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The martingale roulette system is probably the most well known and well-used system that there is. Unfortunately for a number of reasons it doesn't work even when playing on roulette with zero house edge. On this page I shall describe the system and it's flaws to give you a better understanding both of the martingale system and roulette systems in general.

How the Martingale Strategy works:
The martingale roulette system is a simple doubling-up strategy. The player makes his bet of one unit on an 'even-money' chance i.e. red or black, odd or even. If he loses then he places a bet of double the amount onto the same choice. If he loses again then he doubles his bet again etc. In a row of losing bets the player will be staking amounts of 1,2,4,8,16 units etc. Whenever the player wins he will start again by placing a bet of one unit.

The theory behind this system is that on an even-money chance it is only a matter of time before the player wins his bet, and when he does so he will have made a profit of one unit. For example if the player wins when he has a four unit bet on the table he will receive 8 units back for his total outlay up to that point of 7 units.

Why the martingale strategy doesn't work:
The reason for this is quite simple really. Casinos have limits, both high and low, on the bets that can be placed on table games. Although these vary from casino to casino and from table to table they are never likely to have a table where the maximum bet is 1,000 or more times greater than the minimum bet and most tables will be much stricter than this. Although this seems like a lot it is in fact not very much at all. If we carry on the progression I have already shown you: 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024 you can see that a series of ten losing bets would in fact push you over the table maximum at even the most liberal of tables. It would also be extremely poor money management to be placing bets of say $1024 to win a single $1. And before you say that it is very rare to have a series of ten losing bets, it isn't, in fact it can happen quite often.

Another way in which this system is flawed is how it considers the bet's to be even-money bets, when in fact they have a slightly less than 50/50 chance of winning. This is due to the 0 or 0 and 00 that roulette tables have. These cause all bets apart from those on these numbers themselves to lose. This is quite an important factor which should be taken into consideration when developing or studying a roulette system.

History of the Martingale Strategy
Originally the 'Martingale' was the name used for a group of betting systems which were popular in France during the 18th Century. It is not named after a particular person, and no-one is sure why the the name Martingale camed about. We do know that it was used to describe the simplest strategy whereby a coin is flipped and the player wins if heads is thrown and loses if tails. The strategy involved doubling a win after every loss, ensuring that at any point a win would recover all previous losses during that run as well as a profit equal to one unit stake.

The Martingale strategy was seen as a guaranteed profit machine by thos who practised it, but of course none of these people had the infinite bankroll needed to ensure it's success (if they did they would have no need to gamble). As described above, the infinite bankroll is needed due to the exponential betting patterns used in the system.

It is believed, although not 100% known, that the use of the martingale strategy is the reason casinos first introduce maximum table limit 'spreads', to stop players using the system, although the martingale strategy is completely un-sound anyway.