Neighbours bets in roulette
A neighbours bet is a roulette wager on one chosen number plus the numbers sitting beside it on the wheel, most commonly two on each side, so that five pockets are covered with five equal straight-up bets. The grouping follows the order of the wheel rather than the grid of the betting layout, which is why online European and French tables place it on a separate oval called the racetrack. Each covered number pays the ordinary straight-up rate of 35 to 1, and the house edge is unchanged.
How a neighbours bet is built and paid
The bet is really several straight-up bets placed with one instruction. A player who selects 12 with two neighbours on a single-zero wheel covers 7, 28, 12, 35 and 3, because those are the five pockets in a row around 12 on the rim, even though they sit far apart on the table grid.
Take €5 spread as €1 on each number. If any of the five comes up, that €1 is paid at 35 to 1, so the player gets €36 back including the winning stake, and the other four euro are lost, leaving a net gain of €31. Any of the remaining 32 pockets loses the full €5.
That is the whole calculation.
The chance of a hit is five pockets out of 37, or about 13.5% per spin, and the house edge stays at 2.7% because each piece is an ordinary straight-up bet on a single-zero wheel. Over the long run, that edge works out at roughly 13.5 cent lost for every €5 staged, as an average across a great many spins rather than a forecast for any session. Grouping numbers by wheel position changes how the stake is spread; it does not change the odds against it, and no arc of the wheel is ever “due” to be hit.
Where players meet the racetrack
In a land-based casino the bet is usually called out to the croupier, for example “14 and the neighbours, by five”, meaning five chips placed on 14 and the pockets around it. Online, the same instruction is given by clicking a number on the racetrack, the oval panel that lists the numbers in wheel order beside or above the main layout.
Practice varies between games and operators, and this is the part worth reading in each table’s help screen. Some tables fix the bet at two neighbours each side, while others let the player set the spread, with published versions ranging from one neighbour to five on some titles and up to nine on others. The total stake grows with every pocket added, so a ten-neighbour setting on €1 chips is a €21 bet, not a €1 one.
The racetrack is generally found on European and French roulette rather than the double-zero American game, and on an American wheel the neighbours of a number would follow a different sequence anyway.
Neighbours can also be stacked. Calling several centre numbers whose arcs overlap puts two or three chips on the shared pockets, which raises the payout if one of them lands but also concentrates more of the stake on a narrow stretch of the rim.
Not the same as Voisins du Zéro
The confusion comes from translation: voisins du zéro is French for “neighbours of zero”, yet it is a different bet from choosing zero with two neighbours.
Zero and its neighbours is a five-chip bet on 3, 26, 0, 32 and 15, each paid at 35 to 1. Voisins du Zéro is a fixed call bet of nine chips covering 17 pockets from 22 round through zero to 25, laid out as two chips on the 0-2-3 trio, two on the 25-26-28-29 corner and one on each of the splits 4/7, 12/15, 18/21, 19/22 and 32/35. Because it uses splits, a corner and a trio, its payout depends on which pocket wins, and it lands about 45.9% of the time rather than 13.5%.
The other named sectors, Tiers du Cylindre and Orphelins, are also fixed groupings with set chip patterns, whereas a neighbours bet is built around whatever centre number the player picks. What we check first on any unfamiliar table is whether the racetrack labels make that distinction clear, since the two buttons often sit side by side and differ in cost by four chips.
