Martingale Staking Plan
Seeing as you've found your way to this site, it figures that you're looking for easy ways to make fast cash at the casino, and more specifically, roulette. You're not alone, and you're not the first, either. In fact, all the way back in 18th-century France, folks were hard at work trying to devise gambling schemes to beat the system. One of the most popular early attempts was the Martingale Technique.
The system was first forged for the purposes of gambling on coin flips. The idea was simple: gamblers would first call either heads or tails. If he or she called heads and won, huzzah!
But if they lost, they would double their bet on the next flip while sticking with the same call and continue to do so until landing a winning flip. The idea is that the first win would pay off all the losses of the previous flips and earn the player a profit equal to what was initially wagered. With an infinite amount of money and an infinite amount of flips, players were destined to eventually earn a profit.
The theory was later adopted as a mathematical probability theory, first introduced by Paul Levy and later given the "Martingale" term by Jean Ville. The Martingale theory has become useful in a number of ways besides gambling, including in studies of amoeba growth and of ecological communities.
Martingale and Roulette
While the pursuit of science is valiant and all, we're all here because we want to know if the Martingale Technique can be useful in roulette.
The implementation of the theory is fairly straight forward -- players select an even-money bet (red or black) and double their bet so long as they keep losing. When a player finally wins, he or she collects those earnings and once again places the original bet on either red or black. As long as a player sees every Martingale round through to a win, he or she is guaranteed to walk away a winner.
Mathematical Analysis
The math here holds up, so long as players commit to an infinite amount of money and bets per round. If a player starts by wagering $5, loses, then wagers $10, loses again, then wagers $20 and wins, they'll have committed $35 in bets ($5+$10+$20) and reel in $40 in winnings, meaning they'll have made $5 in the end.
The Dangers
Players should still be cautious with the Martingale for a couple of reasons. For one, it's possible for a player to hit a string of bad luck, landing a number of reds in a row despite betting black. If you're starting with a $5 wager and lose five straight hands, suddenly you're required to bet $160 with hopes of a $5 net gain for the round. This could be problematic if 1) You can't afford to wager that money, and 2) the betting limit for your table is lower than what you're required to bet to stick with the system.
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