Win at Roulette with Martingale System

This is the most popular and simplest system, and it is usually the first one that novice players come across or think about.

The idea is that if doubling up your wager after every loss, you will eventually win one bet and then that wager will be won and you will come out ahead.

How to Play at Roulette with Martingale System

The Martingale system is no more than a doubling up method of betting, doubling one's bet after a previous loss. If a player starts with a $1 wager and loses, then bets $2 and loses, he will bet $4, and should that bet lose, he will bet $8 and after that loss, $16, and so on, till he finally wins a bet. When he finally does win, he will end up ahead of the grand total of his first bet, $1 more than he started.

After this winning, the player should start again at $1 bet, and so on. Slowly, he will accumulate more dollars from the casino.

The Martingale system would apply to any game, however, it looks the exact system to win at the roulette, playing on a color or even/odd.

This table shows the player expectations of the Martingale System

Betting this way, the numbers soon become astronomical, and after 9 losses in a row, the tenth bet has to be $512. At this point, the player is exceeding the usual house limit of $500 and thus may only bet $500. Should he lose this wager, he would now be behind $1,011, with no way to break even or come out ahead using his system. Even if he won his tenth bet at $500, he would still be down $11.

10 Losses in a row

With all the escalating bets this system requires, running into the hundreds and sometimes into the thousands of dollars, we must remember that the ultimate win the Martingale system player is hoping for will net him a profit of $1!

The optimistic player would answer that he does not believe that if he bets on the Red Numbers at the roulette with a probability of more than 47% at every spin, he will get 10 times Black numbers in a row.

Well, good question!

What is the longest streak for Red, Black, Odd, Even, High and Low?

As you can see from the chart below, the answer to this question is 30 consecutive appearances in which you would have to wager millions of dollars.

Tommaso Dorigo decided to put together a simple program to extract winning probabilities with the above strategy. The program simulates the outcome of reds, blacks, and neutral numbers in 10,000,000 sessions of up to 200 wheel turn-the typical duration of a night-long game (2 billion spins in total).  and came up with this interesting graph about the distribution of the longest streaks in Even Chances.

We see that there was never a streak longer than 30 and the average losing streak in 200 spins was around 7 spins.

> The horizontal axis shows the longest streaks
> The Vertical axis shows in how many 200 spins tests they happened.

Although it looks absurd to wager so much money to win just $, you have to see it from the opposite direction: This system is the only one capable to win back all your previous losses.

The Martingale system needs some modifications.