Straight Up Bet

The straight up bet in roulette, is an inside bet (the corner bet is another example) on a single number (or group of single numbers). It pays out 35:1, but bear in mind that there are 37 numbers in a wheel (or 38 on an American Roulette wheel), so your odds are less. It’s one of the easiest and best roulette bets you can make on the table. Who doesn’t like a flutter on their lucky number?

People’s favourite numbers do drop in from time to time- check out this lucky lady´s story.

This bet is called “en plein” in French (the Finales en Plein bets are made up of a series of single number bets).

The table above show straight-up bets on 8, 15, 17 and 22.

The Best Roulette Bet?

The Straight Up is the best roulette bet if you want to fully customise your table coverage. Thay are not as quick to play of course, which is fine on a virtual wheel, but if you are playing a live game, you might feel the time pressure when placing your bets.

This most famous of the inside roulette bets – betting on one number and hoping for it to come in – is a pretty risky strategy, so most people try and cover more of the table with low bets on multiple numbers. There is a strategy called the Pivot Roulette System where you bet one number- also know as the Makarov System (flat betting) or a selection of numbers, and hope that they drop in within 35 spins (kind of like playing the lottery on a roulette wheel this one).

If your number drops in before 35 spins have passed, you are in profit. At 35 spins, you break even. After that, you are on a loss. Other systems like the Caro System also talk about single-number bets (but you won´t actually play them!). The Shotwell Roulette System also uses single number bets.

Multi-Wheel Roulette

If you are playing strategies on single numbers like the Makarov System, you might want to try out some of the Multi-Wheel roulette games we have on the site. These variants allow you to bet on up to eight wheels at once which, if you are betting on single numbers, allows you to considerably sped things up.

Most of the games allow you to pick how many wheels you want to spin simultaneously. Just pick a number, choose the number of wheels you want to play and press spin.

The same theory applies for straight up bets, as it does for the outside bets like the dozens bet, in terms of which variants you should be playing and which you should be avoiding. If you bet on one number, you are not going to get paid if the ball lands in the zero pocket, and so it makes sense to play on a European Roulette game with one zero, rather than an American Roulette game with 2.

So how do you pick a single number, or a group of numbers? Well, I guess you use the same technique as when you play the National Lottery. Maybe you have a lucky number? Or pick birthdays. We have a whole section covering numbers in roulette that might help you.

Just remember that all the numbers have an equal probability of coming in and the wheel has no memory from spin to spin. It can be fun to track hot and cold numbers, but previuous results have no impact on future results. You are betting on one spin, not 10 spins.

Straight Up bets often form the core of more complex call bets, such as the Complete Roulette Bet, which is a popular play for high roller types. Check out this Pedro Grendene Bartelle roulette bet, for example. This guy won $3.5 million betting on the number 32 but he hedged himself slightly by covering the 8 numbers surrounding the number with Split Bets (bets on 2 adjacent numbers on the table).

Pros and Cons

This is basically the same question as “Which is the best Casino for playing roulette online?”, as the single number bet is ubiquitous. We’d plump for a Microgaming casino like Royal Vegas or a Playtech like bet365 Casino, both of which have a excellent choice of variants and are pretty fair to roulette players.