A Word About Roulette Betting Systems

Before closing out this look at roulette, let’s take a minute to examine one of the most famous roulette betting systems of all time and the one that many people frequently like to use onSteve Bourie is the author of the American Casino Guide, the most comprehensive publication available for information on any U.S. casino/resort, riverboat or Indian casino. His guide has been published annually since 1992 and is now the biggest selling book in the U.S. on the subject of casino gambling.  Steve's website is www.americancasinoguide.com  roulette. It’s called the Martingale system and it is basically a simple system of doubling your bet whenever you lose. The theory behind it is that sooner or later you’ll have to win and thus, you will always come out ahead. As an example, let’s say you’re playing roulette and you bet $1 on red, if you lose you double your next bet to $2 and if you lose that then you double your next bet to $4 and if you lose that you double your next bet to $8 and so forth until you eventually win. Now, when you finally do win you will end up with a profit equal to your original bet, which in this case is $1. If you started the same system with a $5 bet, you would have to bet $10 after your first loss, $20 after your second loss and so forth, but whenever you won you would end up with a $5 profit.

In theory, this sounds like a good idea but in reality it’s a terrible system because eventually you will be forced to risk a great amount of money for a very small profit. Let’s face it, even if you only wanted to make a $1 profit on each spin of the wheel, sooner or later you will hit a major losing streak where you will have to bet an awful lot of money just to make that $1 profit. For example, if you go eight spins without a winner, you would have to bet $256 on the next spin and if that lost then you’d have to bet $512. Would you really want to risk that kind of money just to make $1? I don’t think so. You may think that the odds are highly unlikely that you would lose that many bets in a row, but eventually it will happen and when it does you will suffer some astronomical losses. One other problem with this system is that eventually you won’t be able to double your bet because you will have reached the casino maximum, which in most casinos is $500 on roulette. Just keep in mind that the Martingale system works best when it’s played for fun on paper and not for real money in a casino. If it was truly a winning system it would have bankrupted the world’s casinos years ago.