with dice and cards, whose much longer history is covered in A History of Games.
An Evolution Rather Than an Invention
Neither France nor Italy can claim the whole game. The betting cloth was Italian and the earliest wheel game on record was English, and it was Paris that joined them. E.O. itself survived a scare: in 1782 a Bill to suppress it came before Parliament but never became law.