FSF – Automated Betting Predictions

The Martingale is one of the oldest betting systems around. Here’s how it works: You make your standard bet, say $5, on an even-money bet, such as red in roulette or the Pass Line in craps. Every time you win you make the same bet for the next hand. But if you lose, you double your bet for the next hand. When you eventually have a winning hand after a series of losing hands, your net win will be $5. In fact, every time you win a bet, you’ll be up another $5, regardless of past losses.

Here’s an example: You bet $5. You win, so you bet $5 again. Then you lose, so you bet $10. You lose again, so you bet $20. You lose again, so you bet $40. You lose again, so you bet $80. Man, it’s not your night! Then you win. Your net win on that series was $5, and since you won $5 before your losing streak, now you’re ahead a total of $10.

If you could always double your bet when you lose you’d be guaranteed to always come out ahead. But in real life you can’t always double your bet. First of all, you’ll run out of money at some point and be unable to double your bet. If you start with $5 and lose thirteen bets in a row (it happens), you’ll have to cough up $40,960 for your next bet. Ouch.

Bet even if you had that much money, you couldn’t bet it anyway, since most casinos limit maximum bets to $500-1000 on a $5 table. And usually, the higher the maximum on a table, the higher the minimum, too.

So that’s the risk of the Martingale: If you lose enough times in a row, you’ll go broke and not have enough money to make the next bet, or you’ll bump up against the table limit. So while the Martingale can work in the short term, the longer you play, the more likely you are to have a long losing streak during which you couldn’t double your bets high enough. How short is short enough? Well, the shorter the better, but an hour is about right. You can certainly play for longer, but the longer you play, the more likely you are to lose.