Martingale System

The Martingale system was invented in 18 century in France. This is one of the oldest and most effective systems in the world. Many other systems are derivative of the Martingale, but all of them are not so effective.

The Martingale is simple, very easy system to learn: the player makes a bet, and then he doubles the amount of the original bet after each loss, when a hand wins the player returns to the original bet. After losing one hand, the player doubles his bet on the next hand and if he wins, he recovers the previous loss and gets a profit. After losing 2 hands one after the other, the win on the third hand covers his losses of two hands, and gives him one betting unit ahead.

However, there is the drawback in this system: the player’s bankroll should be large. If you lose 6 times in a row, you bet must increase 32 times, and so on. If a hand is doubled down or split, this will happen sooner. So, the bet size can be overwhelming, even if you have bet a small amount of $10. Therefore, to be effective over time, the player must have a big bankroll and play at a low-limit table.

But this system is really effective that is why many casinos changed the rules of the game to defeat it. They introduced table limits, so with a table limit of a thousand times the table minimum, a player who uses the Martingale won’t be able to recover his losses after losing 10 times in a row.

But this doesn’t make this system invalid. There is less than a 0.01% possibility that a streak of 10 losses may occur.

Several systems including Oscar's Grind and Labouchere were derived from the Martingale system. These systems have less tough increases in bets, or the frequency of increases in them is decreased.

A "Martingale-four" system offers players to double to twice (for a bet of 4 units) before they return to the initial bet, and playing a "half-Martingale" system the player’s bet increases by 150% and not 200%. Because losses aren’t fully recovered, these systems aren’t as effective as the original.