Betting Systems
Betting systems are strategies of adjusting the size of your bets to influence your short-term profitability. No betting system is capable of defeating the house edge, which means that those systems simply won’t work with a long-term approach – if you play enough hands or spins, the casino will always get its due.
While it is possible to increase the odds of winning over a limited number of games, you have to remember that this always comes at a price, as you’ll never be guaranteed to win – and the eventual defeat might be very painful. Simply put, the more likely a betting system is to make you a short-term winner, the more risky using it will be. That being said, gambling systems definitely have their uses and can really spice up your online gambling experience.
Martingale
The Martingale is one of the most famous and oldest gambling systems. The greatest strength of the Martingale is the fact that it makes it very likely for you to win a short, two or three hour-long gaming session – but if you actually lose, you’re probably going to regret thinking about moving away from betting flat.
The basic rules of the Martingale are to double your bet each time you lose, and to place 50/50 wagers, such as betting Red or Black in online roulette or betting the Pass Line in craps. For example, if you bet $2 on black in roulette and you lose, you have to bet $4 on the next spin. If you lose again, you bet $8 – and if you manage to win this time, you effectively earn $8 – $4 – $2 = $2 and you reset back to a $2 wager.
The problem with the Martingale is the fact that you’ll inevitably have a losing streak that won’t allow you to double up on your bet. In the aforementioned example, losing 13 bets in a row will require you to pay $16,384 – even if you could afford that, the maximum size of your wager for table games on most online casino sites typically doesn’t exceed $5,000.
You might get away with winning small for a few hours, but each time you lose, you’re quite likely to be forced to walk away empty-handed, which wouldn’t be the case if you simply bet $2 flat every single time.
Positive Progression or Anti-Martingale
Positive progression systems are pretty much the opposite of the Martingale, which is by definition a negative progression system since it requires you to bet more whenever you’re losing.
The positive progression systems allow you to exploit your winning streaks to an extent that wouldn’t be possible with simple flat-betting. Quite obviously, the tradeoff here is that you’ll lose more if your streak comes to a sudden halt – but if you get really lucky, you’ll end up with a significantly larger payout.
A good example of a positive progression system would be adding 50% to a safe wager every time you win. For example, if you start with betting $2 on black in roulette and you win, you should be betting $3 in the next round. If you win again, you increase your bet to $4.5 – but if you lose, you go back to betting $2.
That way, a losing streak will cost you only $2 with each defeat, but a winning streak will allow you to utilize some of the money you won to actually contribute to subsequent wins whenever you’re betting a significant portion of the funds you’ve decide to use for your gambling session.
However, please note that, much like the Martingale, a positive progression system won’t decrease the house edge, as all single bets are independent from each other, and stating otherwise would be an example of gambler’s fallacy. The only real impact this system has is maximizing your winnings if you get really lucky, which is counter-balanced by the fact that streak-stopping defeats will put a larger dent in your bankroll.
Playing the Variance
One of the key features of the house edge is the fact that the longer you play, the more prominent it becomes. In other words, the more wagers you place, the more likely to lose you are – if you play a million hands of Blackjack, your results will most probably reflect the expected losses for this game.
The opposite is also true – the shorter you play, the more likely you are to circumvent the house-edge for a short while, as the variance makes everything possible in the short term. Consequently, the logical thing to do would be to minimize your exposure to the house edge and make a single coin-flip bet using the entirety of your bankroll.
In that case, you replace the guarantee of sustaining losses over time with a chance to double up on the money you brought to the table. However, please note that relying on this method doesn’t change the odds for the game that you want to play, which means that the casino will always have an advantage and that using the games with the lowest house edge (generally 5% or less) will increase your chances of success.
Gambling System Scams
A good gambling system might give you a chance to increase your short-term winnings, but it will never guarantee the outcome of the game. Furthermore, no gambling system is capable of making the house edge go away, which means that no system will stand the test of time – once you go through enough repetitions, the edge of the casino will become more and more pronounced.
Consequently, people trying to sell their gambling systems that supposedly “cracked the casinos” are nothing more than scam artists. Online casino games have negative expected value and no amount of voodoo mathematics can change that.
If the guys trying to sell you these products really came up with a working betting system, wouldn’t they be busy earning millions of dollars a day in the casinos instead of struggling to get some of your hard earned cash via a dubious gambling theory site? In the end, one of the biggest benefits of giving a few popular gambling systems a try is the fact that you become impervious to foul play of this kind.
