These are numbered 1-36, plus one numbered zero. There are two major styles of roulette wheel in use: European and American.Ī European wheel has 37 pockets into which the ball can land. “You cannot beat a roulette table unless you steal money from it.” There is some indication that the invetor of the wheel was none other than the mathematician Blaise Pascal. The name 'roulette' comes from the French, and the name means 'small wheel'. Why not just label them ordinally? Before we attempt to answer this, first let's take a look at how they happen to be arranged. If we look at an official roulette wheel, the numbers are not in order: Why not place all the numbers in numeric order and be done with it? Why then, are the numbers in a roulette wheel arranged in a pseudo-random way? It's not as if a roulette player has any input as to where the balls lands. Because of control, an informed player can make the choice to aim for a high maximising potential scoring region (which has high variance), or make a more reliable, and less risky, shot to a mediocre region. We can see that there's logic to the arrangement of scores around a dart board. If you are interested in learning more, I encourage you to read my earlier article.

For you, getting any score from your dart is a win! Just hitting the board is an achievement!įor players with skills in the middle, depending on how good (accurate) you are, your aiming point is going to change. At the other end of the scale, if you are a really bad player, you should just aim for the bullseye at the center of the board. If you are a great darts player, and can throw consistently then, yes, by all means aim for the high scoring regions You'll hit these most of the time, and maximize your expected score. The truth is (like so many things), it depends. Maybe it is better to aim for one of these middling areas? You're not going to hit big scores, but you are not going to get low scores either. Other regions have lots of medium scoring regions as close neighbours. If you manage to hit a high scoring segment, great, but if you miss, you are penalized heavily. On a dart board, high scoring regions are located adjacent to low scoring regions. This is not a trivial question because a dart board is cleverly designed. Where is the best place to aim on a dart board?(With the aim of getting the highest expected score with a single throw). One of my earlier blog postings was about dart boards. This article is about roulette wheels, but first let's take a step back.

Numbers on a european roulette table