The Martingale Strategy of ‘Double or Nothing’
Most scientific minds insist that there are no good strategies for playing Roulette. While other casino games have well developed basic strategies used by most players – Blackjack is an excellent example – Roulette is strictly a game of chance, and as such many people insist that there is no strategy for winning.
There are many other people who argue with this theory and insist that there are ample betting strategies to be put to good use at the Roulette tables of the world.
Among the most well-known of these strategies is the one referred to as the “Martingale Double or Nothing”. This is the reason for many Roulette tables around the world having a maximum bid set on the table. While the amounts may seem awfully low to a player the math quickly proves why it is sound advice for a casino to “cut off” a player on a particularly lucky day. Let’s assume a player following the Martingale Double or Nothing Strategy takes a seat a Roulette table.
The player will purchase their chips, for this example they use five dollar denominations, and make their first wager. They lay their money on black and they lose. Instead of repeating a five dollar wager they now increase their wager to ten dollars. They lose again. This time they wager twenty dollars, and finally they win. What the player has done is recouped their losses and won an additional five dollars.
The strategy can also wreak havoc on a bankroll quite quickly however. Let’s assume the player above did not win on their twenty dollar wager, their next bet is forty dollars and can progress up to three hundred and twenty dollars in only seven spins of the Roulette wheel.
Considering that most casinos lay a five hundred dollar maximum wager on each table a player would not be able to wager the eighth bet of six hundred and forty dollars they would need to eliminate their six hundred and thirty five dollars in previous losses.
Can a player really lose on seven spins a row? Unfortunately that happens quite often, and the reality is that a winning spin at the six hundred and forty dollar loss amount would still only generate a profit of five dollars to the player.
Many experienced players hazard against the hard odds of the Martingale Double or Nothing strategy strictly because the losses can add up so quickly. To counter this many employ the “anti-Martingale” strategy of increasing after wins and reducing after a loss. This would take advantage of any winning streaks or reduce the chances of putting a player into a downward spiral of financial loss. However, many theorists and gamblers do not believe that winning or losing streaks exist in games of chance like Roulette.
To prove their theories most players and mathematicians ask players to walk through a casino which hosts Roulette games and look at the display boards overhead – which usually show the results from the twenty previous spins – quite often they will show a single color coming up more than seven times in a row, which is the death knell to the Martingale Double or Nothing strategy.