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
The house edge is just over 5% in roulette. Use whatever strategy you wish but on a $100 bet you will lose an average of $5 per spin over a long run.
You might be able to grind out a few bucks if you started small enough because in the worst case you would have to survive multiple rounds of doubling. Whip out your calculator and see just how few times a doubling operation on a tiny number takes to result in a financially devastating sum.
So if you started at a buck and were extremely disciplined to always restart at a buck whenever you hit… And also cut cut your losses at say, 5 rounds to restart, it’s conceivable that you could end up with a few bucks in your pocket. Then again, remember that roulette wheels have those pesky green 0’s. Some places even have 3 of them now meaning that you have LESS than a 50 % chance of hitting your colour.
Then, add up the amount of time it takes for each spin, vs the amount of theoretical profit you could make off small sum betting and you might find yourself working for less than minimum wage.
This part is speculative on my behalf because I don’t gamble, but I also suspect that casinos have a minimum and maximum bet allowed at the table precisely to prevent this kind of thing. In this case you would not be able to start small and could only double down a few times before hitting the limit.
If you’re nerve holds out as quite quickly the sums can get very large just doubling there is also the added issue that betting red or black on roulette is not a 50:50 odds, as there is a Green 0 or 00 this tips the odds ever so slightly towards the house
This is called the Martingale system. In theory it can work but in practice there’s a few issues. For starters the roulette is a game designed to make profit for the house, i.e. the casino. Many people have thought of various strategies but ultimately none can work consistently and might only work on occasion by just getting really lucky one day. Betting on colors has low returns so any profit made will be minimal and casinos usually have a maximum betting limit so you can’t indefinitely chase higher and higher earnings, you’ll hit a cap, and you might hit it while still being at a loss. Lastly, you do realise that such a strategy requires the player to already have a lot of money to draw from, in which case even if you end on a win any gains you’ve made are minimal compared to the sum you were using to make those bets. And you do need a large money pool to draw from, there’s no perfect strategy that feeds itself because the game is designed to not allow this.
98% of the time win $100, 2% lose $6300. Looking at it that way, you see why it’s a bad idea – you’re unlikely to lose that many times but if you do you lose a huge amount, and it’s still a losing game overall.
If you lose more than around 5 in a row (totally possible) then the table max will likely get you.
One of the many reasons this is a bad idea is because of the way the house odds are compounded. The odds of winning vs losing by betting on black (47% vs 53%) seem very close — it’s almost 50-50 either way, right?
But if you play six times, the odds of winning six times in a row are (.47)^6 = 1.1%, and the odds of losing six times in a row are (.53)^6 = 2.2%. You’re literally twice as likely to lose with this strategy than to win, and the more times you play, the worse it gets.
A few things.
Many tables have min/max bets which can put a damper on this, but overall you’re betting so much and winning so little the Casino is fine w/ this bet.
That is cashed the Martingale system. Two things run it:
1. You will need an infinite starting account as occasionally you’ll lose many in a row
2. The casinos apply “maximum bet” limits so normally after around 7 or so losses you’d be unable to bet what you need to.
It’s the 0 on the roulette wheel. And the 00, depending on country.
It’s a 2x payout but less than a 0.5 chance. So over time it adds up and the house always wins.
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