Once you are actually placing $2,000 bets, a loss of $30,000 is not at all unusual. This would be equivalent to a $5 bettor losing $75—which any experienced $5 bettor could tell you would not be uncommon. If you count your double loss on your split pair as two hands, you actually began your unfortunate series of losses by losing 10 hands in a row. How unusual is this?
If I was flipping a coin, with heads being a win, and tails a loss, the odds against me coming up tails 10 times in a row would be about 1,000 to 1. That's pretty unlikely, though far from impossible.
Blackjack, however, is less advantageous than a coin flip. In 100 hands, a basic strategy player will experience, on average, 43 wins, 48 losses and 9 pushes. Since a martingale bettor ignores pushes and lets his bet ride, we can ignore them in our analysis. For every 100 win/loss decisions, a basic strategy player will see about 53 losses and 47 wins.
With these win/loss proportions, the odds against losing 10 consecutive decisions are only about 500 to 1. Now 500 to 1 may seem nearly impossible to many people, but realistically, at any given time, a series of losses equivalent to yours happens to dozens of players in Atlantic City, and to hundreds of people every day of the year in U.S. casinos. It's happening right now to one out of every 500 people who are playing. How many tens of thousands of people are playing blackjack right now in U.S. casinos?
You must realize that if you had been flat-betting $10, instead of "doubling-up" to try to recapture your previous losses, you would only have lost $110 (and this includes both your pair-split and your double down loss!), instead of being behind by $7,880 at the end of that first unfortunate string of losses. And your total loss at the end of the debacle would only have been $230, not $29,980.
The martingale is a systematic method of chasing your losses. There's no other way to describe it. This is about the most foolish way to gamble. You violated the single most important rule for gamblers: "If you can't afford to lose it, don't bet it."
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