Chips And The Croupier

If you walk into a brick and mortar casino and play roulette, you would be betting with rather innocuous chips, which look nothing like the customers are playing in other parts of the casino.

There are a number of different colors of chips - they are basically assigned to different players, so as to be able to distinguish the customers at the table from each other. After the player is done at the roulette table, the roulette-specific chips are exchanged for regular casino chips, which the player can then take to the cashier and cash out, or go somewhere else in the casino and play with.

The value of the individual chips varies, according to what the minimum bet levels are.

Of course, online, the setup is a lot different than that.

In a physical casino, the casino employee who runs the game, known as the "croupier," spins the roulette wheel, keeps track of everyone's chips, and pays off the winning bets. He or she spins the wheel one way (counter-clockwise) and sends a ball the other way (clockwise) around a track that lines the upper part of the wheel. In an online casino, this is done by the programming within the software itself. To get the wheel spinning, the player usually just has to click a button on the interface. If so desired, the player can get nice sound effects that go a long way toward duplicating the actual sounds the wheel makes as the ball goes round and round and settles itself in on a number.

The ball that spins around the wheel (in the "physical" setting, it is made of hard plastic or steel; it is simulated in the online casino) will land in one of the pockets. The number that is corresponding to where the ball lands is obviously the winning number. At that point, winners are determined, and the bets are paid off.