Martingale Roulette Strategy: The Double-Down Approach to Beating the Odds

One of the most popular and well-known strategies used by roulette players and fans of other games with an even-money payout is the Martingale Strategy.  It was first recorded in France in the 1800s, and for almost two hundred years, it has been the ‘go-to’ roulette strategy for knowledgeable players and novices alike.

What is this strategy, and why is it so popular?

Find out in this quick video and then explore the article for the full breakdown:

Understanding the Martingale Strategy

What is the Martingale Roulette Strategy?

For roulette, it’s a very simple strategy to understand. 

You start with a one-unit bet that pays even money if you win.  

Let’s say you decide to use $10 as your betting unit.

On a roulette game, there are 6 bets that pay even money. 

Red and Black.  High and Low.  Odd and Even. 

If you win, you keep the $10 you won in a separate ‘stash’ and bet your initial $10 again.  If you win again, you keep the second $10 you won, and make your $10 bet again. 

And keep doing that. 

Until you lose.

Once you lose your initial $10 bet, you double your bet to $20. 

And if you win, you take the $10 you won and place it into the stash.  And the additional $10 that bumped up your bet to $20 goes back into your session bankroll.

And start the progression again, with a $10 bet.

But if you lose your $20 bet, you double your bet again, to $40.
 
And if that loses, you double your bet again, to $80.

And once you win, you’re going to win one unit ($10), and the remainder of the winning bet goes back into the session bankroll.

One of the things that people find the most attractive about the Martingale is that you can get all your losses back with one winning bet.

How does that work?

Let’s say you make 5 losing bets in a row, and then you win, here’s what the numbers look like:

• Bet 1 = Lose $10
• Bet 2 = Lose $20
• Bet 3 = Lose $40
• Bet 4 = Lose $80
• Bet 5 = Lose $160

You have bet (and lost) a total of those 5 bets, which is $10+$20+$40+$80+$160 = $310

And your next bet would be 2 x your last bet, which is 2 x $160 = $320

And if you win, you get paid $320.

Which means you replenish your session bankroll for the $310 you lost, and the remaining $10 from the $320 goes into the winnings ‘stash’.

Here are some tips for the beginners out there

• Start with a very small stake – the minimum bet allowed on the table with the lowest minimum in the casino.  Try to look for the table with the lowest minimum and the highest maximum in the casino.
• The way the Martingale works is that you need to be able to survive at least a 7-loss losing streak.  Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?  But a 7-bet losing streak is not in the least bit unusual.
•  If you’re playing a $10 game, that means you need the bankroll to get to a $1,280 bet – which is what you would be betting if you ran into a 7-loss losing streak.
•  That seems like a lot of money, but don’t forget the other bets that you have made that lost, too. 
• Your total expenditure to get to the $1,280 bet would have been $10 + $20 + $40 + $80 + $160 + $320 + $640 = $1,270.
•  Which means you need the 8th bet, which is $1,280, plus the 7 losing bets before the $1,280 bet, which is $1,270 + $1,280.
•  So your bankroll has to be $2,550 to survive a 7-bet losing streak with a $10 unit as your starting point.
•  It can get pretty expensive, can’t it?

One of the two major downsides of the Martingale is it takes a large bankroll to survive a losing streak.

The other downside is the table maximum. 

It used to be that casinos didn’t have a maximum.

About 140 years ago, the casino in Monte Carlo lost a fortune over a few days because they didn’t have a table maximum.  You may have heard about ‘the man who broke the bank in Monte Carlo’. 

Well, he was a real person and did break the bank in Money Carlo.  In 1881.

And casinos across the world took note of that and did what casinos always do when things don’t go their way.

 Application in Roulette

The Martingale Strategy works best on roulette, because roulette has 6 even money bets that are perfect vehicles for the Martingale to be used.

It also works well on even money bets on other table games, too, but they’re sometimes not ideal.

Almost all the bets on blackjack pay even money, but sometimes the best option for your hand is to split, or double down. 

The Banker bet on Baccarat requires you to pay a 5% commission on a winning hand, which means the Martingale is a bit messy – still very doable, but messy because you’re getting paid 19 to 20.

On craps, the pass line and don’t pass line are both even money bets, but then you run into the odds, or the lay bet behind the don’t pass bet that means that you don’t have the perfect Martingale. And of course, that works on the Come bets and Don’t Come bets too if that’s how you like to play.

You can use the Martingale system for Sports Betting, too, but it can get quite complicated.  With different odds – e.g. -220, or + 275 and so on, you would probably need a Martingale Calculator to determine how much your next bet should be.

