4. The Double-Up System

When a player pits his wits against Roulette or any other table game like Craps or Blackjack, he must find some way to keep himself a business despite the constant tax imposed upon him by the house percentage.

That sounds impossible, but it isn't. Not that anyone should try to beat the house or, for that matter, gamble at all. Nobody should, because it isn't worth the trouble. It's like two salesmen each trying to sell the other something he doesn't need in order to make a commission. Their companies wind up making the real profits and without effort.

But just as one salesman might outsell the other, so might a player outbet the house. In either case he would need a system. There are systems for selling and there are systems that are supposed to beat Roulette and kindred games. Whether they work is a question in its own right. The fact that they exist is recognized.

Each has its merit, just like a sales manager's pep talk. Whether you can go out and beat a Roulette wheel in Monte Carlo or unload a gross of ice-boxes on a colony of Eskimos, is a matter for individual decision. If you ask us, we would take Monte Carlo. The climate is better and it's nicer to gather around a Roulette wheel than within an igloo.

Besides, you meet a better class of people; the bettor class, to be exact, and you will learn more from them than from any book, except that this book is already worth ten tunes its price for telling you that much.

They will say that every player needs a system; that they themselves are using systems. They don't mind telling you how they work—and why not? The bank is big enough to stand the loss, even if you both beat it. Maybe you will come up with some new twist to improve the system. Or you may go bust.

In that case, the man who told you about the system will find out that it doesn't work. He can then try another. No system is perfect, although most players are hoping that they will find one that comes up to that standard.

Double or Nothing

Most systems depend upon a "double-up" process of betting which Roulette players have dubbed the "Martingale." That term, however, is given to various modifications of the Double-up, so we shall study it first in its simplest form. Skip Roulette for the moment and suppose that two friends are flipping coins for $1 a toss. Mr. A is calling "Heads" and the game is getting so monotonous that suddenly Mr. A says:

"I just lost a buck on that toss, so let's make the next double or nothing."

Mr. B agrees. He tosses and the coin comes "tails" so Mr. A loses $2 that trip. Quite undaunted, Mr. A suggests: "Let's double it again. Toss for $4 this time." So they do and when Mr. A again loses, he proposes an $8 toss. That loses, so he goes for $16, then $32 and finally $64, as he experiences still more losses.

By this time, Mr. B is either hoping that Mr. A has a check­book on him, or he is felling sorry for his friend because the game has gotten so far out of hand. Anyway, he keeps on toss­ing away, doubling each time and asking himself: "After all, what can I lose?"

Sooner or later, the coin comes "heads," say on the 12th toss, when Mr. A has wagered $2,048, thus clearing the slate. Naturally, Mr. A is very grateful that his luck finally changed, while Mr. B shrugs it off with: "So what did I lose?"

Mr. B lost $10, chump that he was, by letting Mr. A get away with his "doubling" dodge. If they'd just kept flipping at $1 a toss, Mr. B would have banked eleven wins before Mr. A came up with one. Of course, Mr. B might have gotten smart somewhere along the line, like at the end of the 7th toss, by saying: "Okay, you owe me $64 so pay it now and let's quit."

But the fact remains that by the doubling process, a single win can wipe out a whole series of losses, when dealing with an "even money" proposition. Now let's apply the rule to Roulette.

Doubling with Roulette

Here, the player is privileged to double his bets with no ob­jection from the house, so that he can recoup any number of successive losses that he wishes—up to the house limit. That, of course, is a bad catch, though there is a way of getting around it.

 Suppose the limit is $1200. A player going after black experiences a series of successive losses on the following throws: 1st— $1; 2nd-$2; 3rd-$4; 4th-$8; 5th-$l6; 6th-$32; 7th-$64; 8th-$128; 9th-$256; l0th-$5l2; llth-$l024. Now, for the 12th play, he wants to put up $2048 but can't because of the limit.

What does he do? He puts up $1024 again and at the same time nods to a friend who obligingly brings out another $1024 and places it on Black. The wheel spins; both lose, so what then? They each put up $1024 again and so do two more players who were fiddling about with trifling bets until they were needed.

For another double, four more players would each slap $1024 on the Black, and so on. That is, by doubling the players, it would be possible to continue doubling the stakes, despite the arbitrary limit. But that could get out of hand, too. By the 21st play, there would be one thousand and twenty-four play­ers gathered around the Roulette table, each putting up a bundle of $1024, making a grand total of $1,048,576 to insure a $1 profit on that series.

