With €100m, could you make money playing roulette?

insafehands

Now I don't have that much money, but theoretically, do you think it would be possible?

For example. We start at 0. 0 = €100m.

We're only dealing with either choosing red or black here (i.e. 48%/48%).

Here's how we bet, and possible outcomes.

10 on RED. Lose.
20 on RED. Lose. (we bet 20 so that if we won, we would be back to 0)

We're now 30 down. So we bet 30.

30 on RED. Lose.

Now, we're 60 down.

60 on RED. Win.

So we're now back at 0. The point I'm making is that we'll eventually get back to 0; if we have enough money.

Now take this situation.

10 on RED. Win. This is starting from 0 again.

So we're now 10 up. Our bankroll is 100,000,010. (one hundred million and ten euro).

This figure now becomes 0.

So we start again.

10 on RED. Lose.

20 on RED. Lose.

40 on RED. Lose.

80 on RED. Lose.

160 on RED. Win.

We're back to point 0, and again €100,000,010.

The main theory is that if we lose, we attempt to get back to 0. This will eventually happen.

If we win, then subsequently lose, we again try to get back to point 0, which will have increased by the amount won. This will eventually happen.

So although this may be tedious and possibly require some time; would it not over a long period of time, be possible to make money from roulette (if you had the money for it - in this case €1,000 would probably have done).

Or am I falling prey to a case of Gambler's fallacy?

ish.

Capt'n Midnight

Also most houses have limits to the amount you can bet, so you can't repeat this indefinitely.

1024=2^10 - so ten throws per thousand, twenty per million , thirty per Billion

Thirty throws of the dice is the difference between 10c and €100,000,000 - not a lot of time really.

There is an expression that goes something about throwing good money after bad.

You say 48% / 48% so you are loosing 4% on each throw. To minimise the house take you could put it all on one throw, but bribing politicians would have a better return.

ecksor

You can do a risk of ruin calculation here, but essentially this is a martingale strategy.

However, if you have €100M and you want to make a lot of money playing roulette, then why wouldn't you just take the side of the house and open a casino?

Capt'n Midnight

ecksor wrote:

why wouldn't you just take the side of the house and open a casino?

bribing politicians would have a better return.
you may need a license or better still a monopoly on casinos in the state

Bernard Hopkins

the house stops this stratedgy,........ they are only there to take your money, and prevent this system.

sooner or later you will end up putting 50 million euros to try and win back your original 10 euro bet.

play with those odds and you will get burnt sooner or later,...... and when you get burned , you will be hit hard.

remember,.... you can win as many times as you like, ...but you can only loose once.

StephenInsane

if you had 100m, why in gods name would you be wasting your time trying to win a tenner?

latenia

Alternatively, you could just stay in bed and make E400 an hour on interest.

hotspur

Everyday thousands of people "discover" the Martingale system anew. No it's not a case of the gambler's fallacy because that refers to thinking that previous incidences of independent events influence the probablity of subsequent events, e.g. heads 7 times in a row? Gotta come up tails, €1k on tails FTW beatch!

However the Martingale system sucks. Here's some links to check it out properly:
http://wizardofodds.com/gambling/bettingsystems.html
http://wizardofodds.com/askthewizard/bettingsystems-martingale.html
And to do computer simulations of it (I've done it better elsewhere but I can't find that one anymore):
http://www.iansharpe.com/art_martingale.php

zuutroy

Nice links...I thought Martingale was only limited by house maxima, never knew it was intrinsically flawed.

Capt'n Midnight

zuutroy wrote:

Nice links...I thought Martingale was only limited by house maxima, never knew it was intrinsically flawed.

The house limit is to cover the house against a gambler with a real lucky streak.