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I don't know that it's mathematically worse than any other betting strategy. It's bad because it seems deceptively simple enough for your average, not mathematically inclined person to think they understand it and then want to try. It can make it seem like it's working for awhile, but then when you lose, you lose everything.
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Jan 26, 2016 10:36
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Doctor Malaver posted:Somebody said earlier how martingale is a bad strategy. How is it worse than any other? If you have three players on a roulette table and one will put everything on a single number, the other will play martingale on red, and the third will close eyes and put random chips on random spots, won't all three have statistically the same chance of doubling their stack? The reason martingale is bad is because you will end up betting a lot of money to win your original stake. Also the tables have limits which are quite low to stop you doing it. In my place minimum on the outside bets(forgotten the correct name for them... red/black, odd/even etc) was £5, max was 1000. If you start at 5 and double each time its only 8 times you can bet before you get to 640 and cant double your bet anymore after that so will lose money. At that point you are also betting 640 to overall be up by 5 from where you started, but potentially losing that 640 AND all the previous bets you made. But yeah the house edge is always the same wherever you bet. There are some rules we have in Europe but I don't think the US has where if the ball lands on zero you only lose half, or you can match the bet again and keep it on the table (if you have 5 down on a zero you can put another 5 on to make it 10 for the next spin) which half the house edge. If you are doing a martingale you have to double your bets each time though, but someone just placing random bets can raise or lower their bets however they want.
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Jan 26, 2016 11:30
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The house edge is always the same*, so betting more money like the Martingale requires you to means you're giving up more to the house edge with every bet. If your goal is to get the most out of your money and play as long as you can, you should just place the minimum every time. *There are actually different odds on some bets in roulette, so you can increase the house edge by making certain bad bets as well.
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Jan 26, 2016 15:39
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Jimmy Little Balls posted:The reason martingale is bad is because you will end up betting a lot of money to win your original stake. Also the tables have limits which are quite low to stop you doing it. How come the casino wants to stop you?
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Jan 27, 2016 00:31
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Doctor Malaver posted:How come the casino wants to stop you? That's not the primary purpose of table limits. Rather, it's the upper limit the casino is willing to risk per bet, based on whatever the executives think is good, the size of the casino and how much resources they might have, or so on. A small casino might have a $100 max bet while medium to large ones can arrange for $5,000 maximum bets or more, and that's just for anyone off the street. Players that have a sufficient reputation and the funds will often be able to negotiate 'special limits', subject to the approval of some executive authority or another.
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Jan 27, 2016 02:29
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E4C85D38 posted:That's not the primary purpose of table limits. Rather, it's the upper limit the casino is willing to risk per bet, based on whatever the executives think is good, the size of the casino and how much resources they might have, or so on. A small casino might have a $100 max bet while medium to large ones can arrange for $5,000 maximum bets or more, and that's just for anyone off the street. Players that have a sufficient reputation and the funds will often be able to negotiate 'special limits', subject to the approval of some executive authority or another. Yeah, that makes more sense. Playing martingale only doubles the bet while betting on a number gets 35x the bet anyway.
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Jan 27, 2016 11:31
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Doctor Malaver posted:Somebody said earlier how martingale is a bad strategy. How is it worse than any other? If you have three players on a roulette table and one will put everything on a single number, the other will play martingale on red, and the third will close eyes and put random chips on random spots, won't all three have statistically the same chance of doubling their stack? Is five dollars worth as much to you as five thousand dollars? Would you rather have been making 100,000 a year and suddenly be cut down to 50,000 or have been making 18,000 and now be down to 9,000? In poker tournaments there's a concept called Chip EV (aka independent chip model). You can look into it more if you like but what it boils down to is that if you have ten chips you don't have ten times the value (as far as the tournament goes) as if you have one chip, you have something less. This means people with bigger stacks should by rights be slinging around larger valuations (even proportionally to their stack) and also that if you see someone electing to put what remains of a small stack at play (assuming they know what they're doing) you have to give that more respect. The truth is that the funds you have as an individual work this way as well -- having 100k to invest (at an early age) and but losing half of it is horrible and will definitely change your retirement plans measurably (no more yearly travel, no home care or bad retirement home in old age, etc), whereas having 1MM and dropping to 500k, while 10x worse in raw number value, actually means little for how your retirement will go (still traveling at a whim, still having a home, a vacation home, and probably a rental, still able to swing home health care when it comes to that, the difference is just that you travel to SE Asia instead of Monaco, your homes are modest instead of mansions, your nurse isn't 24/7, etc). Martingaling (if you stick to it) will eventually expose you to a large bet due the exponential nature of the scheme and gambling for life changing sums is different than gambling for entertainment. This is the exact reason casinos have limits on bets at the tables -- the money is real to them too and too much exposure is ruinous. In addition to that if you're playing as a 5.56% dog do you want to be doing it at an average of five dollars per bet twenty times an hour or an average of fifty dollars a bet at an average of twenty bets an hour? Martingaling by necessity forces you to increase your average bet amount above the minimum in an -EV game. The effect of the larger bets costing you more vs flat betting can be seen in the following graph:  (Meaning? If you're a purestrain autist Martingaling is about twice as bad as flat betting. In reality it's much worse due to the occasionally gigantic bet you have to put in and the "life cEV" effects of that on you when you lose them.) raton fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jan 27, 2016 |
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Jan 27, 2016 19:31
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I've played some poker so I understand how that works. You want to have more chips relative to your opponents because you're playing against them, not against the house. As for the graph, it seems to show that you should play Martingale if you want to actually make money because you can do it on a short term swing. If you miss that swing, stop playing. If on the other hand you just want to play with a small loss then stick to flat bets. Years ago a friend of mine "discovered" Martingale so to prove to him that it doesn't work I wrote a simple program that had a bank of 1000 units and started with a 1 unit bet. The program ended when it either got to 0 units or to 2000. Of course it went bust more often than doubling the bank. It would be interesting to compare the number of bets it took it on average to end with a number of bets it would take a similar program that bets 10 units randomly all the time. We can interpret the number of bets the program managed before ending as entertainment value you're getting from the game. What you're saying (and it sounds right to me too) is that the Martingale-playing program would sooner go bust than a 10 unit random bet program.
