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
Yes – that betting strategy will work fine as long as you have an infinite amount of money so that you can afford to keep going until you win.
Note that the odds of continuing a losing streak (e.g. continuing to land on red, if you’ve bet on black) don’t decrease exponentially, but instead stay exactly the same.
It’s like tossing a coin – even if you’ve had 100 “heads” in a row, the next toss it’s still 50/50 whether you get heads or tails since each toss (or spin of the roulette wheel) is independent of what came before. The coin doesn’t have any memory!
Long streaks of bad luck can happen quite regularly – was watching a Netflix documentary on a professional blackjack player (who have a slight advantage over the house) who was touring the states playing hours every day, and had a losing streak lasting for **months** … You better have a pretty large bankroll and disciplined betting strategy (better than I’ll keep doubling my bet) to stay solvent …
Your odds aren’t 50%, they’re 48%. There’s two “green” squares as well.
So you *can* just bet on black forever. And if you stake correctly, you can make money. But statistically you will lose the majority of the time. That 2% difference is enough that it makes the game profitable for the casino.
I stopped by a casino in a fly over state that had 50¢ min bets on digital roulette wheel, I started with $29 cash and in under an hour was up to over $160 cash just betting black every time and doubling each time I lost. Anecdotal yes but there is merit to the method.
Plus the casinos limit your maximum bet. So even if you had infinite bankroll you cannot keep upping your bet
each spin of the wheel is its own odds. They show you the previous results s a red herring and while probability dictates that eventually, you HAVE to end on black, the odds say differently. The odds is how the casino earns its money because probability is just a maybe. You also have the 0 and 00 to lessen the odds of black to something like 47-48% (I forget the actual numbers) so a losing progressive will not always work out….especially when you consider the table limits (as in the max bet for a normal roulette table may be $3,000, and you get there really fast on a bad night)
Full disclosure I did that once at a online casino, he worked out pretty good for a while and all a sudden I loose consecutively enough where « doubling my loss « was above the betting limit of that casino for roulette which made that system failing
The casino normally has limits as to how much you can bet, so after a certain amount, you can’t keep doubling your bets. As a side note, I also considered this once time at a casino. I didn’t bet any money but imagined I had used this exact strategy on Black. I promise you, Red came up 13 times in a row! That’s when I never considered that tactic ever again.
I worked for a casino in IT. In training, they had a professor come in and teach casino math.
Two things keep this strategy from working: you run out of money before the casino does and there is a table limit. After that point yo can no longer double your bet. That limit is to keep this strategy from working.
There’s one thing that gets in the way of this (well, maybe two).
Casinos place a maximum on the permissible bets at their games. So, at a certain point, you will reach a point where you can’t double the bets any more.
Also, the second thing is, you may run out of money at a certain point before you win back what you lost.
Theoretically they can. What you’re describing is called the martingale strategy. There are two problems with using it to earn significant money in practice: first, you need to have a lot of money available to you, and second, whenever a casino notices that someone is using a strategy that beats the house reliably the casino just bans them (the casino doesn’t need a reason to stop someone from gambling).
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