For anyone interested, this strategy is called the [1]Martingale betting system. It works great if a gambler has infinite money, but no gamblers do. It can deplete your bankroll very quickly, due to the exponential nature of the betting system. Your expected profit from this game style is still slightly below zero, due to the relatively unlikely event of running out of bankroll before winning and losing a catastrophic amount of money.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)

EDIT: Everyone seems to have beaten me to this answer... :p

Not only that, but the 0 (and 00 if applicable) also push the odds against you.

The Martingale simply does not work. An infinitely wealthy gambler employing this strategy over an infinite time horizon on a fair game has a neutral expectation. For every gambler who comes out ahead, another one comes out behind. Additionally, real life gamblers aren't infinitely wealthy and casino games are negative expectation.

If it "works" for you, you're just the survivor bias.

I agree it doesn't work but with infinite money you can win any finite amount of money. Your assertion assumes that you don't stop after a win.

He's not saying that there is literally one winner per loser, but that statistically the group of winners and group of losers will be about the same size, for a fair game.

If you profited $10K for two weeks of work, you'd be getting all kinds of free stuff to get you to stick around longer and/or come back. (You'd also probably be laughed at behind your back since that's a pretty lousy take for a hell of a lot of work and a lot of risk)

Winning $10K from a casino is background noise. It's nothing that will get you kicked out.

That's not cheating..... it's a perfectly fine, perfectely efficient way for the casino to make money.

If you are splitting your bets among players to get around table limits, they might frown on that - but that's not because you are "winning" it's because you are circumventing their table limits.

This is called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_%28betting_system%29

Betting $100,000 on two tables has a lower probability of returning $400,000 than betting $200,000 on one table. Also a lower probability of returning zero, but winning one of those bets and losing the other doesn't help. Needing to win two independent (consecutive or simultaneous) negative-EV bets to beat a losing streak of a certain length increases the probability that combination of events won't happen, and if you lose both bets at the table limit (which is slightly more probable than winning both) you'll need to spread your bets across even more tables and hope even more independent events fall in your favour.

It is pretty basic maths that will demonstrate that this system doesn't work (as in it doesn't "beat" the casino).

You say you won $10k, but how much money did you have? You said at one point you had $60k on the table so let's assume you had just that - if you put the entire 60k on something which has 7:6 odds then the odds of you winning are high but exactly what you would expect given the winnings compared with the bet.

When you play with the martingale strategy your odds of winning aren't any better, you just think they are because you don't realise your entire pot of money is actually at stake.

But this obviously fails in exactly the same way when there are no more tables. The strategy simply doesn't work.

The Martingale strategy is not viable.

If winning at casinos is your goal, you're going to need to look elsewhere.

I may be wrong, but I don't know if that works at a lot of casinos because of the zeros and double zeros on the wheel. I think that gives the house an edge.

That's called Martingaling, and it isn't beating a casino because eventually you'll hit a losing streak and either run out of money or hit table limits.

The Martingale only wins in the long run if you have unlimited wealth and time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_%28betting_system%29

I don't see how this betting scheme can be of advantage if each game round is independent of the previous. Plus many casinos put a maximum bet limit anyway if you could somehow make it work.

Except for limits (be it imposed by the casino or your bank account), it's a no-loss situation, even with slightly less than half winning chance (eg due to 0).

Every time you lose, you make up by increasing the potential earning: $1 lost, $2 lost ($-3 total), $4 lost ($-7 total), $8 won ($1 total)

The only problem is that these theoretical limits are really limiting in practice ;-) In case of the GPs buddies, if they started at $15, playing at ~$60k means that they lost 12 times in a row, and if they finally won that round, they still only gained $15.

I just bet using my lucky numbers (no, you may not have them). Guess I beat them too.