Jean-le-Rond D’Alembert did not have a particularly good childhood. He was the illegitimate offspring of a famous 18th-century French officer and was practically abandoned when he was a kid. D’Alembert spent his childhood in relative poverty, despite the money that his dad forwarded to his foster parents. He managed to get a good education, though – and soon started delving into mathematics and the ideas of Isaac Newton.
As part of his projects, D’Alembert created a betting system that bears his name and is used by gamblers even today. Let’s check it out and see if it can help you win more at roulette.
The Concept & How It Works
The system is designed to work for bets that have a chance of winning close to 50% – the so-called ‘even’ bets. Those include Red/Black, Even/Odd, and 1-18/19-36. The logic is that those bets will eventually even out – a long streak of red will surely be followed by a long streak of black.
You need to determine a ‘unit’ that will be the backbone of your D’Alembert strategy. It can be a chip or a select amount of money – it’s up to you. It can be as small or as big as you wish, but keep in mind that you might end up wagering several of them at a time, so you must make sure that the unit value no more than 1% of your total funds. Experts claim that the safest amount is either 0.50% or 0.33%.
The strategy consists of you gradually increasing your bet when losing games and gradually decreasing it when winning. You start with one unit and add or remove a single unit when necessary. The table will show you how a typical game might go when you are using the D’Alembert system.
Example Game Using The D’Alembert System
| Round | Bet | Outcome | Total Profit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round 1 | 1 | Win | 1 |
| Round 2 | 1 | Win | 1 |
| Round 3 | 1 | Loss | -1 |
| Round 4 | 2 | Loss | -2 |
| Round 5 | 3 | Loss | -3 |
| Round 6 | 4 | Win | 4 |
| Round 7 | 3 | Loss | -3 |
| Round 8 | 4 | Loss | -4 |
| Round 9 | 5 | Win | 5 |
| Round 10 | 4 | Win | 4 |
| Total Profit | 2 |
As you can see, even when the number of wins and losses are identical, you still come out at a profit.
Pros of the D’Alembert System
As far as safe betting strategies go, the D’Alembert system definitely takes the cake. You can utilise it with a relatively small bankroll, and the nature of the progression pretty much keeps you safe from hitting the dreaded table limits – which can be a common occurrence when using many other roulette strategies. Of course, a terrible losing run is never out of the question – but overall, it’s pretty hard to reach absurdly high stakes while using this system.
In addition, the system is really easy to learn and master. You don’t need to write anything down, just keep the size of the bet in your head and adjust it according to how well you are doing.
Cons of the Strategy
Since the D’Alembert system is low-risk, you cannot expect high gains from it. You bet small amounts, so you will win small amounts. You will most likely aim to get an equal number of wins and losses, but this is unlikely to happen over the course of a longer game – after all, the house always ends up winning.
Also, if the odds are not in your favour and you hit that horrendous losing streak, you will probably have a hard time recovering from it. The only chance is an equally good winning streak, and those tend to be pretty rare.
Tinkering with the System
Since the D’Alembert method is pretty old, there are many variations and additions that have spawned over the years such as the reverse D’Alambert. The overall simplicity of the system makes it a very good foundation based on which you can devise your own betting strategy for roulette. Here are some ideas that we tinkered with while working on this article.
Bet Progression
Tinkering with the original bet progression can bring interesting results. For example, instead of removing only one unit from the bet upon winning, we tried resetting the bet to one. This will result in really, really low losses, which will be compensated in a way by the winnings. However, when you put the casino edge in the equation, you will eventually end up at a small loss.
Don’t let the casino advantage discourage you – those numbers add up in the long run. There is the possibility of you going on an awesome winning streak and cashing in your winnings afterwards.
Contre D’Alambert
Like most other betting systems, the D’Alambert strategy too has its ‘Reverse’ version. It works exactly like the original, only the other way around. You increase your bet after a win and decrease it after a loss. Let’s compare this method to the regular D’Alambert using the same example from before.
Example Game Using The D’Alembert System
| Round | Bet | Outcome | Total Profit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Round 1 | 1 | Win | 1 |
| Round 2 | 2 | Win | 2 |
| Round 3 | 3 | Loss | -3 |
| Round 4 | 2 | Loss | -2 |
| Round 5 | 1 | Loss | -1 |
| Round 6 | 1 | Win | 1 |
| Round 7 | 2 | Loss | -2 |
| Round 8 | 1 | Loss | -1 |
| Round 9 | 1 | Win | 1 |
| Round 10 | 2 | Win | 2 |
| Total Profit | -2 |
As you can see, the results are not as positive as with the regular system. However, the Contre D’Alembert requires an even smaller bankroll, and if you are on a huge losing streak, you don’t need to wager a lot of chips at once to recover from it.
