Re: Roulette
This has been dicussed many, many times on here and lots of other places. Do a search for "martingale" either on here or on google.
The short answer is that even though intuitively it seems really "unlikely" that you will hit a long enough losing streak to wipe you out, eventually you will. With a simple bet on black, you have a medium chance of winning a bit, and a slightly larger chance of losing a bit. Employing a martingale strategy gives you a large chance of winning a small amount, and a small chance of losing a very large amount. In the end, you still get the exact same EV.
The fallacy of the martingale is essentially that we humans have a hard time understanding very small numbers - in our mind, a 0.0001% chance of losing seems "impossible", but its not and it will happen.
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