There were also two bar spaces that won all bets for the casino.
It also used a circular table with 40 sections marked with 'E' and 'O' (meaning Even and Odd): 20 of them were marked with the letter 'E' and another 20 - with the letter 'O'. Three out of the 40 cups marked with zero were house cups, as a result the house had 7.5% edge over the players.Īlong with Hoca, the 'E-O' game was played in England. The players could bet on any of 40 cups on the table. The game used a circular table on which a ball was rolled. Even Cardinal Mazarin, the chief minister of France, opened casinos offering Hoca games with the aim of collecting money for the Treasury. The Hoca game was very widespread in Europe in the middle of 17th century. English ' E-O' (meaning 'Even' and 'Odd').Roulette wheel game is sometimes believed to be a mix of two popular games: The Greeks used a shield instead of a chariot wheel but the idea of the game itself remained the same - the wheel or shield stopped and the marked space on the ground against an arrow was considered the winning one. The mechanism of that 'game' also included an arrow which pointed to one of 10 winning spaces on the ground. The tradition to use a spinning wheel in gaming goes back to the Greco-Roman period when Roman soldiers used to spin a chariot wheel to determine a winner.
