No matter which system you use, the house edge stays the same. However with martingale you either win big or lose bigger.
Not true - you do not win big with the Martingale system, do the math. As you keep doubling down you are only ahead by the amount of your original bet. So when you finally win, you only win the amount of the first bet. When you lose, you can lose your entire bankroll. Since people can't seem to understand this on this thread, here is an example following the Martingale system (doubling your bet after every loss):
Bet 1: 5
Result: Lose
Loss/profit so far: -5
Bet 2: 10
Result: Lose
Loss/profit so far: -15
Bet 3: 20
Result: Lose
Loss/profit so far: -35
Bet 4: 40
Result: Lose
Loss/profit so far: -75
Bet 5: 80
Result: Lose
Loss/profit so far: -155
Bet 6: 160
Result:
WinLoss/profit so far: 5
So you can see that you end up putting down bets as high as 160 (and risking over 300) just to earn 5 in the end. And if the bet maximum would have been 100 for example, this person would have been screwed, just to try and earn 5.
Martingale is a crap system. End this thread.
What i mean is that for example if you would have 1000 persons and each of these 1000 persons would have $255 and they make bets of $1 and use martingale. And each person would make 100 bets, than either they would make about $50 or they would lose everything. If you combines all the value than the net. result is a loss (if we assume a house edge). But some of the individuals may have gained a large profit, much larger than anyone could ever get by betting flat rate.
What i am saying is that the expected profit with any system or betting pattern does not increase, but that does not mean the distribution does not change. In fact all the martingale system does is increase the spread of the distribution moving it from a normal distribution to something else entirely.
as you can clearly see, both the chance of winning as well as the amount won increases a lot by using martingale, however the downside is that when you lose, you lose big. While with flat betting you either lose a little or win a little, the results are much more controlled.
However no matter which system you use the expected profit is ALWAYS 100%-house edge