Roulette on the iPhone, as an article of 2014 told it

This article was first published in 2014, when the telephone was turning into a casino and a page on roulette "for the iPhone" (the title of the original) seemed worth writing, and we keep it as testimony of how the game was sold to a player with a handset in his pocket. What follows tells what it promised, and what a wheel on a screen is worth today.

What the article promised

Everyone, the article began, loved the thrill of roulette, but until then the only place to play had been a land casino, crowded, noisy and full of smoke. The answer was already in the reader's pocket: the telephones of 2014 could run "nearly any type of software imaginable", and Apple's App Store and Google Play (the shops from which applications were downloaded) held hundreds of thousands of them, roulette included.

All it took was to download the application over a 3G, 4G or WiFi connection, open an account and choose between play money and real money, after which the player was "not tied down" and could pause the game or, "if careful", spin the wheel at work, on the bus or on a long flight, since the airlines had begun to sell wireless Internet on board.

Deposits and withdrawals, as the text described them

Playing for free, the article said, required nothing but the download, while playing for real money required a deposit, usually by credit card (Visa, Mastercard and American Express were the names given), with the warning that some card issuers refused casino transactions, in which case a deposit "by phone" or by wire transfer was possible. Winnings went back to the bank account by wire transfer, "just like your paychecks".

The ten tips, read with today's eyes

The second half of the page, written in the first person singular (a voice this site has never used), listed ten tips "to beat online roulette", a game that the same text called a game of chance invented in the eighteenth century. Half of them were sound, and still are. We would repeat them to anyone who opens a wheel on a telephone in 2026.

Playing on a single-zero wheel is the first of them, because the European wheel has thirty-seven pockets and a house edge of 2.70 per cent on every bet, while the American wheel with its double zero (thirty-eight pockets) takes 5.26 per cent. The "five-number bet" (0, 00, 1, 2 and 3), which the article rightly told the reader to avoid, takes 7.89 per cent.

Trying the game in the free play area before betting money was the second, and it is still our method, since every casino on this site was tried in demo mode; the "en prison" and "la partage" rules, which return half the stake (or hold it for one more spin) on even-money bets when zero comes, cut the edge on those bets to 1.35 per cent.

The warning against the "Martingale" (the system that doubles the stake after every loss) was the best of the ten: a player who starts with one unit and loses eight spins in a row has staked 255, and must put 256 on the ninth spin to win back one unit! A table limit, or an empty pocket, usually ends the sequence soon enough.

The tip on "a target of winning" was the article's way of saying that the house edge wins in the long run, and the last paragraph praised two unnamed casinos, one of which streamed live roulette "from a casino in Dublin", in a link that no longer exists; of those names we have no record, so the claim stays as a claim.

Seen from 2026

The applications of 2014 have given way to the browser, since the casinos run in HTML5 on any telephone without a download, and the live roulette of the article is streamed from studios to any operator that pays for it. The wheel itself has not moved. The single zero still beats the double, and no telephone changes the 2.70 per cent that the house keeps from every bet you place.

The image links to SlotoCash, a casino of the Deckmedia group with a Curaçao licence, still on our list (the link is an affiliate link, as the box above says), whose review carries the conservative rating we give to offshore houses. The page of 2014 named no casino, no licence and no "wagering" (the bets required before a withdrawal), which is the difference between then and now.

A player who wants the wheel today will find it in the lobby of any casino on our world list of no deposit bonuses, where you will find the terms counted rather than praised, while the other games we have played in demo are in the slot hub. The other articles of 2014 and 2015 are kept in our news archive.

By the Online-Casinos.ws editorial team · Online since 2002 · Last updated: 9 October 2026