Other calculators that you may find useful, mostly for Sports Betting include 

• Parlay Calculator
• Moneyline Calculator
• Kelly Criterion Calculator
• NFL Spread Calculator, and the
• NFL Prop Bet Calculator.

 Ultimately, the Martingale Strategy Roulette, as its name implies, is perfect for roulette. 
 
Most people when playing the Martingale on roulette play Red or Black.  Recognizing the color is the easiest way to quickly identify whether you have won or not.  While the High/Low and Even/Odd work just as well and the odds are the same, the Red/Black choice is the easiest for most players to track.
 
An interesting point to note is that you can switch between the even money choices, and it really doesn’t matter which you bet, or in which order.
 
So you could bet Red, Red, Even, High, Black, High and Odd and the odds of winning or losing remain identical to the odds of betting Red all the way through.
 
The reason most players don’t bet that way (and it’s probably 95%+ of the players who don’t), is because of the Gambler’s Fallacy, which is ‘I’ve lost 6 Reds in a row, Black must be due to hit now’.
 
In fact, that’s not true.  The odds of any of the even money bets coming up at any time are exactly the same no matter what the last spin was, or the last five spins and so on.

Evaluating the Effectiveness

Probability of winning and losing streaks

What are the odds of a winning (or losing) streak?

As you can see from the table above, the odds of winning a single, even money event is 48.6%.

Why isn’t it 50%, or 1 to 1%?

Because the zero changes it from a 50/50 bet to a 48.6% bet to account for the extra space on the wheel.

If you were to say ‘I’m going to hit 2 Reds in a row’ and then try to do it, on your first attempt you have a 48.6% chance of hitting a Red number. 

And on the second attempt, you have a 48.6% chance of hitting Red the second time.

But once you link the two attempts together, where you have to hit Red the first time in order to be able to try to hit it the second time, you have to include the odds of both attempts as a pair, not individually. 

So it becomes 23.7% because your first attempt would lose 51.4% of the time.

The chart above shows that the odds of hitting (for example) 4 Red numbers in a row is 5.6% - or 16.9 to 1.

Which means that once every 17 spins, you could hit the same 4 even money bets in a row.

And when the casino expects to see about 40 spins an hour on a moderately busy roulette game with an experienced dealer, once every 17 spins should occur about once every 25 minutes or so.

And hitting Red (or any other even money bet) for 7 spins in a row, which should occur once every 154 spins, should occur once every 3 hours and 50 minutes or so

And both of those occurrences are great if you’re betting Red.

But they may wipe out your bankroll if you’re betting a Martingale on Black.

What is your opportunity to win with a 7-Red in a row streak?  

If you’re playing a classic Martingale, and stashing your winnings every spin, with a $10 unit, you would have increased your stash by $70 with a 7-win streak.

Pretty good!

But if you were on the wrong side of that streak, i.e. betting Black, you would now be betting $1,280 having lost $1,270 ($10 + $20 + $40 + $80 + $160 + $320 + $640).

And if you finally win and the ball drops in Red, how much do you win?

The dealer will pay you $1,280 for your $1,280 bet, and your losses to that point are $1,270.

So you would win $10.

For a $1,280 bet.

And having to bet $1,280 would mean that you had to have come to the table with a $2,550 bankroll.  To use $10 as your initial betting unit.

I don’t know about you, but that would be too nerve-racking for me. 

I’m looking at the wrong end of a $2,550 loss on a bet that I have a 48.6% chance of winning.

Too risky for my blood!

And that’s assuming the casino will allow you to make the $1,280 bet. 

What if the table maximum is $500.  Or even $1,000?

You’re done – you can’t recover.

And that’s the massive downside to the Martingale.

And this is a good spot to talk about this. 

Here at Chipy, we have many articles on how to play the most popular casino games, about slots, and about casino-related subjects generally. 

They’re all written by experts, and the best part is they’re all free.

Best Martingale Roulette Strategy Variations and Adaptations

Over the years, some players have come up with some variations of the Martingale that may make sense to you.  The first of these is the Grand Martingale.

The Grand Martingale

It’s almost identical to the Martingale, but instead of simply doubling your losing bet, you sweeten the bet a little.

Let’s say you’ve chosen the same $10 unit and lose. 

You could then decide to add an additional $10 to every bet you made, so your next bet would be the standard Martingale ($10 + $10) + $10 = $30.

Now if that bet loses, your next bet would be ($30 + $30) + $10 = $70

And if that loses, then your next bet would be $70 + $70 +$10 = $150.

And the next bet is $150 + $150 + $10 = $310.

The Grand Martingale Gamble: Betting Big and Losing Bigger

As you can see, the Grand Martingale gets you into some seriously deep water very quickly.  Which is fine if you win quickly.  But what if you don’t, and you run into a 7-bet losing streak.

