Martingale does increase your chances of winning. It just also decreases the payout from winning and increases the cost of losing to compensate.

In the short term, you have a much better chance of winning. In the long term the resuls will be the same as if you had just made a bunch of big bets.

It’s like a reverse lottery. In a lottery you have a very small chance of winning a lot of money and a very big chance to lose a little amount of money. Using martingale you have a very good chance to win a small amount of money, and a very small chance to lose it all.

If you’re content to gain a small amount of money, you have a good chance of actually doing that. Once you start trying to double the amount you started out with you’re going to eventually lose. Just like if you’re content to lose a small amount of money, the lottery is a good way to do it. If you want to throw away millions, you might risk actually winning.

It seems that since I don’t play the lottery because I don’t have sufficient chance to win, I should use Martingales…. I guess I may have done some expected value calculations at some point.