The best and only way to beat the house is having an infinite balance. In this situation you can use a simple martingale strategy. Isn't it easy?
Bang on! No, it's not.
If you had infinite money you would be risking it to earn just the initial amount you were trying to win.
If you play black or red and your initial bet is $1, and lose, you would need to double your bet infinite times to earn just $1 (a little bit less actually). I’ve explained this ad nauseam on this forum.
Too much risk for such a low reward.
He was just illustrating how a martin gale system would actually work and win against the house. Generally the house always wins due to the house edge, and the fact is that you have a slight better chance to losing, but that is something enormous statistically.
An infinite amount of money will ensure that even if you lost 1,000,000 times and won on the 1,000,001st bet you will have money to bet with. Of course if you have infinite money then you don't really need to gamble, this is just all for illustration.
And I was just illustrating that it wouldn’t actually work, unless you called “work” to risk an infinite balance to win just $1. That can’t be properly called “beat the house”, which he said was easy, and you seem to agree with, even for illustration purposes.
If you started betting with just $1 and kept on doubling your bet after losing, by the 50th bet you would need to put $ 562,949,953,421,312 on the table to have a net won of just $1 (if you succeeded and won that bet). Just by the 50th bet. By the 51th bet you would need to double that amount, and so on.
If you told the casino owner that you had beaten the house because you have risked an infinite amount of money and ended up having a net profit of $1 he would laugh at you. This, again, is for illustration purposes.
Martingale doesn't work, full stop.
The concept is simple. If you play 100 times on a 50-50 chance game. Your chance of winning is 50/100 times. but with the house edge element involved, depending on the percentage, you are allowed to win 45-50 times out of 100 chances. It will happen, whatever be your strategy. The odds will always favor the house giving them the "edge". So, you can only win if you are lucky and you quit after winning. In a long run, the odds that you come out as victor is slim to none.
The concept is so simple that you haven’t expressed it properly, which makes me think you haven’t understood it completely. I mean, you get the idea, and most of what you say is correct but here is the flaw:
Even if you factor in the HE element, your chances are still 50/50. So, let’s suppose you bet $100 and HE is 5%. When you lose you lose 100$ but when you win, the House pays you just $95. After an infinite amount of times (just for illustration purposes), you will still have won 50% of the times (and lost the other 50%), but you will have lost money due to being paid less when you win.