roulette double bet

[mmmmmbrother]

in roulette there is a hideous house advantage.
doubling your bet every time wont work because of this.
but what about trippling your bet everytime.
looking at red/black;

if you keep betting on black
bet 1, lose
bet 3, lose
bet 9, lose
bet 27, win.
so you spent 40 dollars but won 52 ?

or do you only get 1.5 to 1 odds for betting on colours


the only problem i can see with this is the bet limit.

[Siegmund]

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the only problem i can see with this is the bet limit.

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Congratulations. There's your answer.

This fails for exactly the same reason the doubling strategy fails. The number of spins it takes for you reach the betting limit and suffer a catastrophic loss is fewer than when you only double up - but (probability of hitting the maximum bet and losing)x(maximum bet) is still larger than (probability of winning before the progression ends)x(minimum bet). The house gets a fixed percentage of your action in the long run, regardless of what distribution of bet sizes you choose.

[mmmmmbrother]

those casino owners know their stuff

[AaronBrown]

The casino owners don't have to know much stuff. All they care about is they get an edge on every bet. With a million bets on red/black in roulette, the house expects to win 526,316. Less than one time in 200 will they win fewer than 525,000. The casino can't lose, however people move their bets up and down.

The only risk would be if someone placed a single bet so large that it could dominate the results. If 999,999 of the million bets were for $1, and one bet were for $1,000,000, then the casino could lose. The expected value would still be in its favor, and if it did this every day for a year it would virtually always come out ahead, but this one bet could give it a loss for one night. That's why casinos don't allow million to one ratios between the lowest and highest bets at any table. As long as the ratio is no more than ten or a hundred to one, the casino is safe.

Your tripling strategy, like the martingale, wins a little almost all the time, but loses a lot when it loses. It has a negative expectation like any other roulette bet. If you have $30,000 to risk, you can afford to go up to 10 rounds. If you win any of those 10 spins, you walk away with a profit. The average profit is about $40. About one time in 600 you'll lose all ten spins which costs you about $30,000. The expected value of the loss is $50, which means you pay the casino an expected $10 every time you start one of these series.

The exact numbers, if you're interested, are 99.8369% chance of winning an average of $39.55, 0.1631% chance of losing $29,542, for a house expected profit of $8.66.