Is there Positivity in Negative-Progression Roulette Betting Systems?

Say we want to go out and play roulette and earn $5 per day. Our bankroll is $5,000, which is the average maximum bet on high-end roulette tables across the world. It’s also a sizable sum to bring to a roulette table, but let’s stick with it.

A popular negative progression for this is called the Martingale system, originating in the early days of Le Grand Casino in Monte Carlo.

Martingale calls for an original 1-unit bet, in our case $5. The idea is simply to double that bet after every loss.

Each time we win we’ll take down the $ 5 profit and return to the original $5 bet. Let’s simplify our bet to “red,” which on a European-style wheel with only one zero (0) has almost a 49% chance of winning.

Performance

The first thing you might notice is that every day we have almost a 50% chance of making our $5 on the first spin. When we lose, we have that same chance with the $10 called-for bet on the second spin, and if we lose that, we have the same chance with the $20 bet…then $40, then $80, then $160, then $320, then $640, then $1,280, then $2,560, and so on.

If you think that the chance of losing consecutive rounds is any different, that’s something called the Gambler’s Fallacy. No worries – it’s an infamous trip-up for many casino players throughout history.

It means that even if you keep losing, you still have a 51% chance to keep losing. The stake you need keeps doubling every round with exponential growth. Guess what? We just ran out of chips!

Evaluating this, you can win $5 every single day for a year and a half, during which you never lost ten spins in a row. But the day always comes when you do lose ten spins in a row, and when it does you’re wiped out!

And if you have the terrible bad luck of losing those ten spins in a row during the first days, weeks, or even months of the trial, your bankroll is busted!

The Martingale is the most extreme of the negative betting systems, but they all more or less lead to the same plank. My advice is to play roulette with a positive-progression betting system that lets you take advantage of winning streaks, which do come just as the losing streaks do.

Imagine hitting ten “reds” in a row playing Martingale and winning a measly $50. But when you lose ten in a row with the double-up, you lose a whopping $2,560!

So go for the big win and protect against the big loss!