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Does the Martingale Strategy Work for Sports Betting – 2024 Guide

We are certainly in a very rough year for all of us, so we could all use a break and a bit of luck. There is no surprise that in the year 2024, betting and gambling around the world have had quite a boost. But if we want to make some real profit, and not just have a little fun, we can not solely rely on luck. There are a lot of gambling schemes and sport betting methods that people are using to try to cheat the system. 

Probably the most famous of them is the Martingale strategy, which originates in 18 century France and is still popular around the globe. So if you want to find the best option for sports betting, simply check out sportni-portal.com and find the best possible selection of bets. But we are not here just to find good bets, but to see are there good sports strategies you can use to maximize the profit.

So let us try by explaining what Martingale strategy is. People like using it in roulette, so we will use that example. Let us say you bet five dollars on red, and it is black. The strategy is quite simple, the next thing you say is, I  will bet double on red again. The idea is that no bad streak lasts forever, and sooner or later, you will be recovering all of the previous losses. So the profit will not be that large, only those first five dollars, when the initial bet is a good one. So on the surface, it looks bulletproof, right?

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Well, not really, because losing streaks can be much longer than what our instincts tell us. Doubling the bets means the money we have to invest is growing exponentially, which means things can go out of our hands faster than people anticipate. No one can sustain betting those amounts forever, so while you will profit from those initial bets for a while, all it takes is one bad streak and losses be higher than your gains were. So the risk is that you will lose all the money you have. But how do this tactic transfers to sporting bets?

So there are a couple of points we need to go over with when it comes to sports and Martingale. The first in math. In roulette, the odds are always the same, so it is easy to double the bets. When it comes to sports odds, they will be adjusting to your bets. So we could even try out this tactic. So the money we are betting might not always be double of the previous amount, might be a bit less or a bit more. The important thing is that the potential winning of your bet will regain all of the preceding failures. Now, we see how we can adapt the Martingale system to sports betting but is it a good idea to use it at all?

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So the original tactic has a problem that eventually, you will run out of money to bet and recover all of the losses. That is a big problem in roulette, where odds are already not in our favor. After all, the house always wins, right? So if even a pure flip of the coin with exactly 50 % chances of coin-flipping one side can go wrong and bankrupt our Martingale player, when it comes to roulette that already has like 5% of chances it goes green, our problems are even larger. But what about sports? After all, bookkeepers wouldn’t even be able to design their odds if games were an utter coin-flip. There is a lot more skill when it comes to predicting sports results.

Probably the best way to fully understand the application of this method in sports is to go through some examples. So let us say we want to bet on basketball, and our first bet is 10 dollars on a low odds of 1.3. So while we picked a favorite, we still lose. So for our next bet, we try a different route.  The odds are 3, so we are trying something that is far less likely to happen. To recover our ten dollars from the earlier wager,  we need to bet three dollars and thirty cents. Notice how because the odds are higher, we are not even increasing money we are wagering.

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But, we miss our bet once again. Now we lost a little over 13 dollars. The next thing that catches your eye has an odd of 1.5, so the money you need to wager is around 9 dollars. We lose again. So we try something with odds of 2, and we wager a little over eleven. Unfortunately, we missed again. We try out another 2.5 odd with a wager of around 14 dollars. After that fail, we have lost a total of around 50 dollars. To break even, you try out another favorite, take odds of 1.4 and bet 35 dollars. With that win, all of the money you lost is back in your pocket.

So long story short, it all depends on two things. How deep are the pockets even before the betting starts, and are you good in it? Sooner or later, the latter is going to happen. That is a fact when it comes to coin-flipping and 50% chances. On the other hand, luck is a small part of the sport, and therefore, understanding sport can give anyone an edge. Another option is intriguing if you are a big fan of some team, and that team is good, you can try out this system. It is not likely that someone like the Lakers in the NBA is going to go on a losing streak, so can they will win a game the wager is on and help us out, right? It all depends on how much money we already have and how much risk we are willing to take. Another thing to keep in mind is, is there a betting limit on wagers? Because that could make our infinity scaling impossible.

About Suzan Vega