Martingale Roulette System

The martingale is probably the most common roulette system; lots of people use it or use some variation of it. It's a system that we advice caution with and you should always have a stop loss limit.

So what is the Martingale? You basically start out with a small bet and then increase your bets after every loss until you get a win. How much you decrease them by will depend on what you're betting on, and we have all the progressions listed below.

The upside to the martingale is that it can prolong your winning runs and give you lots of small wins. The downside is that it only takes one bad losing run to put a serious dent in your bankroll.

Here is the progression that you need to use when you're betting on even chance bets which are red/black, odd/even and 1-18/19-36.

As you can see, the bets start out very managable but after 6 losses things start getting risky. What you need to remember is that no matter which stage of the progression you win on, you will always only be in profit by 1 betting unit. However if for example you got to the stage where you had to bet 512 and lost, you would be down by 1023 altogether.

We have been playing roulette for years and in our experience we've found that if you start betting on a colour and use the above progression, you're asking for trouble long term.

What a lot of people do is wait until there's been 4 or 5 colours in a row and then they bet on the opposite using the martingale. While this is safer than betting on a colour straight away and doubling your bets, it's what's commonly known as gambler's fallacy. It's worth pointing out that we have seen 16 colours in a row and what you can take from this is that long runs without colours can and do happen, both and online and offline.

Before we move on to other variations of the martingale, it's worth saying that you should always set yourself a stop loss limit and a profit target. By stop loss I mean a certain point in the progression that you aren't going to go past and an acceptable amount that you're prepared to lose. I think profit target pretty much speaks for itself.

The Martingale On Other Parts Of The Roulette Table

The martingale is by no means limited to the even chance bets, it can be used elsewhere as well. Usually if it's not being used on the even chance bets, it's being used on the dozens or the columns.

This is more of the same, you start out with a small bet and then when you lose you gradually increase your bets. The good thing about betting on dozens or columns is that the progression isn't as steep as it is with even chance bets.

The downside is that you aren't covering as much of the table. With the even chance bets you're covering just less than half the table but with the dozens and columns you're covering just less than a third.

This is the progression that you need to use when betting on a dozen or column 

As you can see the progression is a little safer than the one you would use for the even chances, but like all progressions, it gets risky eventually.

Now it would be suicidal if you started betting on a dozen or a column straight away using the progression above because you would definitely go bust before long. Most players adopt the a strategy of waiting for a few spins without a dozen before betting on it.

Personally, we don't believe that's a good idea because we have seen quite baron spells without a dozen hitting. I can't remember the eact number but it was around 28 spins consecutivley without a dozen and that's a lot.

As always, set yourself a stop loss limit and a profit target and don't be greedy either way, stick to it. If you want a safer system why not take a look at the Labouchere.