That many patrons couldn't get into the average gambling house at one time, let alone gang up on a single game. But you'd need that many or more to be certain of the Martingale. According to one authority, the color Red came up twenty-three times in a row at Monte Carlo, followed by a Zero, which would have meant a sequence of twenty-four losses for anyone playing the Martingale on Black.

Even worse, runs of lengths as great as thirty-three have been reported by persons well conversant with Roulette, so you might still be licked even if you had more than a thousand friends standing by to help you throw more than $1,000,000 after $1—even if the bank would let you.

Runs Versus Limits

A martingale, for those who don't know, is a forked harness strap that keeps a horse in hand by holding down his head. But a horse can run away despite a martingale and your bets can do the same when you play the Martingale. But don't laugh off this system, as some people do, on the ground that it's crazy to go doubling your losses just to save a single buck.

There's a lot more to it than just a $1 gain. During the course of a year, a Roulette wheel may make approximately 125,000 spins in a casino like Monte Carlo. Now, on that wheel, there are three "equal" types of play: Red or Black, Odd or Even, High or Low, which makes six "plays" in all, a total of 750,000. Now, if you had $1 riding on all those plays at every turn of the wheel, you would win on nearly half of them.

We say "nearly half* because we must allow for the Zero, which would occur about 2000 times. We can also allow for a Double Zero, knocking off another 2000. Those figures look in­significant when we consider that half of the remaining total, about 372,000 plays, represent a sure profit of $1 each because every win wipes out the chain of losses that it follows.

Here, in simple form, is how it works:

After 0 losses, totaling 0 a win brings $1

After 1 loss, totaling $1 a win brings $2

After 2 losses, totaling $3 a win brings $4

After 3 losses, totaling $7 a win brings $8

After 4 losses, totaling $15 a win brings $16

After 5 losses, totaling $31 a win brings $32

After 6 losses, totaling $63 a win brings $64

After 7 losses, totaling $127 a win brings $128 After 8 losses, totaling $255 a win brings $256 After 9 losses, totaling $511 a win brings $512 After 10 losses, totaling $1023 a win brings $1024

The player must stop right there—assuming that he has cash enough to go that far—because he has reached the limit. Now how do those figures stack up?

Very nicely, according to one estimate, which says that in 1,000 coups—or winning plays—there should be on the average about one run of nine. In short, a player working with $1200 capital would find himself $511 out at the end of such an ad­verse run; but he would still have $512 to put up so as to clear the slate and collect his odd $1 for that coup.

Should it work out that way, never with a run worse than nine, the player would be $1000 to the good and ready to start all over, this time with the bank's money as his stake. That's how good the Martingale can look—on paper.

Evening the Odds

It can look still better if the player is working on Red, Black, Odd, Even, High and Low, all at once. He will need more capital because he is playing the game six ways, but it won't have to be six times as much. It won't even have to be three times as much for a very simple reason, namely:

Red and Black can be played to the hilt with the same $1024 —or even a few dollars less—because every time a string of Reds are doubling Black's losses, they are bringing in a dollar by dollar profit on the Red column. The same applies to Odd and Even as well as High and Low.

What's more: When a player does encounter a bad streak of nine in either Red or Black, there's not a chance in a million that he will be hit that badly in the other departments: High-Low or Odd-Even. So a fund of perhaps $2000 should carry the whole burden, which is nice to know, for those who want to try.

We say "those" because usually two or more players pool their brains as well as resources in an operation of this sort, as there are several piles of chips to handle. But there is no book-work or tabulating required with this system, unless the players want it for future reference.

The process is fantastically simple. On every win, a player puts away $1 in a special pocket and keeps using the rest of his stake to double the wagers as required. At the end of the session, whatever he has pocketed is profit. To make it even up, a player should quit just after a Red win has been followed by a Black win, or vice versa.

The same applies to the High-Low and Odd-Even combi­nations. Everything will then be cleaned up nicely, unless the players themselves have already been cleaned out because the Martingale failed to work.

That can, indeed, happen. If it couldn't, there would no long­er be a Monte Carlo, nor a Las Vegas. There would only be a Havana, where some of the wheels are reputedly so crooked that nothing matters anyway.

But the Martingale can fail, even if a player has cash and nerve enough to risk $1024 on an eleventh play, for the simple reason that sequences of eleven and more may crop up at any time, sinking the player, Martingale and all. At the same time, the Martingale has been known to put others in business and keep them there a good while.

You can't dispute the fact that mathematically the odds are against the player in Roulette and other casino games, because the house percentage is sure to win out in the long run. But the double-up system is a mathematical demonstration, too, and over short hauls it frequently works in the player's favor.

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