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.
In: 93
To expand on /u/EastNine ‘s point — the expected (average) profit from multiple bets is the sum of the expected profits of the individual bets. The expected profit making a bet on roulette is always negative — unless you possess some physics hack that boosts your winning probability, which famously has happened on rare occasions, but the main consequence is tricking suckers into losing money trying to replicate the achievement.
No matter what complicated formula you use to decide how much to wager, you cannot obtain a positive average return through a series of bets whose individual expected returns are all negative, which is the case for every bet at a fair roulette wheel. If you understand this more general rule, you will also avoid falling for a thousand other broken betting strategies that try to turn a series of bad bets into a good outcome. Complicated betting schemes to turn profit on a series of bad bets are just like perpetual motion machines that try to create new mass-energy or predictably reduce entropy. The most reliable way to evaluate such a system isn’t to bog yourself down in the details and very possibly miscalculate (“Wow, it works!”) Your best shot is understanding that the claim being made is fundamentally impossible, and refusing to get roped in.
You might make a profit on a series of mostly money-losing bets, so long as at least a few of the bets are actually good bets, and you bet more when the odds are good. Betting big when there are many face cards in a blackjack deck famously can be a legitimately profitable strategy, which is why you have little chance of finding a casino that will let you pull it off.
There is also 0 and 00 so that wipes you out. Even if you play on the thirds and you bet 1-12, 13-24 that would be 2/3 of the table you still get wiped out by 0 and 00
Let’s say you do this once, and profit $100. Then you try it again, and win another $100. You can do it over and over and over and keep winning, but the one time luck isn’t on your side you will lose $3200, and the whole thing wouldn’t have been worth it.
I want to emphasize your odds are always less than 50%. It’s possible to get neither red nor black off of roulette due to the presence of the green 0 and 00.
Now if you’re playing a video game that has a Save/Load then there’s usually a way to cheese the system because you have infinite money. But it’s typically faster to bet on a single digit 34 times in a row before reload since a single payout of 35x carries less risk multiple 2x wins in a row. This only works because you can reload if you don’t win. Also the randomness can a bit off and somewhat predictable.
I could see this being useful in some rare cases, like say you have $9,900 but you need $10,000 to keep from getting evicted. But if you are in this position of having gambling be your savior, it probably is because you gambled poorly in the past. You should stop playing chicken with your finances.
Your odds of winning aren’t 50%.
They’re slightly less (47.4%) because of the zeroes. That isn’t a coincidence.
This is known as Martingale and it doesn’t work for 2 reasons: you need an infinite bankroll because although the likelihood is very low it happens relatively often because you roll a lot of times and casinos have a bet limit exactly to prevent this.
I used to work in a casino. I once rolled a 0 FOUR times in a row ( I was a total beginner nad it was all an accident). Calculate how impossible that is 😀 Then you will know why someone wouldn’t bet on something that has almost no chance of winning 😀
As others have mentioned, there are caps on how much you can bet, which limits this strategy. There are three “even money” bets. Black or red are the most well known. There are 36 numbers, so you can also bet “odd or even”, and the third even-money bet is high or low. Meaning a number between 1-16 or 17-36.
European wheels have one green number, called “0”, and American wheels have an additional green number “00”. If you see there have been five of the same numbers in a row (5 reds, 5 odds, 5 lows), then you can bet the opposite (lets say $100) and also bet $10 on the green as “insurance”. The 0 and 00 are not red or black, high or low, odd or even.
Casinos have crunched all the strategy odds, and it’s like Holyfield saying he has a plan to fight Mike Tyson. Then Tyson replied “Everyone has a plan…until they get punched in the face”
People seem to always forget about the 0’s also. 2 green spots to keeps the casinos odds better. I always like to bet on the 0’s
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