The D’Alembert System Is Fun and Easy to Use
The D’Alembert system is one of the easiest and worry-free ways of playing roulette that we know of. The strategy is plain and simple, and works like a charm – but don’t expect to become a millionaire while using it. The winnings will be small, and you will inevitably be at a loss in the long term. Thank the casino advantage for that.
Still, we highly recommend trying the system out. It’s a good way to get started with roulette strategies before you feel confident enough to take on riskier systems that have the potential to bring you a lot of money.
How binary betting systems work
The premise with D’alembert binary betting system is this: for every loss, raise your bet and for every win, lower your bet. The idea with this system betting is that if you increase your bets with every loss, when you eventually win, you’ll win back your losses, since you’re always matching your potential future payouts with your increasing losses.
In theory, this seems like a solid plan. The idea with binary options betting is that the chances of you winning or losing are 50/50. Over a long enough period of time, there’ll be points where you will have won more games than lost, and vice versa. As long as you play for long enough and have the money to keep playing until that comes about, you simply have to cash out and walk away with the profits.
As long as you’ve been making up for your losses with each win. That final win which breaks the 50/50 stalemate, will be the round where you cash out and will have made some money.
How The D’alembert Betting Strategy Works
The idea of the D’alembert progression when betting is to recoup any losses on each turn, whilst risking very little money, by staying at fairly low bets. Here’s this system bet explained in a simple way:
- Players will start off betting 1 unit (chip)
- If they lose, they add another unit
- If they win, they decrease a unit, with 1 unit being the minimum amount they can bet
Using these simple rules for a roulette betting system, here’s what a typical round of 8 bets might look like.
| ROUND | AMOUNT BET | OUTCOME | TOTAL GAIN |
| 1 | 1 | Loss | -1 |
| 2 | 2 | Loss | -3 |
| 3 | 3 | Loss | -6 |
| 4 | 4 | Win | -2 |
| 5 | 3 | Win | 1 |
| 6 | 2 | Win | 3 |
| 7 | 1 | Win | 4 |
| 8 | 1 | Win | 5 |
As you can see, every time you lose, you add an extra single bet unit to the wager and whenever you win, you subtract a single bet unit from your wager. Once this hits 1, you continue betting 1 unit as your wager, doing that until a loss occurs and then you repeat the process. Using this rule of Dalembert progression in single betting increments, you can see that in a very few number of bets, you can return back to your starting amount and then begin making a profit within about 2 consecutive wins.
The main strength of D’alembert roulette system is that the increments which you increase your bet by are incredibly small, so the amount you risk is relatively low over time. This slow increase also means you’re unlikely to go over any betting limits, so you can continue this pattern for an extended period, contrary to the Martingale system.
Why It’s Not Going To Make You Rich
The reason why Dalembert betting progression and so many other strategies win people over, is they look great on paper, but in practice they simply don’t work as effectively as promised and people overlook the maths behind what’s going on.
The first big problem is that casinos know that binary bets with a 50/50 chance, played over a long enough time, will work. Because of binary betting sites design their casino games to not work this way. Looking at the roulette example, it is true that you can make a bet between the outcome being red or black, but you’re forgetting the extra green 0.
The Disastrous Effect of Green 0
There’s a reason why additions like the green 0 exist. They’re designed to make the game unbalanced and stop there ever being a true binary option in the first place. Roulette really has 3 choices: red, black or green; but players completely forget about green because it’s so unlikely to come about.
Even if it is unlikely, it still has a disastrous effect in the long run, since your options are no longer 50/50, effectively turning Dalambert strategy into an illusory system or, rather, into simple non system bets at that.
The example used in the table above, is a particularly fortunate one. 5 wins in a row would be brilliant, but it’s very unlikely to happen. In fact, the small numbers at play here, make it unlikely for you ever to win a satisfying amount of money. Even at your peak winning streak, you’ll still only be winning by 1 unit each time. Even if you manage a relatively good winning streak, a losing streak of just half that number of wins will remove any profit you’ve received, since you’ll be spending even more when you’re on that losing streak.
And the worst part is, that a losing streak is actually more likely, due to the favour laying with the house. On a standard 37 numbered European roulette wheel, 19 of the possible results are always against you, which leaves you with a 51.4% chance of failure on every spin. Your chances of losing each bet are higher and every time you do lose, you’ll be increasing your bet, which means that you’ll be statistically losing more often and spending more money to do it.
So, In the Long Run…
If we take into account the entire premise of why the Dalembert system should work, we see that the casino game’s design of not being a 50/50 bet, slowly removes any chance of long term profit using this system:
- Binary options – Option isn’t binary and weighted more in favour of losing
- Large enough stockpile of resources – Increasing your bet on loss combined with an increased chance of losing, means your bets will inevitably start to rise and run you dry of money
- Long enough period of time – The probability is you will eventually hit that bet limit and then you can no longer continue following the Dalembert roulette system
