Top Five Online Roulette Strategies to Help You Win Big
Online roulette strategies have been around for decades, where as general roulette strategy is as old as the game itself, which is quite a long time – over 200 years and counting. Roulette may be a game of pure luck, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying to “crack the code” by using all sorts of betting systems, hoping to beat the odds and take home some big money before Lady Luck catches up to them.
Now that we have the internet, online roulette strategies are all the rage. You can even use these strategies when you play roulette at Bodog Casino, including the systems we’ll tell you about right here in our latest top five list. But they all come with a warning: Your odds of winning any bet remain exactly the same from one spin to the next, no matter what system you use, how much you wager, or how many spins the wheel has taken since your last win.
Martingale
The most famous of all online roulette strategies is also the easiest. The martingale system was very popular in France, where it came into vogue shortly after the game was introduced in the 1700s, and it remains popular today. All you have to do is double your even-money bet (Red/Black, for instance) every time you lose, until you finally win.
Let’s say you start with $1 on Red, and the wheel comes up Black. Now you double your Red bet to $2, and you win, thus pocketing $1 in profit. Had you lost that bet, you would then have bet $4 on Red, and winning that third spin would once again leave you up $1. You realize that same dollar in profit no matter how many spins it takes.
The martingale is a tempting strategy to say the least. But you can see the problem: You’ll eventually go on a losing streak so long, you’ll have to double your bet to a size your bankroll can’t handle. If you know the story about the chessboard and the grains of wheat, you’ll know exactly what the danger is for martingale users.
James Bond
You might already know that Ian Fleming popularized the game of baccarat with his 1953 book Casino Royale, which introduced the world to British super-spy James Bond. But did you know that Bond also plays roulette in this book? He enjoys more than just a few spins before taking on SMERSH operative Le Chiffre at the fictional Royale-les-Eaux casino in Somme, France.
A close reading of the text shows two Bond systems in play. The first is obliquely referenced as a “progressive system on red” that we’ll discuss further in a moment. The second saw Bond spend about three hours tracking the results at the wheel, looking for any mechanical abnormality that he could take advantage of – not entirely unreasonable, this being the early 1950s. Bond determined the wheel was biased towards the first two Dozen bets (1-12 and 13-24), so he hammered those for the most part, and walked away up one million francs.
Somehow, as the years went by, the “James Bond” betting system became the following:
– Bet £14 on High (19-36)
– Bet £5 on 13-14-15-16-17-18
– Bet £1 on 0
This system does cover about two-thirds of the wheel like Bond did with his Dozens approach, but unless you’re dealing with an imperfect wheel – which you won’t be when you play online at Bodog Casino – you’ll be losing money in the long run.
Paroli
The Paroli is a reverse martingale, where you double your bet after every win instead of every loss. The logic is that you’re betting increasingly large while you’re on a winning streak, then reducing down to your original bet size once your luck runs out. But again, there is no “maturity of chance” in roulette; your chances of winning don’t improve just because you’ve won several spins in a row.
Oscar’s Grind
This is another “even money” progressive betting system, where you start betting one unit on something like Red, then add one unit every time you win, and maintain your bet size when you lose. Wherever you are in this progression, as soon as you are ahead, you revert to your original bet size; also, once your bet size reaches four units, you maintain that bet until you’re ahead.
The good thing about Oscar’s Grind is that it gets you to break your bankroll down into units, and bet just one unit in the beginning. The bad thing is that you’ll eventually be betting four units over and over again until you go broke. But at least you didn’t blow it all on one spin.
Labouchere
This is where we get back to 007. That “progressive system on red” wasn’t fully explained in Casino Royale, but Fleming gave out the details in a 1960 column for the Sunday Times, and as it turns out, Bond was using a version of the Labouchere system, named after the notorious British politician Henry Labouchere (1831-1912) who was credited with its invention.
To use the Labouchere system at the roulette wheel, start by writing down a series of numbers that correspond to how many units you want to win. It could be any series, really, but most players go for something simple like 1,2,3.
Once you have your numbers written down, take the first and last number in your sequence and bet that total amount – it can be on Red or any other even-money bet. If you win, cross those numbers out; if you lose, add your bet size to the end of your list. Continue in this fashion until all your numbers have been used up (if you only have one number left, bet that amount), thus locking in your profit, which would be six units in this example.
As with all these roulette betting systems, the allure of the Labouchere is that you don’t have to win more than half your even-money bets to make a profit; you only need to be right one-third of the time with the Labouchere – provided you have an infinite bankroll and the casino has no betting limits. We’ll see you at the tables.
Hopefully, our online roulette strategies have filled you with confidence. If so, we’ll see you at the tables.