Page 8 - Jackpot Magazine South ~ October, 2022

PLAY TO WIN
Betting progressions are not the way to win
“A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
— William Edwards Deming, American statistician and management consultant
On the surface, it makes sense. You make a small wager, and you lose. You bet bigger the next time to recoup your loss, but you lose again, make another bet, this time even bigger than the last. It will work, you say to yourself, because unlike before, this time, I will win. It’s a popular system that many use, known as progressive betting, meaning you vary the size of your bets in a determined manner, according to whether or not the previous bet was won or lost.
Henry Tamburin, best-selling author and gaming expert, used
to receive letters about this
and other betting systems.
People used to ask him
whether the systems worked
or not. In a past column
for Jackpot!, Tamburin took a
look at one system in particular, noting that with some progressive betting systems, you increase your bet following a losing hand (so-called negative betting progressions), while in others you increase your bet following a winning hand (positive betting progressions).
But, he wrote, the most famous and widely used progressive betting system is the Martingale, or double-up, system. Working with a blackjack mathematician, he analyzed the Martingale betting system and this is what he shared.
First, Tamburin explained how the Martingale betting system works: It’s actually quite easy to understand and use. You just double your bet after every loss until you finally win, at which point you will be ahead by one betting unit. For example, suppose you wager $10 and the results of the next three hands are loss, loss and win (L-L-W). Using the Martingale system, you
lost $10 on the first hand,
$20 on the second hand
and won $40 on the third
hand. You wind up with
a net win of $10, which
is the goal of the progression, to win an amount equal to your starting wager.
How can there be anything wrong with the logic of the Martingale? Just leave the table after a win and you always walk away with a profit. Right? Well, yes and no. Long streaks of consecutive losses will doom the Martingale player, but pundits will always counter with “the chance that this will happen is slim.” Really? Let’s take a look.
You have about a 52 percent chance of losing a hand in blackjack (excluding ties). The chance that you will lose, say, 10 consecutive (resolved) hands is 0.145
percent, meaning you will average one sequence of 10 losing hands (excluding ties) in about every 692 sequences of 10 hands, and so, this losing streak will occur about once in every seven hours of play (assuming you play 100 resolved hands per hour). And get this, you don’t know when that string of 10 consecutive losses
will occur in the seven hours.
Will it happen when you first sit down,
or maybe in the middle of play? The math says that you have roughly a 12 percent chance of losing 10 in a row in the first hour; a 24 percent in the first two hours; and a whopping 51 percent chance after only five hours (i.e., you are the favorite to have had at least one losing streak of 10 resolved hands). Sadly for Martingale bettors, a streak of 10 consecutive losses is not such a rare event after all.
What about all those frequent winning sessions that Martingale players (and system sellers) always tout about this system? The fact is this: although most players will walk away a small winner most of the time, the money you will lose in that one catastrophic
losing session will more than completely wipe out all the money you will win in your more frequent winning sessions.
In the long run, your wins and losses will add up to the casino’s edge, and the amount of money you will lose using the Martingale betting system will be close to the casino’s theoretical edge in the game, times the total amount of money that you wagered, the same as it is for every other player who plays blackjack. In other words, mathematically speaking, you can’t, and you won’t, gain the advantage over the casino using a Martingale betting system.
There is another more practical issue with the Martingale that also dooms most players who use it, and it is this: on an extended losing streak, you may not be able to double-up your bets because you will bump up against the maximum betting limit imposed by casinos.
For example, suppose you are a $5 bettor and you lose eight (resolved) hands in a row. Your losses at this point total $1,275 (gulp!). Assuming you have the bankroll (and the guts) to double up again, your next wager according to the Martingale is $1,280, which exceeds the $1,000 table betting limit that you’ll find in most casinos on low-limit tables. Unfortunately, there is no way for the progressive bettor to bet enough to recoup his losses when this occurs other than to move to a higher-limit table.
There are, for sure, many other types of betting progressions that players use to try to beat the casino at blackjack. If you remember one thing, though, remember this: The odds of winning any hand in blackjack are not dependent on whether you won or lost the previous hand, which is why betting progressives don’t work. Rather, the odds of winning are dependent on the ratio of high cards to low cards in the unplayed cards.
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