The Martingale roulette system is the most popular roulette system and has been around since the 18th century. There are many roulette systems out there, but the Martingale system is simple and easy to follow so it caught on.

The basic principle is to double your bet every time you lose and return to your original bet every time you win. Doubling your bet every time you lose means that when you do win you win all your losses back. It is important to bet on even money bets such as black or red or odds or even so that the probabilities are kept the same and you are winning back double your money each time you win.

So for example if you started with £2 bets and then lost the next 7, your betting would go like this. £2 >> £4 >> £8 >> £16 >> £32 >> £64 >> £128 >>£256. If the 8th bet of £256 wins, then you would get back £512, making a £2 profit.

As you can see, as you double the money the numbers start to get quite large. However because most bettors see that all loses are always recouped using this system and you always get back into profit they think that it is a good system to use. Many sites on the Internet promote using it and some even sell ebooks with the system and guarantee big winnings.
There are several reasons however why it really is not a good system to use at all. Even if you do have the confidence to bet big and double your bets every time you lose you have to have a really big bank role to start with. Just to cover yourself to play 7 loses in a row you have to put down £510. Probability shows that it is still quite easy to lose 8 or 9 times in a row. 9 loses in a row with the example above would equal a massive £2040 that you would need to bet.

It is now that a few doubts start to arise. Firstly what if you have one loss too many and you haven’t got enough to double your money? Well, you have just lost big! Losing that much is a serious risk considering that when you are winning you only get £2 for every time you do so. Say you don’t win 9 in a row, but actually win them all. Your profit now would be £18. Is winning £18 really worth the risk of losing £2040 if all 9 bets go the other way and you lose? You could say that you will use bigger stakes so that when you do win you will win more. However this works the other way as well. When you play with these higher stakes the money you put down when you lose is going to get massive and you won’t be able to put down for so many losing bets and therefore increasing your chances of losing it all.

Besides all this a lot of casinos actually have a maximum bet allowance, so if you are losing, doubling your bet and reach this amount then you no longer have the ability to win back your loses on the next spin that you win.

Careful calculations show that with an equal betting pot, doubling the bet when you lose has no advantage over not doubling it, and it can actually increase the risk of you losing big.