Lol. I'm expounding on my previous point.

Wait, what? How does variance not play a role here? Do you even know what variance is?

So essentially now you realize you lost the argument and you're trying to change gears, a logical fallacy known as shifting the goal posts. That's fine and all, but it's apparent that you're wrong here. I won't go into detail explaining why because you're most likely a troll or just someone who likes to waste other people's time; either way have a nice night.

jesus christ learn how to be wrong politely

This comment busted me up.

fyp

What if we start at a $5 bj table.

We can always move to a higher stakes table, or change casinos. I'm pretty sure there's probably a $100,000 max game easily found in Vegas.

How likey is it that we need to bet that starting with $5?

Edit: would be cool to look down at a blackjack with a huge bet out there..

Theoretically, if you started at small enough stakes, yes you could do it. It's very possible.

Everyone here is really trying to make the argument that you're somehow going to lose 20+ hands in a row is just ridiculous and downright intellectually dishonest.

Go for it bro, follow your dreams.

By all means, gamble if that's what you like to do. There's nothing wrong with that. But don't fool yourself into thinking that your particular system of chasing losses makes you any more clever than some destitute fellow who paints Las Vegas Boulevard with his brains after he loses everything on that last roulette spin or crapshoot that "just had to come in."

Looking at OP's plan, he wouldn't have to lose anywhere near 20 times in a row. He's planning to Martingale off of a starting bet of $5,000. That's his target profit, and he has $100,000 with which to try to do it. All it would take is a losing streak of 4 bets to leave him with too little to bet again:

1: $5,000 × 2^0 = $5,000
2: $5,000 × 2^1 = $10,000 (lost so far: $5,000; bankroll: $95,000)
3: $5,000 × 2^2 = $20,000 (lost so far: $15,000; bankroll: $85,000)
4: $5,000 × 2^3 = $40,000 (lost so far: $35,000; bankroll: $65,000)

And this hardly even matters, because even if he had a bankroll of $1,000,000, it would still be a sucker bet. The probability that someone with a large bankroll will hit a streak of n losses to wipe him out may be very low, but the cost of losing times the probability of losing is always greater than the profit from winning times the probability of winning. That's why Martingale is a losing system, not because of betting limits, bankroll limitations, or lack of discipline.

Follow your dreams, indeed. Right off a cliff.

If you're intent on putting $100,000 at risk at a blackjack table, just drop the whole sum on one bet, and walk away whatever the result is. That's your best chance of coming away a winner, short of working a counting system or not playing at all.

Exactly. couldn't have said it better myself. Martingale is flawed for this very reason.

So with a $100k bankroll if one wanted to just grind Martingale what are the chances he would lose?

Starting or at $5 and moving up to high roller tables if need be.

Seems like a good way to make a few hundred a day and getting comps too.

For what very reason? Because he'd run out of money or because it's a sucker bet based on flawed logic in the first place?

This is ridiculous. You don't "grind Martingale." Grinding is pushing small edges to eke out profits a bit at a time. Martingale requires you to keep betting more than the entire sum you've already lost—expoentially increasing amounts—just on the hopes that you'll win the relatively tiny amount you started with. A grind it is not.

The problem with Martingale is that as your likelihood of going bust approaches 0, so does your ROI. You could have a very low ROR with a $5 unit if you had a $2M bankroll, but then your ROI is so low as to effectively be 0%, with an ROR >0%. On a $100k roll, with a $5 unit I want to say losing 13 in a row leaves you laying ~$41k on the next hand, and unable to cover an additional hand should you lose that one.

Losing 15+ hands should happen a few times a year to a serious player. $100k won't cut it.

You know what OP could do, though? Collect that $10,000 each from these 9 guys, and be the guy who holds onto the bankroll. Don't play blackjack at all, but occasionally pay each guy $500 and tell him it worked, no problem.

Then, one day, stash $75,000 of it in a safe deposit box or whatever somewhere, tell these guys that you lost four times in a row, and give them each $2,500 back. You can use your remaining $2,500 as a bargaining chip in case they get ornery about losing. Make it believable, though, that you're broke and really don't want to give it up.

