Progressive betting..

[1800GAMBLER]

This is a roulette post really regarding the doubling up betting.


I.e. $2 $4 $8 $16 $32 all on the same colour.

I know roulette tables aren't beatable but i'm wondering if you could make a _short term_ gain with this system.

Since the probability of a streak is 1/2^n (not perfectly accurate due to green but i have no idea how many numbers are on there) n being the number of the streak, eventually you'll double up.

Any articles on this?

Thanks.

[Jimbo]

"Any articles on this?"

Hundreds if not thousands. It is called the Martingale System. In case you are wondering the poor fellow died broke. /forums/images/icons/smile.gif Just do a google search for Martingale, it will give you planty of choices.

Here is one (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Martingale.html) and one more (http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&frame=right&th=1c8af76001cbbc0e&seekm=p gpmoose.200003130923.23354%40shell9.ba.best.com#s) just for good measure.

[Dynasty]

No.

A system isn't going to do anything to change the fact that every bet you make on a roulette wheel expects only to get about 95% back in return.

[1800GAMBLER]

Values only converge to that in the long term.

[Jimbo]

"Values only converge to that in the long term."

Conversley this implies that you could lose your entire bankroll before you won a single bet. Correct? Actually I believe Dynasty was referring to your expectation about which he is correct.

Did you read either of the articles I linked for you?

[Cyrus]

...but not the way you think, I'm sorry to say.

You can use progressions in tournaments involving casino games that have inherently a negative expectation, eg craps. Or you can use it if you're camouflaging your Blackjack advantage play by pretending to be just another harmless Martingale fan.
Or you can use it if you're Bill Gates and you're gambling in a negative-EV game against an entity with less money (capital, bankroll) than you, though without any limitations to bet size.

Even so, "accidents will happen"! As E. O. Thorp noted in his Mathematics of Gambling, when you start off with a $1000 wager, and play long enough, eventually you will run into a losing streak of note. If you lose 11 times in a row (a 0.16% occurence), your next bet should be $1,024,000! And if you happen to hit on a 30-losses-in-a-row streak, your 31st bet should be about the net worth of the NYSE. (At the time Thorp wrote that, it was abt $1 trillion.)

But if you have an unlimited bankroll, ie an infinite amount of money, to begin with, you cannot really win! Adding any sum to your bankroll does not increase it; it is still infinity. (A concept that for all practical purposes holds for all the filthy rich folks such as Gates.)

However, the briefest yet most succinct explanation was given online by Stanford Wong: you can't add up negative numbers and expect to have a positive number as their sum.

Realizing (as you have) that every bet, no matter how much money is wagered each time, carries a negative expectation, one realizes that adding up all the bets will assuredly produce a negative number as well.

That elusive "short-term winning strategy" is something that will be known only after the fact. Simply put, no one, not even Sklansky, can determine when a losing streak (or a winning streak) will occur -- until it has already occured.

Good luck with your gambling.

BJ Math (http://www.bjmath.com/forums.htm)

[Ed Miller]

If you play this system for a very short period of time you will be more likely to be ahead after that short period than behind. When you are behind, though, you will be very far behind while when you are ahead, you will be ahead by a much smaller amount. Is that the answer you were looking for?

[1800GAMBLER]

I did. Dynasty just answered some made up question.