Most common roulette numbers: what 16.5 million live spins show

Ask ten players which roulette number hits most and you'll get ten answers, and a good share of them will say 17. The pages that rank for this question either list what people like to bet on or count a few hundred spins. We had a bigger sample to hand: every spin on 148 live tables since February, 16,536,037 of them. So we counted, and these are the most common roulette numbers on real live tables.

Which roulette numbers have come up most?

11 leads, followed by 20, 34, 15 and 33. Before anyone rushes to the table, look at the margin: 11 landed 0.25% more often than an average number. Over 16.5 million spins that's a sliver.

• 16.5Mlive spins counted
• 148single-zero tables
• ±0.4%widest gap from an average number
• 144spins for all 37 to appear (median)

The bars look the same because they nearly are. That's the real answer to “which number hits most”: on a fair wheel the leader wins by a whisker, and over a big enough sample every number ends up in almost the same place.

Which roulette numbers have come up least?

31 is last, 0.40% below average, with 7, 18, 0 and 8 just ahead of it. Zero is in that group too, which surprises people: it isn't rarer by design on a single-zero wheel, it's just one more pocket out of 37.

How close is every number to 1 in 37?

Very close. All 37 numbers sit within 0.4% of the average, and 35 of them fall inside the band a fair wheel stays in 95% of the time. The other two land just outside it, which is about what chance predicts for 37 numbers.

Short stretches are a different story, and that's what makes watching a table fun. On the evening we took this screenshot, 16 and 22 had each landed 6 times in Lightning Roulette's last 100 spins, while 8 and 25 hadn't landed once:

Open Lightning Roulette →

A swing from 0 to 6 in a hundred spins is normal. Spread across millions, it flattens out. For more on reading those panels, see how to read live roulette statistics.

Every table page shows which numbers are hot and cold right now. Pick a table →

Is 17 the most common roulette number?

It's the most famous one. 17 sits in the middle of the layout and players love it. A Hard Rock Bet study of more than 30.5 million roulette bets in Michigan and New Jersey found 0 and 11 were the most-backed single numbers, with 7, 17 and 23 close behind.

On the wheel, 17 is about as ordinary as a number gets. It ranked 24th of 37 in our record, within 0.02% of an average number. Month by month it has been anywhere from 2nd (September) to 32nd (June). The one small coincidence: 11, another crowd favourite, is the number that landed most.

Does the most common number change month to month?

Every month, so far. Nine months, nine different leaders:

A few numbers have been at both ends: 32 went from last in February to first in July, and 31 finished last twice, in April and September. A monthly leaderboard is a fun thing to follow, as long as you read it as a scoreboard rather than a forecast.

Does red or black come up more often?

They're level. Red took 48.64% of spins and black 48.66%, a difference of two hundredths of a percentage point. Odd and even, and high and low, came out just as even.

If you want the opposite of even, look at streaks instead. Our streak tracker post counts how often a colour or a dozen goes missing for 10, 15 or 20 spins in a row.

How often does 0 come up in roulette?

Once every 37 spins on average: 2.70% of everything we recorded, or about 27 times in 1,000. On a table that spins every 40 to 50 seconds, that's roughly one zero every half hour. Repeats happen too; any number, zero included, comes straight back about once in 37 spins (how often a number repeats).

How many spins until every number has come up?

This is our favourite one. We counted how many spins a table needs before all 37 numbers have appeared at least once, and did it 76,580 times. The median was 144 spins, which is about two hours of play. The textbook figure is 155.5 on average; we measured 152.1.

• 61spins: the fastest full set
• 144spins: the usual (median)
• 558spins: the slowest full set

The slow end is where the last number or two drags on. Whichever number is the straggler that day tends to show up in the “longest waits” panel on the table's page:

See the live waits →

Where can you see which numbers are leading right now?

Every one of our 159 table pages shows its hot and cold numbers, how long each number has been waiting and the latest results, updated as the ball lands. The live board does the same across all the tables at once. If you need the raw results for your own research, they're available through our data API.