Don't shoot me! - Roulette I think I have it worked out

nevermind guys, it appears we have a mathematician among us

If I had an infinite amount of money I don't think I'd be giving it to casinos by playing roulette. I'd be playing poker 24 hours a day and losing it to my new friends at Cardschat.

LOL - this is a very good point.

If you've got an infinite bankroll, why are you gambling, and why do you care how much you win?

If I had an infinite amount of money and I still felt the urge to gamble with it, I'd be looking for the funnest way to use it, not the winningest way

Alexei - I realized this morning that you might interpret my reply as a negative response to your post. Your post was absolutely correct and most of the respondees here know that. It's just that my mind got hung up on the concept of an infinite bankroll and I felt an overwhelming urge to comment on it.

Well, just to be fair, by the time you're facing Dario Minieri, you'd be trying to win back $9,998 plus an additional $2 of profit. Of course, the fees you've paid up to that point completely offset that puny profit.

Since Roulette is a game based on luck, you can't beat it in the long term. Play for fun if you like. In case you've made a bit of profit, it's best to just leave and never come back. Fear the long term.

Actually it is nice to ponder having an infinite bankroll...
And there's a valid point, what would be the point of any kind of gambling with an infinite amount of money, and secondly it wouldn't be any fun, because it wouldn't matter to you if you won or lost. It'd be like playing play money poker, and if you just liked the action there'd be no reason to ever fold which would be very bad poker. Sounds like it'd be time to break out the MMORPGs

If I had an infinite BR I'd play RPGs with real people just because I could afford it. The world would be the game board and all of it people my playthings. Man this sounds fun. Oh well off to FT to start building my infinite roll. I'll let you know when I'm 1/2 way there!

i work in a casino!! and yes the house always win BUT only 99% of the time. we are dealing with numbers here. and doubling up you WILL win. ALL casino do know about this and we are trained to look out for it. we are trained cause it DOES work 100%!
and yes i would start with 10p . as yes u may lose 8x but then u would have only betted £25.50p. it would never go in to the £300 altho u only make 10p when you win you also win all your money back.so u dont lose a penny.and yes do NOT try it at a real casino we will catch u in a sec. if it was NOT a thret to the casino we would not be trained to look out for it.
it works it take times but who makes £16 an hour tax free? it boring but it grows!! dont get greedy and you will win every time. this is were the house does not win

^^^ lol wtf, is this a joke?

Roulette is French for: RULE is that you LET the house have your money.

This is not even rocket science, but 6th grade probability. The only game you can win at consistently is Black Jack, and when you get good at that they won;t let you play. That's why casinos look like castles!

At least they let us play poker in the hall ways

Using the martingale system do not work. I did infact try a variant of it once, betting on black. Starting bet 1$ and i farly quickly was up almost 1300$ Along the way i had 15 strait black, no problem since i was betting on black. But after 6-7 hours i hit the casino limet 2 times within 30 mins. Walked away with about 300$. Good for me but no betting system will change the fact that every spin has -EV.

There is even an episode of CSI where a guy tries out the martingale system. He did not do well.

Like everyone has said before this system is quite old and the main problem is hittng the house limit.

A friend of mine (well a guy I have played poker with a couple of times) was telling me about how he plays roulette some times. Quite interesting, he studies the table for an hour or so and looks for patterns in the numbers that come up. Dosent always find them but occasionally he will find a table where its possible to predict (roughly) where the ball will land, i.e 1:10 chance that 27 will come up. So after say 8 no 27's he will start betting on the numbers in that area.

Apparently he has done OK with it.

I couldnt understand how this was possible but he recons its to do with slight inballances in the wheel caused in production and possibly problems with the bearing on the wheel..... this would not work online!!!!

But anyway he has made a bit of money doing this .. tbh it seems more effort thasn its worth.

I wrote a simple model of your strategy in Matlab. It starts with a bet size of 1$, and increases it every time you lose. I have it run 1000000 iterations for each "session" of gambling. Let's see if you turn a profit in the long run.

%Function roul. Models the roulette gambling strategy described above, given no betting limits and no conditions for quitting.
function newroll = roul(bankroll)
bet=1;
for i=1:1000000
if bankroll<0
break
end
z=rand;
if z>0&&z<.473684
bankroll = bankroll+bet;
bet=1;
else
bankroll = bankroll-bet;
bet=bet*2;
end
end
newroll=bankroll;

** Here's the model of your roulette strategy, done 10,000 times in a row. This assumes you start with a 100 unit bankroll.

%Script "longrun"
vector = ones(1,100);
for i=1:100
vector(1,i)=roul(100);
end
result=sum(vector)

** Here's a long run model. I do 100 sessions of 10,000 iterations of your strategy and sum up the resulting bankroll. Let's see 5 results of this, which is 100*10,000*5 iterations.

>> longrun

result =

-17183

>> longrun

result =

-22165

>> longrun

result =

-26217

>> longrun

result =

-14591

>> longrun

result =

-41566

As we've now empirically determined, your betting strategy is a losing proposition in the long run. Sure you could go up some then quit, but it's no different than putting coins in a slot machine then quitting when you hit.

Nothing changes if you increase the bankroll to something much higher than the starting bet:

**Increased starting bankroll from 100 to 100000:

>> longrun

result =

-1906640

>> longrun

result =

-2647712

>> longrun

result =

-4973841

>> longrun

result =

-5709524

>> longrun

result =

-3369732

^^^^

Its even worse than that though as your modle dosnt take into account hitting the house limit.

Even so it still proves the point!!

According to Casino managers, the best thing ever invented for getting people to play roulette is the big tower that shows the last 10-20 "hits". It gives people an idea they can find a pattern.

Each run of the wheel is A COMPLETELY RANDOM EVENT! Unless the casino is cheating.

If you flip a coin three times in a row and it comes up heads each time, what is the chance that the next flip will be heads? Answer 50:50, unless it is a two headed coin (cheating).

Once again, 8th grade statistics/probability.

yes hititng house limit can happen. but it better if u play on a online public table.
and also if i lost about 6x in row and betting 10p you next bet would be £6.50p. so change tables and pput yr first bet as 6.50p.
and u NEVER stay on one table for more that 35 mins.

interesting stuff guys, i will never play roulette, but i had always imagined this martingale strategy as a "strategy" (though at the same time, realized its stupidity because in the long run you'll always get your ass kicked).

it was very nice to see it summed up on wikipedia and the math behind it, and the difference between having a bankroll at 4x and infinite compared.

Solid gold

Reminds me of the carnival scene in In America. It's a classic game of double or nothing. You will eventually go on a losing streak and go broke.