Quote from: nimda on June 13, 2014, 09:01:04 PM

Quote from: dooglus on June 12, 2014, 05:54:31 PM

For those who say Martingale "never works", I woke up this morning to find that Just-Dice had lost 100 BTC overnight.

Looking into it, I see it was a single big player who won it, and he won it using Martingale.

Here's a chart showing his profit over the last 6 hours:

http://i.imgur.com/3GymqSB.png

First, I love how martingale charts look. A perfect martingale will be a straight line with periodic drops of varying magnitude, where deeper drops are exponentially more rare.

Second, is there any way to calculate the probability of a bust on a martingale procession while taking into account the ever-increasing bankroll it provides?

Possible to calculate? Of course such a simple thing is. But that ever-increasing bank roll won't matter much, the gains are very small. What is the probability you'd like to know? It might be so that an exact calculation is unfeasible but also that it would be unnecessary because we could have a very good approximation. The probability of going bust if you keep going on indefinitely is of course 100 % so what probability would you like to know?

And of course, a simulation is possible always with these dice games and that's fun to run a few, too. It's possible to run such a simulation with no previous programming experience or math knowledge, if you are willing to look up the basic things and think about it for a while. Python is a great beginner language for example, it's like today's BASIC except that it's suitable for a lot more advanced programming.