4
Jan
Jan
Why does this not work for roulette?
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2kool4u asked:
In roulette, if you place a bet on the color black, you double your bet. The color black comes up slightly less than one time in two (on average). So theoretically, if you kept doubling your bet you would always come out on top, as long as the colour black came up once in a while. Why doesn’t this work in practice? (It doesn’t–I tried it!) Leaving out the possibility that the game was fixed.
I mean, the idea is that if you lose, you double your previous bet and keep doubling it until you win. Then you go back to your initial stake and start again.
How To Win Poker
In roulette, if you place a bet on the color black, you double your bet. The color black comes up slightly less than one time in two (on average). So theoretically, if you kept doubling your bet you would always come out on top, as long as the colour black came up once in a while. Why doesn’t this work in practice? (It doesn’t–I tried it!) Leaving out the possibility that the game was fixed.
I mean, the idea is that if you lose, you double your previous bet and keep doubling it until you win. Then you go back to your initial stake and start again.
How To Win Poker
Category : Other - Science
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The problem is running out of money before you hit the win. It doesn’t take very many losses for the money to add up. If you put one dollar on black and it came up red 8 times in a row you would already be up to 512 dollars. And if you had the 512 dollars and it finally hit red, you would only be one dollar ahead after all that.
The reason of this is the fact that there is some non-zero possibility of getting red N times in a row, where N is any given number. So if you are playing rather long such a row can happen and you will simply get rid of your money…
This system of betting is called the “martingale” and has been known and discussed for two or three hundred years. The Wikipedia article explains its flaw better than I can.