What is the Paroli (Reverse Martingale) Betting System?

Many roulette systems could be described as pessimistic, or cautious, and work using negative progression whereby bets are doubled after a loss to cover that loss.

The Paroli is the exact opposite.

Instead of chasing after losses (which can mount up quickly), this system would have you leap onto the back of lady luck when she appears, and ride out winning streaks with higher bets to take advantage of the good fortune.

It’s also quite clever in that it is designed not to rely on that winning streak lasting too long.

The Paroli, like the Martingale, can be used on any game with a bet option that has a close to 50% chance of coming off, such as Craps, Baccarat, and a coin toss – it’s not exclusive to roulette.

It’s also a system that can be tweaked, so while discipline is needed here, you can personalise the system.

How Does the Paroli Betting System Work?

With the Paroli, what you are ultimately aiming for is 3 winning spins in a row, betting on even money outcomes. The way in which you structure the system is up to you, but in general there are two ways of thinking about it.

• Option 1 – A continuing stream of bets played to the rules below.
• Option 2 – Short cycles of 3 bets at a time, played to the rules below.

With option 1 you would simply bet until you wanted to stop, using a pre-set base stake that doubles after a win (for no more than 3 wins before resetting) and resets after each losing bet.

With option 2 you would play 3 bets using the same rules, but after the 3^rd bet you would reset regardless of what had happened up until that point.

The idea, however you approach it, is that financial damage from losses is kept to a minimum, while payouts for wins are multiplied without pushing your luck too far.

That last bit is important because it is backed by maths.

Getting 3 wins in a row couldn’t be described as uncommon, because so many spins are played in an average session of roulette, but your chances seem low when viewed as a percentage.

Since you will be betting on 1:1 outcomes like even/odd, black/red etc., your chances of winning once (on a European roulette table) are 18 in 37, because there are 37 possible results and 18 of them will result in a win.

This works out as 48.64% (that pesky green zero stops it being 50/50). So you have just under a 50% chance of winning once.

That dips to 23.66% for 2 wins in a row.

To win 3 times though, your chances dwindle to just 11.51%, because:

• 18 ÷ 7 x 18 ÷ 7 x 18 ÷ 7 = 0.1151

Four wins in a row is starting to push your luck and puts you in danger of losing far more money a lot more often, which is why we don’t go past 3 wins in a row.

Example of the Paroli Betting System

So what does the Paroli system look like in practice?

Let’s have a look.

The table below shows a few spins using option 1, the continuous play approach, while the table below that shows a few spins using option 2, the three spins per cycle approach.

We will just use a £1 stake as the base unit to keep things simple, but you can use any stake that suits your pocket. Let’s say we have a £50 bank to play with.

…and on you would go.

You will notice that we won 4 times in a row between bets 2 and 5, but we reset to the base stake of £1 for bet 5. If we hadn’t, our stake would have doubled and we would have won £8 instead of £1 on that bet.

Sounds great, but bet 6 was a loser, so if we had simply carried on doubling – it would have been a £16 bet by then – we would have lost all of the gains from bet 2 onwards and be much worse off. That’s why we are disciplined in resetting after 3 wins.

Next, option 2, with the same base stake and a starting bank of £50:

We have put the 2nd cycle in bold to clarify the table a bit.

We can see in this table that we lost out a number of times by forcing ourselves to reset after 3 bets. The last bet of cycle 1 and the first two bets of cycle 2 were winners, so technically that’s 3 in a row.

However, we reset after the 3^rd bet in cycle 1 meaning that we didn’t get the benefit of doubling for that mini winning streak.

To add insult to injury, we would have reset after that 3^rd consecutive win if we were playing the option 1 approach, and avoided the loss that came on the 2^nd bet in cycle 2.

Of course, we could just as easily have demonstrated a scenario where the option 2 approach saved our skin, but this shows the benefits and pitfalls of both options.

Questions About the Paroli System