We recently covered everything you need to know about playing roulette in a casino. However, with more and more people flocking to online casinos in the wake of the COVID-19 or coronavirus outbreak, we decided it was time to begin looking at online roulette, and how it differs in terms of play, fairness and safety to roulette you would play in a brick-and-mortar casino.

Where can you play online roulette?

At Lemons & Sevens, we are not affiliated with any casinos, online or in the real world - so we’re best placed to recommend the online casinos where you won’t get ripped off. It should go without saying that it is good practice to only play at established online casinos that have been audited by an approved independent body - such as the UK Gambling Commission.

Once you’ve selected a few audited online casinos, take a look at what they offer to new roulette players. Most websites will offer a free bonus for new players, free plays, extra deposit when you deposit a certain amount, or entirely free play if you’re not quite ready to gamble your money just yet.

How do you play online roulette?

Online roulette is just the same as live roulette in terms of the rules and general style of play - although the layout and design of the game will vary from website to website. For example, here is the layout from PokerStars’ roulette.

When playing online roulette, you’ll first want to select the amount of your bet. Online roulette players have a wider variety of bet sizes that can be placed. It’s easy to find tables between £0.10 and £5.00 (or higher).

To place your bets, you’ll click on the numbers you want to bet on or the lines in between them, to place chips as you would in live poker. You’ll get an “undo” button if you want to retract a bet before the “no more bets” signal, and a “replay bet” button after the spin is over if you want to simply play the same bets as the spin before.

If you’re playing alone, sometimes you will be given the option to digitally “spin the wheel” yourself, but in some solo and all multiplayer online roulette games, you won’t be in charge of when the wheel is spun.

The “wheel spin” in online roulette is simulated by a Random Number Generator, or RNG. The RNG uses a number from a previously set feed of seed numbers and an algorithm to produce a number from 0-36 as randomly as possible.

Can you cheat online roulette?

The short answer is simply, no. RNGs are as close to random as a computer algorithm can get - which is to say far more random than a human being could spot patterns in or guess the next number. Any audited online casino will use an RNG to deliver their roulette services, as this protects them from cheaters and the players from being cheated.

Is online roulette rigged?

Although online casinos can rig their roulette games, it’s worth noting that audited casinos are tested for fairness. As roulette already has a house edge, there’s not really any need for casinos to run fixed roulette games.

To make sure that you’re not playing a rigged roulette game, choose a properly audited online casino. To be extra safe, it’s worth noting that online casinos with a brick-and-mortar casino in the same name are more likely to be safe as they have more at stake if they’re found to be cheating.

If a roulette game is rigged, it means the entire casino is probably also rigged, and you’d be better off playing at a properly audited, big-name casino. (Have we said it enough yet? Only play at an audited casino.)

Live online roulette

Live online roulette is essentially just live roulette that you can watch online via video feed. If you still don’t trust the RNG, live online roulette uses the same wheel that you’d see in a physical casino, and you just place the chips remotely.

Just because a casino has live online roulette, doesn’t mean it’s safe to play at a that isn’t audited, however, as rogue online casinos that want to rig their games can still do so through video editing and image manipulation.

In essence, online roulette is very similar to live roulette, with the main differences being available bet sizes and the interface on which you play.

If you have any questions about where you should play online roulette, or how to play roulette in general, don’t hesitate to get in touch and we’ll point you in the right direction!

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