D'Alembert Roulette System

In a game like online roulette, you are fighting a battle with a built-in house advantage, and you have to use everything at your disposal to try and tip the odds a little more in your favor. You're not going to do this by making certain plays, because all of them have a 5.26% negative expectation, with the exception of one that is marginally less. So you are going to have to do it with the help of a betting system, which generally requires a certain progression of bets that you will use, based on the previous result.

We're going to talk about one of those, called the D'Alembert System.

This is not an ideal system for striking it rich, but at the same time you are not likely to go broke using it either.

What you do in this system, like in almost all roulette betting systems, is concentrate on playing the outside bets as your basis. Those are the ones that are closest to being even money propositions.

Your instructions in this system are rather simple:

- AFTER A LOSS, YOU ADD ONE UNIT TO YOUR NEXT BET
- AFTER A WIN, YOU DEDUCT ONE UNIT FROM YOUR NEXT BET
So let's say that you began with a $5 bet, and then lost the first bet, you would wager $6 on the next one. Then if you lost again your bet would be $7. Lose again, it's $8 and so on.

So as you can see, though you are increasing your bets after losing, you are not doing it the same way as you would in a Martingale, where you double bets after losses. The D'Alembert is "safer" in that it would take a losing streak of horrific proportions to get yourself to the table limit, which is always your principal concern with a Martingale.

To the contrary, in this system, your real worry is getting yourself to the point where you are actually below the table MINIMUM.

Think about it - if $1 is the minimum and you are starting with $5, you will actually get in trouble if you go on a moderately strong winning run. If you win, for example, you go to $4. Win again, you;re down to $3. Another win takes you to $2 and then you lose to get you back up to $3. But two more wins will get you to the table minimum, and then another will literally leave you nowhere to go.

What then? Well, your guess, frankly, is as good as ours.

What you would want to do then is start with a higher minimum, $10 for example. That way you don't fall into much danger of getting yourself to the table minimum, since you'll win ten times in a row every 1758 spins.

There is a certain consistency in this system, in that you know where you are going to stand if you even out. In other words, if you have the same amount of wins and losses, your profit will be equal to the number of winning instances.

The problem with this, of course, is that since whatever outside bet you place is going to have an 18 out of 38 chance of winning, over the long haul you're going to have more losses than wins.