Online roulette tournaments are a new rage in the online gaming world and enable tournament rules in this game that traditionally was never prone to this type of play. Most typically, online roulette tournaments will have a buy-in, which on payment of it will grant the player a set number of playing chips. The tournament will be structured in rounds in which a certain number of players will play on a number of tables and the top scorers from each table will progress to the next round, and so on until a winner emerges.

Unlike other tournaments however, online roulette tournaments do not usually require playing until you are out, or indeed until you have knocked everyone else out. Usually online roulette tournaments allow you to stop play when ever you wish, at which point your chip count will be recorded. Only once everyone at your roulette table has stopped play and had their chips counted, will the winners of that table emerge. It is usually the top two players from each table that will go through to the next round but this can vary between online roulette tournaments, as can the number of players per table, the number of tables, the number of rounds, and indeed the prize. The prizes of online roulette tournaments are usually dictated by the number of entrants and therefore the number of buy-ins; however there may be occasion where a guaranteed prize pool is provided by the casino and therefore the number of entrants makes no difference. The payouts, or how the prize-pool is divided up between the different position winners, again depends on the individual online casino.