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Jan 28, 2016 11:05
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Doctor Malaver posted:As for the graph, it seems to show that you should play Martingale if you want to actually make money because you can do it on a short term swing. If you miss that swing, stop playing. If on the other hand you just want to play with a small loss then stick to flat bets. I mean, if that's the message someone gets from that graph I want them at my poker table with chips and cards. Not saying that some people won't draw that conclusion, but it's a really bad conclusion.
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Jan 28, 2016 15:01
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I like to do that doubling bets thing. "martingale" or whatever you guys call it I've been in a casino ~7 times. I play roulette and put it all on black. If I lose I double my bet. I only bring enough to play 3 rolls. So basically I get 3 chances to land on black or I lose it all. If I win one time I just leave the casino. I understand that If I lose, I'm losing 7x the amount of money I'm trying to win. I'm proud to say I've won money every single time I've stepped foot to a casino. Does this mean I am stupid?
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Jan 29, 2016 06:42
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As long as you don't come in expecting to win you're not really an idiot. I used to like working Friday and Saturday nights best since most people who came in where people out drinking for the night and just came in to have fun, most of them never having been to a casino before so they just wanted to see what it was like. I don't really gamble but if i do go to a casino i just give myself £100 and pretend I've aleady lost it so any money I have left when I leave is a bonus. The people who come in everyday and have strategies for the games expecting to become a millionaire off it are the idiots. I guess somewhere like vegas where you get free drinks if you give yourself a limit and stick to it, it can be cheaper than going to a bar.
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Jan 29, 2016 10:34
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The "idea" behind the Martingale system is that any one win negates all of your previous losses. However, to use the system "perfectly" requires unlimited betting and an infinite bankroll, two things no player or casino have. Also, on that graph, each unit of time is one shoe of Baccarat, which is about 40 hands. (Assuming 6 decks, 66% penetration, and an average of 5 cards dealt per hand.) A "session" at a table is probably a few hundred hands, or maybe 5-10 shoes. (Sure, some people will sit there for hours, but most people generally don't, although Baccarat tends to attract the players who have a "system.") You're not even getting to the first tickmark on the x-axis of the graph, which means the long term trend is nearly meaningless. (It definitely still matters, because the EV adds up, but in any short session, you're almost as likely to win as you are to lose. All 3 lines on the chart start out winning.) That last part is what makes gambling entertaining - even with the odds against you, you can still leave a winner if you're lucky. (That's for things like pit games/slots; when you're playing poker/backgammon/whatever where you're playing against the other players, you're trying to exploit a skill edge, but in the short term, luck is a major factor, too.)
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Jan 29, 2016 18:59
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I LIKE COOKIE posted:Does this mean I am stupid? Separately is there any analysis of a Martingale-like strategy where instead of increasing bet sizes to recover accrued losses, you keep the same bet size but bet on increasingly long odds to recover losses? It has the same flaw in that at some point you will go broke or not be able to find a long enough bet, but seems more practical than attempting to double your bet however many times. If I lose a one unit bet 30 times in a row, I can walk over to the roulette wheel and (try to) get a better than 30:1 payout, but doubling my bet 30 times in a row is likely impossible.
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Jan 29, 2016 22:26
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twodot posted:Depends on what you're trying to do. Betting on black has a 47% win rate, so 85% of the time you'll hit on one of your bets and recover on betting unit, and 15% of the time you lose seven betting units. Your expected value for one session is -0.2 betting units. Just betting 7 units on black has an expected value of -0.42, so your exposure isn't ridiculous. What you seem to be ignoring, is the value of having money on the table when drink service come around. If you were due to hit the longshot why not bet it in the first place bud Wait I ran a sim 
raton fucked around with this message at 03:24 on Feb 1, 2016 |
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Feb 1, 2016 03:22
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Do you dealers ever see trouble at the craps tables over players who bet against the flow (usually the Don't Pass/Don't Come betters)? When I go to play I switch it up between playing Do and Don't every couple goes around the table, and once in a while I've gotten some dark fuckin' looks from other players, like I've somehow jinxed the whole table.
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Feb 1, 2016 07:11
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Ciaphas posted:Do you dealers ever see trouble at the craps tables over players who bet against the flow (usually the Don't Pass/Don't Come betters)? When I go to play I switch it up between playing Do and Don't every couple goes around the table, and once in a while I've gotten some dark fuckin' looks from other players, like I've somehow jinxed the whole table. It usually only ever comes to looks. Craps players are superstitious, and they probably did think you jinxed the table, but they're more than likely just going to move instead of starting anything. If someone is going to cause trouble, they generally would have over basically anything that irks them, and there's usually tells that inform the supervisors and security that something is going to go down. That said, discretion is the better part of valor. Any fights I have seen are usually preceded by posturing. If someone decides to get in your face, starts yelling, or both, take your chips (if something is on the table that you can't immediately reach, inform the boxperson as loud as you can that all your bets that can be off are off/that nothing has action, and once things have calmed down return to the table to get your money back, or speak with the pit boss if that isn't feasible) and put some distance between you and them. Security will probably resolve it, but the resolution probably isn't something you want to be near.
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Feb 1, 2016 07:57
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