Bam, $65,000 profit, easy as pie. If they'd fall for the Martingale thing, they should fall for this without a hitch.

I think the best thing that can be said about Martingale is that nearly every person who has ever gambled has tried to think of a way to bet that would provide a foolproof win. The Martingale system, among others, has been around for hundreds of years. If any system like this worked, casinos would have been bankrupt years ago. And yet they still seem to do quite well.

You also can't say that we are going to lose 25 hands in a row. I think with a proper bankroll you will be able to make a profit.

The problem is for this to work you have to start at the lowest $5 stakes. And you might make 200 a day. Which is okay, but if you used that huge bankroll for other investments you might be able to make more money on interest alone.

Actually, given a long enough timeline, I can say exactly that.

And sure, you could post an absolute profit at some point if you had an unlimited bankroll. As I pointed out above, the problem is that if you compare ROI vs bankroll, as bankroll -> infinity then ROI -> 0.

The expectation for a player using Martingale, for any time period and with any size bankroll (infinity doesn't exist), is negative, equal to the house edge. And expectation here means average outcome. Betting systems do not change expectation, it isn't possible.

You are right that the longer you play the closer to the chance of loss gets to 100% (with any betting system, not just martingale). But the part naive gamblers don't get is that the time period doesn't matter as much as you think. That streak of losses that wipes out the bankroll can be the first session you play, just as easily as it can be one down the road somewhere. It is equally likely to occur in any session. A low frequency event doesn't necessarily mean a long delay to see it. And it's 100% guaranteed to occur eventually.

You can think this all you want; it doesn't make it true.

With a mega-large bankroll, sure, you might be able to post some kind of profit on any number of days. Maybe it would be $200, chiseled away $5 at a time. However, each day you do this, you're playing a sort of anti-lottery in which there is a small but not insignificant chance that you will take an unrecoverable loss.

Over an increasingly long period of trials, your results will approach the sum of your expectations. Martingale systems don't change this; they just manipulate your experience of variance so that your session results are polarized into a lot of tiny wins and a small number of astronomical losses (or more likely, just one astronomical loss after which you're too destitute to ever try it again).

Imagine an "investment" vehicle that allows you to begin with any balance x. Each day, you are paid a dividend of a simple 0.01% of that balance (0.0001x). The catch is that, each day you keep your money in the account, there is a 0.011% chance that your entire balance will be wiped out (–0.00011x). So, keeping your money in the account for one day has an expectation of 0.0001x – 0.00011x = –0.00001x.

Because you're a human being who operates on a day-to-day type of cycle, it may feel like a good deal to you because the account just seems to be paying you money every day. And after all, a chance of 11/1,000 of a percent seems totally negligible. But you are theoretically losing money, every day, just as surely as the sun rises and sets. That 11/1,000 of a percent isn't negligible. It's a trap in which the punishment, though rare, comes swiftly and severely, and in which you don't have a series of lesser negative results to hint that you should correct your behavior.

That's Martingale, basically. You can keep feeling good about that $5 at a time or $200 a day, until one day you lose the anti-lottery and it costs you $167,772,155 (the amount you lose if you Martingale from a base of $5 and hit a 25-loss streak). If you'd fall for this kind of scheme, I don't know how you got your hands on that much money in the first place, though.

If you have an infinite bankroll you cannot profit because you cannot end with more money than you started.

Yay Martingale.

You realize that each bet has an edge for the house, and that the more you bet the more the house edge is, right?

Once at bellagio I lost 25 hands in a row at BJ, martingaling at first but after a bunch of hands just min betting.

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If you had infinite bankroll and infinite betting limits you would never go bust.

But that's not the case, and starting at $5 per hand you will have a 11/1100 chance of losing 25 in a row. And after $1.6 million you would not be allowed to make that big of a bet in a casino due to limits.

Are both of these assumptions correct?

Betting $1.6 million to possibly win $5 would be the stupidest bet ever made in a casino.

You are not winning just$5, you are trying to win$5 over and over.

Uh...what?