Gambling for Crypto with the Martingale Stratagem

You've probably noticed by now that a lot of these faucets want you to gamble. You've probably noticed their games are "provably fair" as if that makes gambling a good idea. You're probably staring at the tiny amount of satoshis in your account and thinking they could be a whole lot bigger, if only. Gambling with crypto (or any money, really) isn't a good investment strategy and you will almost certainly go broke. The devil's bones are made of dice. Don't do it. But if you're still inclined anyway... read on.

Once upon a time, there was a man named Joe Doob. (I swear to God that's his real name, by all means look it up.) He invented the martingale stratagem, wherein every time you lose a hand in blackjack (or roulette, or baccarat, or another almost-fair-odds game) you double your bet. So if you win the second hand, you win back everything you lost plus your initial bet. If you lose the second hand but win the third, then you win back the losses incurred on the first and second hands, plus your initial bet. So far so simple, right? How on earth do casinos not go broke if there's an honest-to-goodness way to rip the currency out of their hands? Well the trouble is it's really slow, and open to impulse. You keep playing over and over, and every win gets you a little more money, but this is the gambling equivalent of a McJob. And you can do it; there are people who live in Las Vegas and play blackjack for a living by employing the martingale. But they aren't rich, and never will be. The casinos tolerate them because they won't go broke servicing the few people who can do it profitably, and every person that walks out of a casino not feeling robbed is free advertising for the casino.

But I really have to emphasize the "open to impulse" part. The trouble with the martingale is that your string of previous bad luck does not affect your chances of having good luck in the next hand. There is a number of losing hands at which you're better off just walking away, or starting over if you can handle it. Many can't, and their impulses lead them to ruin. The casinos make far more money off of people who think they understand the martingale than they lose to people who really do, and thus shall it ever be.

However, with the surfeit of crypto faucets trying to goad you into gambling with the money they just gave you, I figured it wouldn't hurt to run the math on how to use it. Just don't come at me if you lose all your satoshis doing this, and read on:

Let's say you start on a site like, I dunno, freebitco.in. (For the record, they have a faucet too, but it's unconnected to anything so basically gamble and win or be resigned to collect from it sometime next year if you use it.) But it's a solid crypto gambling site, "provably fair" (which is true, although you'll still lose slightly more often) and has everything we'd need. There's a roulette-style game where you'll win 47.5% of the time. Almost close enough to even odds that you can use the martingale. So play a hand, gambling a single satoshi. Whoops, you lost. If you don't advance past the first hand, for every thousand hands you'll win 475 satoshis on average and lose 525 satoshis, for a net loss of 50 satoshis. Don't do that.

So you have to play a second hand. Look at that, a win. In this event, you'd go back to your initial bet. If you refused to play the martingale past two losing hands, then for every thousand martingale rounds (which start with a bet of 1 satoshi and end either with a win or accepting the losses of the round) you will win an average of 724 satoshis and lose an average of 552 satoshis, for an average gain of 172 satoshis for those thousand rounds. However, why stop there? If you're willing to lose two hands in a row and play to a third, you'll have a net gain of 275 satoshis per thousand rounds. If you're willing to lose three hands in a row, that goes up to 316. If you're willing to lose four, it's 321. After that, the losses double while the loss percentage doesn't quite halve. That means that you'll make less money per thousand rounds. But so long as your resources are unlimited, you can be willing to lose fourteen hands in a row and still make some sliver of satoshis. It's only after fifteen losing hands in a row where the martingale is no longer even theoretically profitable. (For those interested, I've posted my work in detail here.)

So if you're going to profitably use the martingale stratagem, you need to be willing to throw away your losses after the fourth straight losing hand at the latest. As far as a return on time and investment goes, you're probably best off quitting after the second or third losing hand. If you can't handle watching a lot of money leave at once, probably quit after the second. One of the cool things about freebitco.in is that it lets you autobet so that you don't have to do all of this manually for a pittance of satoshis - just tell it how to bet and get yourself a nice cold beverage while your computer loses all your money for you (or alternately, makes you a satoshionnaire).

I should explain that although I mostly just talk about stuff that interests me, or that I use myself, or that I recommend... I don't use this and I don't recommend it. The devil's bones are made of dice, do recall. But if I were ever inclined to gamble crypto (and with my orphaned satoshis at freebitco.in, might as well), this is how I'd do it.

#cryptocurrency #math #BTC #faucets #gambling