Gaming Gaming insights

The martingale system

Written by Pai Yao

This article first appeared in the Sep/Oct 2011 issue of World Gaming magazine.

The martingale is one of the simplest, oldest and best known betting systems on the planet. It has been around even longer than the casinos. We take a look at this famous (and infamous) approach to betting.

The birth of the expression ‘martingale’ has been lost to the mysteries of time, but it is probably of French origin, and has certainly been around for many centuries. Many mistakenly believe it was named after a person, but it more probably is derived from the French town of Martigues, less than 300 km from the European gaming capital of Monte Carlo. Those crazy French aristocrats from a few centuries ago have a lot to answer for.

Martingales originally referred to a family of progression betting systems but the term ‘martingale’ is now most commonly thought of as the simple ‘double up when you lose’ strategy.

The martingale is typically implemented on even money (or close to it) bets, such as player or banker bets on baccarat, or red or black bets on roulette

The system starts with an attempt to win a single unit. The player bets one unit, and if he wins the attempt is successful. If he loses, the player then doubles his stake and bets two units. If this bet wins, his net result of the two-hand progression is a win of one unit. If it loses, he doubles his stake again and bets four units.

This pattern continues. If the player continues to lose, he continues to double his bet, betting eight units, then 16, 32, 64, 128, 256 and so on doubling indefinitely. The idea behind the system is that eventually one of these bets must win, and that final winning bet will cover the losses of all previous bets in the progression, plus provide a net win of a single unit.

Another approach taken by many Chinese players is to make their Martingale series “1, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on” instead of “1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on”. This means less risk is taken at the start, but when any bet in the series other than the first one wins, the player breaks even on the series (recouping the single unit lost on the first bet of the series) instead of winning one unit. The player aims to make all his profit on those series where the first bet in the series wins.

All this sounds good in theory, but there are some major drawbacks with the martingale system.

First of all, in order to implement the martingale indefinitely, one requires an infinite bankroll. Even the Sultan of Brunei could technically find himself penniless, due to the geometrically increasing size of the bets. Streaks of 20 or more of one colour in roulette or one side (player or banker) in baccarat, while rare, are certainly not unheard of. The 20th bet in a martingale series is a staggering 524,288 units!

The second issue is that even if you did have the stupendous bankroll required to cover the enormous bets the system calls for during an extended run of losses, the casino will not accept bets of this size. Typically, if a martingale progression is started with the table minimum, the table maximum bet is reached on about the eighth bet.

A third (admittedly much smaller) problem is that the martingale system requires not only infinite bankroll, but also infinite time.

Despite these known problems, the martingale does provide a system that creates a very high probability of numerous small wins in the short term. However, the glaring shortfall of the martingale is that at some stage there will be a massive loss that eliminates all the short term wins thus far.

In addition to the martingale, other betting systems such as the reverse martingale and the Fibonacci have evolved. We’ll examine these and other betting system in future issues of World Gaming.