The 6th bet is $310 + $310 + $10 = $630

And the 7th bet would be $630 + $630 + $10 = $1,270

So your 8th bet would be $1,260 + $1,260 + $10 = $2,530.

The Grand Martingale is a very dangerous system indeed.  You need to have very deep pockets, and a table with a large minimum/maximum spread.

And I can tell you from personal experience, I never had a table that would let a player have that much ‘headroom’.  A $5 minimum table would have a maximum of perhaps $500.

A $10 table?  The maximum would be $1,000.

So after 6 losses in a row, the player would ‘hit the wall’.

The Mini-Martingale

Almost identical to the regular Martingale, instead of increasing your bet by 100% after a losing bet, you increase your bet by 50%, or 75% after losing.  In theory, this means you get to play longer, with less risk to your bankroll.

In actuality, it merely delays the known outcome, which is the player runs into the table maximum at some point, and loses.

Okay – what about the Anti- or Reverse Martingale?

The Reverse Martingale

Often called The Paroli System it’s the exact opposite of the Martingale and I always think of it as the Martingale roulette strategy that probably works the best. 

Every time you win, you double your bet. 

As you’ve seen from the numbers above, a 7-bet winning streak may happen once every 3 hours and 50 minutes or so.

And when it does, a Reverse Martingale, or Paroli system player is positioned to make a lot of money.  As long as he doesn’t lose his nerve on the way up.

The beauty of the Paroli, and where it has a serious advantage over the Martingale, is that the player only ever has one unit of his money in action.

So if your unit is $10, that’s all you have bet.

Let’s look at the numbers of how a Paroli works.

Your first bet is $10.

If you win, your second bet is $20.

If you win again, your third bet is $40.

Then $80, then $160, then $320, then $640, and finally $1,280.

And if you win the 7th and final bet, you now have $2,560.

From an initial bet of $10.

Maximizing Wins with the Reverse Martingale

Of course, you’re probably going to hit the maximum before you get to the $1,280 bet, but you can see how it works.

And also, by the way, the maximum can actually work in your favor instead of working against you as it does in a standard Martingale.

If you have a $10 minimum and a $1,000 maximum, it only takes 6 winners in a row before you hit the maximum – which means that you’re taking $280 off the table, and still have a $1,000 bet in action.  

And at no time does the player ever have more than $10 of ‘his own money’ on the layout.

So I’m going to take the Reverse Martingale over pretty much any other system.

Every time!

Real-World Applications of Martingale

When would the Martingale system be successful? 

What’s the best way to utilize it?

The circumstances that allow the Martingale system to work well for the player are when you have two or three losing bets, and then two or three winning bets consistently over a long period of time.

If you’re betting an even money bet such as Red and you had this run of numbers, you would be in good shape:

Red, Red, Black, Black, Black, Red, Red, Red, Black, Black, Black, Red and so on.

With your one-unit bet being $10, this run of numbers playing a standard Martingale would have you winning $60. 

But as I’m sure you know, the roulette wheel is never this cooperative.

Playing the Reverse Martingale (the Paroli system) would have you losing $60.

Why the Martingale System Remains a Popular Choice 

The Martingale system is a well-known system that has been around for centuries. 

It is a popular system with experienced and novice players alike. 

The main reason for its popularity is its simplicity.

The system requires that you double your bet every time you lose, until you win. 

And when you do win, you get back all your losses, and win your initial stake.

Well, there are two major downsides to the system.

The first is that it requires a large bankroll to make sure you can weather the volatile nature of the roulette wheel.  It is not in the least bit unusual to run into a losing streak of 6 or 7 bets.

And when you do, assuming you start with a relatively small bet of $10, you must have the bankroll to continue to double your bet as high as $1,280, and possibly as much as $2,550. 

Which is a huge amount for the average retail player who just wants to have a couple of hours of fun playing roulette.

And then there is the table maximum. 

If you get into a 6- or 7-unit losing streak, you will almost certainly run into the table maximum and not be able to bet as much as you need to in order to overcome the losing streak and get to the winner that gets you all your money back.

It’s quite a dangerous system that can get you into deep water very quickly.

Final Thoughts

The importance of responsible gambling.

Always make sure that it’s all for fun.  Once it stops being fun it’s time to take a serious look at why you’re gambling, and whether you’re totally in control of your behavior.

If you find yourself betting your mortgage money, or your food budget money, it’s time to stop.

We have an article to help you if you’re in that situation, written by an expert.  You’ll find that the professional casino guys are very much on your side when you’re in this situation.