Roulette is a casino game named after the French word meaning little wheel which was likely developed from the Italian game Biribi. In the game, a player may choose to place a bet on a single number, various groupings of numbers, the color red or black, whether the number is odd or even, or if the numbers are high (19–36) or low (1–18). To determine the winning number, a croupier spins a wheel in one direction, then spins a ball in the opposite direction around a tilted circular track running around the outer edge of the wheel. The ball eventually loses momentum, passes through an area of deflectors, and falls onto the wheel and into one of thirty-seven (single-zero, French or European style roulette) or thirty-eight (double-zero, American style roulette) or thirty-nine (triple-zero, "Sands Roulette") colored and numbered pockets on the wheel. The winnings are then paid to anyone who has placed a successful bet. History The first form of roulette was devised in 18th century France. Many historians believe Blaise Pascal introduced a primitive form of roulette in the 17th century in his search for a perpetual motion machine. The roulette mechanism is a hybrid of a gaming wheel invented in 1720 and the Italian game Biribi. The game has been played in its present form since as early as 1796 in Paris. An early description of the roulette game in its current form is found in a French novel La Roulette, ou le Jour by Jaques Lablee, which describes a roulette wheel in the Palais Royal in Paris in 1796. The description included the house pockets, "There are exactly two slots reserved for the bank, whence it derives its sole mathematical advantage." It then goes on to describe the layout with, "...two betting spaces containing the bank's two numbers, zero and double zero". The book was published in 1801. An even earlier reference to a game of this name was published in regulations for New France (Québec) in 1758, which banned the games of "dice, hoca, faro, and roulette". The roulette wheels used in the casinos of Paris in the late 1790s had red for the single zero and black for the double zero. To avoid confusion, the color green was selected for the zeros in roulette wheels starting in the 1800s. In 1843, in the German spa casino town of Bad Homburg, fellow Frenchmen François and Louis