What an Hour of Roulette Actually Costs

The Only Formula You Need

Three factors, all of them under your control before the first spin. The house edge is set by the wheel you choose — 1.35%, 2.70%, 5.26% or 7.89%. The stake is set by you. The spin rate is set by the format, and it is the factor that changes most and gets discussed least.

Note what is not in the formula: which bet you place. Straight up, corner, red or black — all of them cost 2.70% of the stake on a European wheel, so none of them appear in the arithmetic. Bet choice changes the variance and therefore how long the session lasts, not what an hour of it costs.

The Grid

European wheel, 2.70%, every combination of stake and speed:

Those rates are what the formats allow rather than fixed specifications. A live table's pace is set by the dealer, the betting window and how many players are seated, and 40 an hour is a reasonable working figure for a busy one. An automated table publishes its cycle length in its own rules, usually somewhere between 25 and 40 seconds. A solo online table has no betting window at all — the limit is how fast you can click, and clicking fast is what the interface is built to reward.

Speed Beats Stake

Trace one diagonal through that grid and the point becomes unavoidable:

A tenth of the stake, half again the hourly cost. Anyone who moves from a live table to an online one and cuts their bet by 90% to be careful has increased what the evening costs them. The stake is the number on the screen; the spin rate is the number that multiplies it, and it is invisible.

This is also the honest answer to a question that comes up constantly — is online roulette worse than live? The random number generator is not the problem; a tested RNG deals the same 37 pockets. The problem is the clock. Fifteen times the spins means fifteen times the charges, and the published house edge is identical, which is exactly what makes it misleading. Two games advertised at 2.70% can differ in real cost by a factor of fifteen.

The lever, if you want one, is not willpower. It is the format: a live-dealer table has a betting window that cannot be skipped, and that window is a spending limit enforced by the game rather than by you. Live against RNG goes through what else differs.

And Then There Is the Wheel

Hold the stake and the speed still and change only the table:

A factor of six between the top and bottom rows, for identical chips on identical spins. The two rows that matter most are the first and third, because that choice — a French table with la partage versus an American one — is available in most large casinos and costs nothing but the walk across the floor.

Using This Before You Sit Down

The useful move is to decide the hourly figure first and let it set the stake, rather than picking a stake and finding out afterwards. If an evening's entertainment is worth $20 to you, the grid says that is $5 a spin at a live table for four hours, or $1 a spin online for rather less than two.

Two things make the calculation go wrong in practice. The first is counting only what you brought: the edge applies to everything you stake, and money won and re-staked is charged again, so a session that turns over $2,000 through a $300 bankroll has paid 2.70% of $2,000, not of $300. The second is the spin rate, which almost nobody measures. Timing ten spins and multiplying is thirty seconds of work and it is the only way to know which row of the grid you are actually in.

The calculator takes a stake and a wheel and returns the expected loss directly, if you would rather not do it by hand.