Archive for June 19th, 2010

Question by outlet04: Would this roulette strategy work?
If you’re playing roulette and put a large amount in like 1000. Then you bet one on red every time. Every time you lose you just bet double to get back where you were. You keep doubling until you get your red. the chances of black coming up like 9 times in a row are very slim. You keep doing this while adding up slowly. Is this a good strategy?

Best answer:

Answer by zadignose
This is not a good strategy. This is known as a “martingale” system. No matter how you structure your bets, you’re getting bad odds. For instance, the chances of getting black nine times in a row are still high enough that the risk is greater than the reward.

As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, you’re “laying odds.” That means you’re offering to pay the house a large amount of money in the case that a long shot comes in, and you’re getting a small amount of money when the longshot doesn’t come in. In this case, the amount of money you get is *too small* to compensate for the times when you have to pay off a long series of expensive bets.

Ultimately, each and every time you bet, your expectation is to lose 5.26% of the money you put on the table in an American Roulette game, or 2.7% of the money in a single zero game. That’s true in martingales, that’s true of ANY betting system. The main difference between playing a series of small bets and a martingale system is, in the former you bleed to death slowly, and in the latter you get destroyed very suddenly on one catostrophic loss.

Also, the odds of getting 9 black/green spins in a row is not nearly as unlikely as you think. You’re very likely to see this happen even on your first visit to a casino.

What do you think? Answer below!