Everyone who plays roulette in land-based or online casinos is aware of the existence of “strategies” and most gamblers use them actively. These strategies promise many things: to increase your chances of winning, to cover your losses, to make you win big… But do they really work? If you are playing roulette for money, is it really worth using a strategy? In this article, we will answer these questions.
Strategy Types
To explain how effective they can be, let’s first briefly talk about the basic types of strategies. All roulette strategies that exist aim to do one of the following:
- Increase your chances of winning,
- Managing your budget efficiently.
This distinction is more important than you might think, as it determines whether the strategy will actually work. Strategies that increase your chances of winning are simpler and once you start using them, you don’t need to make any changes. For example, a strategy called “James Bond” allows you to cover 25 out of 37/38 possible outcomes by placing certain bets each round. This gives you a theoretical 68% chance of winning in European roulette. You just need to keep placing the bets required by the strategy until you make a profit.
Strategies that focus on managing your budget are more dynamic and complex. They require you to regularly change the amount of bets according to the win/loss situation, often even following a specific mathematical sequence. For example, the most famous strategy in this category, the Martingale, requires you to double your bet after every loss.
Winning Chance Strategies Don’t Work
Strategies that increase your chances of winning may seem to work in the short term, but they will be useless in the long term, because:
- Even if you cover 36 out of 37 outcomes, you cannot eliminate the casino edge. In the long run, the math formula the game uses will always ensure that the casino wins.
- The more outcomes you cover, the more bets you have to place and only one of them can win – the others you lose. So even if you win, your bankroll will continue to be depleted by losing bets.
Strategies that try to increase your chances of winning will seem to work if you play with low stakes and don’t participate in games that last longer than 10-15 spins, but this is a misconception: at a certain point, the casino will always make a profit on your bets, and you will eventually get back less than you invested.
Budget Strategies Work, But Not the Way You Think
Strategies that increase or decrease bet amounts according to certain rules work. They are all based on the same principle: the player eventually wins. When this happens, the winning bet will pay out a big enough money to cover all your losses and leave you with a small amount of profit. Technically, this is true: indeed, at a certain point you win – you can’t lose forever. And if you have held on until that point, you will indeed be paid an amount that covers your losses and allows you to get more money than you invested. However, these strategies have two main problems:
- Nobody knows when you will win. You can lose 20 times in a row. Imagine that each time you increase the bet twice: on the 21st spin you might win, yes, but will you be able to afford it or will you go bankrupt?
- Every roulette game has a maximum table limit. Once you reach this limit, you can no longer increase the bet. All these strategies require regular bet increases to work. Therefore, the moment you reach the table limit, they stop working.
Some strategies try to limit the rate at which bets increase, others focus on extending the time until you go bust, but they all end up in the same place: unless you have an infinitely large bankroll and a game with an infinite table limit, at some point they become useless.
