The Martingale System

The Martingale System

One of the most popular casino strategies is known as the Martingale system. This casino strategy is so simple that there’s a good chance that even if you haven’t heard of it from someone else, you may have come up with the idea on your own – or even tried it yourself!

Basically, the Martingale system is a strategy designed to be used on any casino bet where the payout is even money, and your chances of winning are nearly 50/50. Examples of places where you could use this casino strategy are in roulette on any of the even money bets (such as red/black or odd/even), betting on the player in baccarat, or making a pass line bet in craps.

Regardless of which game you play when using the Martingale system, the plan is to start out with a very small bet – perhaps the table minimum. If you win, you’ll bet the table minimum again. If you lose, you’ll double your bet, and continue to double your bet each time you lose until you win once. Once you win, you’ll go back to betting the table minimum.

Let’s use an example with a table minimum of $10. On your first bet, you’ll wager $10. If you lose, you’ll wager $20. Lose again, and you wager $40. Any time you win a bet, you’ll go back down to $10. Using this system, you win $10 for each completed cycle; your biggest bet will always cover all of your previous losses, plus one unit.

Intuitively, this casino strategy seems to make perfect sense. A long string of losses is unlikely, meaning that you can expect to eventually win and recoup all of your losses. As long as you have a large bankroll, losing even several wagers in a row shouldn’t hurt you at all.

Unfortunately, the math doesn’t back this up. Unless you have an infinite bankroll (you don’t), there’s no guarantee you’ll ever win a bet, and while long losing streaks are rare, they can happen. This doesn’t even consider the fact that most casinos have table maximums in place, which will artificially cap the number of times you can double your bet.

The problems with the Martingale system are the same ones that plague all casino strategies that work by altering the amount of money the player bets based on whether they are winning or losing. No matter how you structure a series of bets, if all of those bets have a negative expectation, your overall expectation will also be negative. It’s worth noting that this doesn’t necessarily apply to games where the results of each bet are not independent – for instance, a card counter in blackjack will bet more when the remaining cards in the deck favor the player, because in this case, the odds actually have changed.

Most players also seriously underestimate the odds of losing a long string of bets, so even if they understand that the Martingale system isn’t a long term winner in theory, they think their chances of losing are so small that they don’t need to worry about losing their whole bankroll. For instance, consider a American roulette table where the table minimum is $5, and the table maximum is $500. You can keep doubling even after losing six times ($5, $10, $20, $40, $80, $160, and a final bet of $320). If you bet on, say, black, you will lose 20/38 (or 52.6%) of your bets. You might be surprised to know that you’ll lose seven times in a row about 1 in every 90 times!

In the end, the Martingale system is simply a casino strategy that simply lets the player trade small wins for occasional very large losses. In the long run, no matter what betting strategy you use, the house edge in a game where each result is independent of the ones that came before cannot be overcome by betting systems like the Martingale.