So that friend of mine that I mentioned earlier came up to me the other day and was really excited about a gambling system that he had bought somewhere online.

It was revolutionary, guaranteed, and a license to print money. He just needed me to stake him the cash to get started. Not to worry, he would have doubled it inside of an hour, and would ship it back to me pronto, with interest.

Well, as a potential investor I had to have a look at the system, otherwise why would I invest? But he didn’t want to part with the knowledge. It was a struggle for him. I watched him wrestle with his dilemma as I smoked a cigarette.

Eventually he concluded that I had to be brought in on it, even though he worried that I would just take the info and go make myself rich, leaving him out in the cold with nothing after he had done all the hard work of buying the system.

So I looked. It was the old ‘double up after a loss’ system, if you could call that a system. Known to the world as the Martingale system, briefly, you bet one unit (a dollar) on, say, red at roulette. You have slightly less than 50% chance of winning. if you win, you bet the same again. If on the other hand you lose the first bet, you double your stake on the same color for the second bet. And so on. So if you lose four bets in a row you’ll have bet $1, then $2, then $4 and then $8. The next bet will have to be $16. If you win this bet you will get back $32. Of which $31 ($1+$2+$4+$8+$16) is your original stake amount. So you are up one dollar.

And you start again at $1 and keep on doubling up until you are rich.

There are some fundamental problems with this system though, the most obvious of which is that there are table limits, both minimum and maximum, at all casino games.

So if you lose ten bets in a row, and believe me that happens regularly, then you will have to bet over one thousand dollars on the next bet. To win a dollar.

I explained all this slowly and carefully. A number  of times. Eventually I just said no, I wasn’t staking him. I think I have to cut him loose. Although, judging by the way he looked at me as he walked away, I might have already.

I didn’t ask him how much he had paid for the ‘system’, and he didn’t say.