Big Six Wheel vs Roulette: The Same Idea at Triple the Price
Last reviewed: August 2026
A money wheel and a roulette wheel are the same machine wearing different clothes. Both spin, both stop on one pocket out of a few dozen, and both pay you a fixed multiple if you called it. The difference is what they charge. American roulette takes 5.26% from every bet on the table. The Big Six wheel takes between 11.11% and 22.22% depending on where you put your chip.
Side by side
| Game | Pockets | House edge |
|---|---|---|
| European roulette | 37 | 2.70% on every bet |
| American roulette | 38 | 5.26% on every bet |
| Big Six: $1 spot | 54 | 11.11% |
| Big Six: $2 spot | 54 | 16.67% |
| Big Six: $10 spot | 54 | 18.52% |
| Big Six: $5 / $20 spots | 54 | 22.22% |
The cheapest bet on a money wheel is more than double the most expensive bet on an American roulette table, and about four times a European one.
In dollars
Percentages slide off. Here’s the same comparison as money, at a modest $10 a spin and a leisurely 40 spins an hour:
| Game and bet | Cost per hour |
|---|---|
| European roulette, any bet | ~$10.80 |
| American roulette, any bet | ~$21 |
| Big Six, $1 spot | ~$44 |
| Big Six, $5 spot | ~$89 |
Two hours on the money wheel at the worst spot costs about $178, roughly what sixteen hours of European roulette would cost you at the same stake. Same $10 chip, same act of watching a wheel spin, eight times the burn rate.
Why roulette is cheaper
Both games short-change you the same way: they pay less than true odds, and the gap is the house’s margin.
On American roulette a single number is 1 in 38. Fair payout would be 37:1; it pays 35:1. Two units short, on every bet, which works out to 5.26%.
The elegant thing about roulette is that this shortfall is applied uniformly. Whether you bet one number or eighteen, red or a corner, the house edge is 5.26%. There’s no bad bet to stumble into, other than the five-number bet on an American wheel.
The Big Six wheel has no such discipline. Its payouts were chosen to match the bill denominations printed on the pockets (1, 2, 5, 10, 20) round numbers that people recognise. The pocket counts then had to be whatever they had to be, and the resulting edges land wherever the arithmetic dropped them. That’s why they’re not even in order, with the $10 spot cheaper than the $5.
What you’re paying for
The honest answer is: nothing you couldn’t get for less.
Roulette requires no skill either. There’s no strategy, no decisions after the bet, nothing to memorise. It offers exactly the same experience as the money wheel (watch a wheel, see if your number came up) at a quarter to a half of the price.
The money wheel’s real advantage is location. It’s usually near the entrance, it has no table minimum ceremony, no dealer explaining anything, and no other players to hold you up. You can walk past, drop a chip, and keep walking. That convenience is what the extra 6 to 17 percentage points buys.
If you’re going to play it anyway
Plenty of people play the money wheel for a few spins as a bit of fun on the way in, and that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do with $20. Two rules make it cheaper:
- Bet the $1 spot at 11.11%, or the special if the wheel pays 47:1 (also 11.11%). Both are the cheapest thing on the layout.
- Avoid the $5 spot. At 22.22% it’s tied for the worst bet available, and it’s the one most likely to look like the sensible middle option.
And if you were about to sit down for an hour, walk twenty more feet to the roulette table, or better, to baccarat at 1.06% on banker or the craps pass line at 1.41%. The money wheel is the most expensive way to bet on a spinning object in the building.
You can compare them directly: our Big Six simulator and roulette simulator both run on independently reviewed engines, so a few hundred spins of each will show you the difference in bankroll rather than in percentages.