Why can’t people go to the casino playing roulette and bet on black, and if they lose, double what they lost and bet on black again until they win?

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If you bet $100, your odds of winning are around 50% and if you lose, bet $200, and so on and so forth until you win, and then cash out with a guaranteed profit. Assuming odds of black are 47.37% as per American roulette, your odds of not winning a single one after 6 tries are 0.02125 (I think) and decrease exponentially after each subsequent try.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

If you lose $100, then $200, $400, $800, $1600, and then win on a $3200 bet, you’ve won $3200 minus $(1600+800+400+200+100) for a total of $100 win.

So you have a 98% chance of winning $100, and a 2% chance of losing $6300.

So the net effect is like the opposite of a lottery. You have a large chance of winning very little money, and a small chance of losing a large amount of money.

If the roulette was 50/50, and you played 64 times, you’d win 63 and lose 1 (on average) which would leave you with $0. And that’s before we factor in the casino’s advantage.

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