The Reality with Roulette Strategies
A simple Google search will tell you the sheer number of tactics, strategies and supposed secrets to help you win more frequently in roulette. As is the case with most other casino games, scholars and common gamblers alike all the way from hundreds of years ago have been trying to find a way to predict the result for the next spin or to find a pattern in the game. Hundreds of thousands of rounds of roulette were performed to forward this effort, and some people claim to have reached that goal, the Holy Grail of the game, the secret to winning at roulette. Such people usually publish their findings in a book or pamphlet, which they'll probably try to sell to you for $39.99 plus shipping. But do those things really work?
Before you go on, first read about a coin game that was popular in France before the 19th century. In that game, you would win an amount equal to your bet if the coin landed heads, while you would lose your bet to the game master if it landed tails. It's pretty obvious that there's a 50% probability of the coin landing in your favor at any given time. If you lose any time in the game, you could bet twice as much on the next round so that, should you win, you could recoup what you lost.
The situation above is one of the simplest examples of the martingale system of betting at work. It can be considered one of the grandfathers, an ancestor of most of the betting systems and so-called gambling secrets that are included in a lot of literature. With the martingale betting system, you double your bet after every loss, supposedly to let you recover all your losses upon your first winning shot like what was described above.
But there's a very big flaw in the martingale system. While it does sound good and sensible on paper, it's a very different story on paper. You see, in order to bet twice as much after a loss, you'd have to have quite an awful lot of money. While it might be practical to do with a coin game where your chances are 50:50 and there's a good chance that you'll win your losses back in the next round, it's not the case with other games that have more probabilities like, say, roulette. If you consider the likelihood of the ball landing in your favor, the number of rolls it would take for the ball to do that and the amount of money you'd spend betting in all the previous (not to mention losing) rounds, why, you must have an unlimited bankroll.
And there lies the problem. Few people, if at all, probably have a bottomless bankroll and, unless you have one, you're going to find executing the martingale system very difficult. That, in turn, makes many contemporary writings based on the martingale system impractical for use with roulette. Once the fundamental idea has been debunked, the whole house of gambling literature cards comes crashing down.
Betting systems can be considered a milder version of gambling techniques because you're just moderating the amount of money you bet (and will most probably lose) instead of actually influencing the game. As seen above, betting systems can hardly be used for roulette, much less gambling techniques. In games of chance like roulette, that's exactly the only thing you can count on - chance.