Avoidable Roulette Betting Strategies

Lessons should not only teach what should be done, but also teach what should be avoided. In online roulette the second aspect becomes more important. This is because so many betting strategies have been propounded as offering certain ways to beat the online casino. Unfortunately none of them work.

The simple fact of the matter is that in roulette each bet has a constant house edge. This is 5.26% in American Roulette and 2.70% in European Roulette. No matter what combination of bets the player chooses or how he increases or decreases the wagered amount, in the long run he will lose out to the online casino.

The most common betting strategy is the Martingale strategy. It involves doubling the wager on an even money bet after each loss. It is often stated as that when the player will eventually win he will recover his losses and end up winning an amount equal to his original wager. The use of the word "when" is intentionally misleading. The correct word should be "if". A player can keep on betting on Red all the time and a Black number can be called all the time. Though this is unlikely it is possible and therefore the correct word is "if".

Even if one assumes that eventually the player will win, it is impossible to predict how many times he will have to double before the win takes place. This is important because in online roulette the player cannot go on doubling for ever, or even for a large number of spins. All online roulette games have an upper limit on the wager and in most cases this is 500. If a player starts with a chip of denomination 1 and starts doubling, he can do so only 9 times. His tenth time will require a denomination of 512, which exceeds the limit. If he loses all nine times, and that is a real possibility then he has lost over 1000 credits in all. And if he wins any one of the nine times his net win is only 1 credit. Let us say a player wants to win at least 5 credits at the end of the doubling exercise. He has to start with 5 credits. This means that he can double only seven times before reaching the maximum wager limit of 500. This illustrates that the Martingale strategy is theoretically not fool proof and practically worthless. Several other strategies have been devised that are variants of the Martingale strategy. All of them are avoidable.

If at all a player wants to try out a strategy there is one that has some merit. It does not guarantee a win. In fact at the end of it all the player faces the same house edge that he faces in any single wager. However this strategy makes the play livelier and hence the player can have some fun. This roulette betting strategy was proposed by Andrez Martinez of the Los Angeles Times. The player divides his bankroll into 35 parts and wagers one part on a single number each time. If he wins on the tenth spin he recovers his bankroll and the remaining 25 parts of his bankroll are the excess that he has. If he wins on the thirtieth spin he recovers his bankroll and the remaining 5 parts of his bankroll are the excess that he has. If he is playing American Roulette then there is a 40% probability that he will lose out all 35 times.