Doubling Up is not the answer

One of the most popular misconceptions is that the system of playing red/black or odd/even on a roulette table  and doubling up when you lose is an infallible way to win. It sounds of course very simple; if your 1 Euro bet loses you double the stake to 2 Euro so if you win you have a profit of 1 Euro and if you lose again you double once more to 4 Euro and so on until you eventually win. There are two distinct fallacies with this thinking; firstly you are ignoring the possibility of the “zero” coming up in which case you lose no matter whether you backed red or black or odd or even and secondly you can end up betting a lot of money to win 1Euro so is it worth it? Some casinos, even online casinos have quite small limit spreads (the difference between minimum and maximum bets) which means for example if your minimum bet is 1 Euro and the maximum is 250 Euro after 8 consecutive losses you can no longer double up to recover your loss. Anyone who has played roulette will tell you that 8 consecutive reds or blacks is a quite frequent occurrence. But what if the spread is 500 Euro, it must be considerably more? Actually no, even with a 500 Euro spread you can only have 9 losses before you reach the table maximum and a 1000 Euro spread will still only give you 10 losses before you hit the ceiling and by this time you will have lost 1023 Euro. Even if your next maximum bet of 1000 Euro is a winner you are still 23 Euro down and as you are only winning 1 Euro every time you go through this process you will need to do it 23 times to break even.

The answer is don’t go down this route, it is a very dangerous gaming strategy.