In this article we take a look at the Martingale betting system and see if it can be used to make a profit from playing blackjack at any of the many USA online blackjack sites we feature.

The first question for many may well be, “What is Martingale?” Well, Martingale is a negative progression staking system, by which we mean that your stake increases after a loss. It was hugely popular in France in the 1700s and many believe it is a guaranteed way to beat the house.

Martingale is most commonly associated with roulette and betting on red or black but it can be used for any bet where the odds of success are approximately 50% and the payout is even money.

In roulette a player would bet $10 on, say, black and whenever they lose they would double that stake, whilst any win resets the stake back to the original $10. Assuming the first three spins are red, the player then bets $80, having previously staked $70 ($10+$20+$40). Black comes in and the player wins $80 for a profit of $10.

The Martingale system delivers a profit of one times your base unit WHENEVER the win comes in, even if that should be after eight, 20 or even 200 losing bets. Theoretically it is indeed a guaranteed way to make money but theory and practice are two different things and in practice you need a limitless bankroll, a casino with no limits and infinite time, not to mention nerves of steel to keep betting even when you are potentially thousands of dollars – or much more – down.

So, to get back to the central issue of this article, yes, Martingale can be used playing blackjack but crucially no, it cannot be used to make a long-term profit and certainly not to guarantee such an outcome.

You could double your stake after every loss but anyone who has played much online blackjack will have experienced a long, scarcely believable, run of defeats. If you use the Martingale System to play blackjack, at an online or real world casino, the only guaranteed outcome is that at some point you will suffer a huge, huge loss and that will outweigh any previous small profits you had made. So do yourself a favor and don’t even try it!