The Martingale system is the simplest and most obvious system there is. All you do is double after every loss. This is usually done on even money bets (red, black, high, low, odd, even) and it the most popular. Many people are using the Martingale without even realising it. The table below shows what happens in a Martingale run.

Bet number Units Bet Result Net Profit
1 1 lose -1
2 2 lose -3
3 4 lose -7
4 8 lose -15
5 16 lose -31
6 32 win +1

You will always make a profit of 1 unit when you win. It is possible to make a profit in the short term doing this. However you need a large bankroll to sustain betting through rough patches and the table limits on the casino stop you doubling up indefinitely

martingale-1
Behaviour of Martingale betting with a £500 maximum bet, minimum bet of £1 and a bankroll starting of £1000. If you hit the max bet of £500, just keep betting until it wins. Table has La Partage rules which is common in French roulette and UK casinos

I ran this simulation a few times and it is possible to get well up but in the end, the system will crash.

martingale-2
Behaviour of Martingale betting with a £500 maximum bet, minimum bet of £1 and a bankroll starting of £1000. If you hit the max bet of £500, just keep betting until it wins. Table has La Partage rules which is common in French roulette and UK casinos

This time, it took almost 33000 spins for the system to fail. The system was £5000 in profit before it crashed. Before you get too excited, you get scenarios like this one where the system crashed just after 187 spins.

martingale-3

The same betting system but this time, it never got in to profit and player would have lost all his money. Martingale can be thought of as a low risk way of making small amounts of money but when you do lose, you lose big. Its just knowing when to cash out, which is unknowable in advance. In the middle simulation, it would have been great to have cashed out at £5000 profit but it wouldn’t have been possible to know that in advance.

Tables with small maximum bets.
Some casinos defeat the martingale by imposing smaller bet limits. For example, having a max bet of £200 reduces the change of you being up very much.

martingale-4

When you have a high limit, you can win back your losses but when the limits are restricted, you just lose your money.

Top tips for the martingale.

  1. Have a big bankroll. The bigger the bankroll the more you can withstand with respect to bad runs
  2. Find a table with a big gap between the maximum and minimum bet
  3. Quit while you are ahead. If you are lucky, you can get several thousand pounds up before the system breaks you but when it does, it hurts.

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