gamble to win

Originally, martingale referred to a class of betting strategies popular in 18th-century France. The name is not eponymous; and there is no Monsieur Martingale. The simplest of these strategies was designed for a game in which the gambler wins his stake if a coin comes up heads and loses it if the coin comes up tails. The strategy had the gambler double his bet after every loss, so that the first win would recover all previous losses plus win a profit equal to the original stake. Since a gambler with infinite wealth will with probability 1 eventually flip heads, the Martingale betting strategy was seen as asure thing by those who practised it. Of course, none of these practitioners in fact possessed infinite wealth, and the exponential growth of the bets would eventually bankrupt those who choose to use the Martingale. It is widely believed that casinos instituted betting limits specifically to stop Martingale players, but in reality the assumptions behind the strategy are unsound. Players using the Martingale system do not have any long term mathematical advantage over any other betting system or even randomly placed bets.