This one is often described as a bet rather than a system, because rather than prescribing staking rules and betting patterns to follow, you only need to place the same overall bet each time you play.
The bet was developed by Ioannis Kavouras, a Greek roulette player with 20+ years experience of playing the game.
After testing many strategies and theories, losing and winning lots of money, and trying his own systems and strategies, he came up with this one.
It is probably the least well known of all the approaches to the game that we talk about on this site, because Kavouras only made it public information somewhere around 2010, but it’s definitely an interesting bet to study.
How Does the Kavouras Bet Work in Roulette?
The idea behind this bet is to match the chaotic nature of the results in roulette, with a chaotic bet.
This bet gives you good coverage of over half of the wheel, meaning that you are statistically likely to have more winning spins than losing ones, and it also spaces out the covered numbers well so that no section of the wheel is favoured too heavily.
To place a Kavouras bet you need to bet as follows:
| Bet | Numbers Covered | Stake | Payout |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corner | 0, 1, 2, 3 | 1 unit | 8:1 |
| Line | 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36 | 2 units | 5:1 |
| Split | 8, 11 | 1 unit | 17-1 |
| Split | 13, 14 | 1 unit | 17-1 |
| Split | 15, 18 | 1 unit | 17-1 |
| Split | 17, 20 | 1 unit | 17-1 |
| Split | 27, 30 | 1 unit | 17-1 |
So whatever stake size you are using for a single betting unit, this bet will cost 8 units per spin and will cover 20 out of 37 numbers, or 54% of the wheel.
There is nothing else to remember except the bet positions on the board, and the fact that your line bet needs 2 betting units rather than 1, making this one of the least mentally taxing strategies there is.
The downside for recreational players is that the optimum bankroll is 1600 units, which means you need a fair amount of money to begin with if you hope to make the bet work over the long term and cover losing streaks.
Can You Win Money With the Kavouras Bet Strategy?
Since you are betting 8 units on each spin and there is still a 46% chance of none of your numbers coming up, it is possible to go deeply into the red quite quickly using this bet if you hit a run of bad luck.
What’s more, because not all of the bets you are making cover a loss it can be hard to come back from a few bad spins in a row.
In terms of betting units, each bet has the following potential upside when stakes are taken into account:
- Corner – 1 unit profit
- Line – 4 units profit
- Split – 10 units profit
So only the split bets cover the damage done by a losing spin, with the others giving you a smaller but still very welcome nudge into profit.
The important thing to understand with the Kavouras bet is that even though your chances of winning each spin beat the odds, the amount you win on some of those bets resets the odds of coming away with a profit in the long terms back in the casino’s favour.
For example, your session could look like this:
- Win – +4 units
- Win – +1 unit
- Win – +1 unit
- Loss – -8 units
- Loss – -8 units
- Win – +1 unit
- Win – +10 units
- Win – +10 units
- Loss – -8 units
- Loss – -8 units
Total = -5 units
So you have 6 wins against just 4 losses, which is a 60% hit rate and actually better than the odds suggest, but you are still down financially because your wins do not recoup enough to cover the losses.
Therefore, you either need to implement a staking strategy which complicates the bet, or you need to get lucky quickly then walk away before your luck turns. The man who invented the bet even sells his own staking strategy, although we wouldn’t ever recommend paying for a roulette betting system.
Many dedicated roulette players have adopted and adapted the Kavouras bet, applying their own staking systems to it, and indeed its flexibility is one of its main qualities for anyone who treats the game more professionally.
For the recreational player though, it is better to use the bet with a quick get in, cross your fingers, then get out mindset.
Mental Betting
One popular way some people approach this system is to bet mentally until a trigger point.
For example, you might stand watching the game and making mental bets on the outcome using the Kavouras bet.
Once you have lost 3 times in a row this would ‘trigger’ a real Kavouras bet.
From this point a win would see you increase your bets by 1x, and a loss would see you keep your bet at the same level.
Three wins or two losses in a row would reset the bet to the original amount, so one betting unit, from whatever point you are at in the game.
After 3 losses, you would stop playing with real money and go back to betting in your head until the trigger is hit again.
This goes some way towards taking advantage of winning streaks while letting losing streaks pass by at no cost, but of course you cannot achieve this completely.
Again, this can be tinkered with as much or as little as you want.