Spaceman_Spiff
Legendary
*
Offline Offline

Activity: 1638
Merit: 1000


₪``Campaign Manager´´₪


View Profile Personal Message (Offline)

Ignore
April 06, 2014, 10:31:29 AM

The Martingale "system" has no sound rational basis to even be called a system in the first place, because it does not actually do anything statistically that in any way improves outcome of any arbitrary series of fixed bets.

All the Martingale system actually does is play psychological games with your perception of wins and losses, and appeals to a misguided sense that the individual bets are somehow not statistically-independent events.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure casinos love the Martingale, since it gets you betting more and more on losing bets.

They do NOT like any system that may be employed by any gambler in which the gambler walks away with 1 satoshi more than he started with.
Martingale doesn't change the expected return of a bet.  It only results in a large probability of a small win, and a small probability of a big loss.  The average expected return stays the same.  Casino's won't mind as long as they can say stop when the betting amount gets too high.

The starting unit can be any unit.. you can start at $100.... and each time you win you start again at $100.. so then you are accumulating $100 for each series.. yes, you may have a 7 time losing streak that results in bets of $6,400.. but that would be rare.. you are mostly going to stay in the $100 to $1600 territory... and pocket $100 each time... and yes, if you go there starting at $100, then you will likely need to bring a pretty big bankroll in the unlikely event of a losing streak of 10 that brings you to the $51,200 bet... that way it may be better to start with a $1 or a $2 or maybe at most a $10 bet...just in case you have a prolonged negative streak.
None of that changes what I said.  It doesn't matter that losing is rare, as long as (odds of loosing * amount lost)>(odds of winning * amount won), you are on average going to lose money.
This is a situation in which you should listen to your mathematical brain, not the intuitive one, cause while the latter is very handy for handling complex situations, it takes shortcuts and is buggy.