The Martingale Strategy And Why It Fails

A lot of people have an idea that they think will surely beat the Caribbean Casinos or Worldwide Casinos. While this strategy could be used at a number of popular games, let's look at roulette for a clear example of how this strategy could work. The player starts out by betting $1 on red. If he wins, then he profits $1 and repeats the strategy from the beginning. If he loses, then he doubles his bet to $2 and places it on red. If he wins this time, he'll have a net profit of $1 and will start over from the beginning. Suppose the player loses for a second time. In this case, he'll just bet $4. If it comes up red this time, he'll profit $1 for the series of three spins.
This is called the Martingale strategy, and it's well known among gamblers. The idea here is that if you keep doubling your bet each time you lose on a bet that's close to being a coinflip, you'll eventually get paid off for a win of one unit.

It can be difficult to wrap your head around why this strategy is not sound, and people who are not very familiar with gambling can mistakenly believe that they have created a fool-proof system for winning.
The problem with the Martingale strategy and similar other strategies is that there is a chance of running out of money before you hit your win to pick up a one-unit win. With the roulette example, to place ten bets, you'll need a bankroll of $1 + $2 + $4 + $8 + $16 + $32 + $64 + $128 + $256 + $512 = $1023. If you want to be able to survive a run of ten losses with this strategy, then you'll have to have at least $1023 in your bankroll.
However, no matter how large your bankroll is, you'll never have enough to weather a long losing streak, and that's why the strategy is not sound. If you've ever played blackjack, you'll notice that there are bet maximums on the tables. Why would a casino want to keep you from betting more than the maximum amount? One reason is that this prevents people with millions of dollars from trying to use the Martingale strategy. If the betting spread was $1 to $500 at a blackjack table, for example, then players would be stuck on their tenth bet with the Martingale strategy because they would not be allowed to be $512.