Martingale Roulette Strategy

Why it will make you go bankrupt, mathematically

Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a strategy to guarantee a profit in gambling? Probably not, but I am not here to philosophize about it.

So what I am here for?
I am here to discover a gambling strategy, and show why it is simply not working mathematically — so you will be able to remove it from your “gambling strategies” folder, I hear everyone have those.

Before we go over the strategy, let’s get aligned with what are the features of a roulette (at least for the sake of this article).

• Roulette has 37 slots ranging from numbers 0 to 36
• 18 slots are red
• 18 slots are black
• The 0 slot isn’t colored

The Strategy

The strategy is fairly simple and easy to follow

1. Place 1$ on red
2. If you won, repeat step 1
3. If you lost, bet again with a doubled amount
4. If you win continue to step 1; else repeat step 3

The intuition behind this strategy is that after every losing streak if you win the next bet you cover your losses.
For example, if you just lost 3 times in a row…