Paroli - Reversed Martingale Roulette Strategy

Paroli is a popular strategy that is also known as reverse Martingale as it more or less works in complete opposite to the Martingale strategy. It’s an incredibly interesting strategy as it opposed to most roulette strategies focuses on benefitting from winning streaks instead of trying to win back losses. The big question is of course how well this actually works in reality? You’ll find the answer to that in the following article, along with how Paroli is used at the tables and what the background of the strategy is.

The background of Paroli

The Paroli strategy is named after a man by the name Paroli, which no one actually really knows who it was. What however is known is that the strategy is incredibly old as it dates all the way back to the 17th century. The Paroli strategy was then applied to a game called “Basset”, which is a card game that was invented in Italy at the end of the 16th century.

Paroli is based on the assumption that winnings and losses always come in streaks. In other words that there are occasions when the table is considered hot, giving many winnings in a row and also occasions when the table is considered cold, giving many losses in a row. The Paroli strategy is benefitting from this by betting more money when the table is hot and betting less when the table is cold.

How Paroli works

Paroli is one of the simpler strategies that you can apply at the roulette table. It’s designed to be used on bet alternatives that give you double the stake back, such as red/black colour and even/uneven number.

When applying the strategy, you would first have to decide a base stake that you would like to use. Every time you have a losing round at the table, your next bet should always be the amount of the base stake. On a winning round, the stake is however doubled, but eventually also reset to the base stake even though you keep winning. How many times you should keep doubling your stake before resetting it is completely up to you, but the strategy says to only do it two times. Let’s illustrate this with an example:

You decide your base stake to be £1. You place your first bet and lose it, which means that your next bet should be placed with another £1 as the base stake should always be bet at a loss. This time you win, hence your next bet should be increased to £2 as the stake should always be doubled at a win (up to two times). Once again lady luck is by your side and you hit a win. Therefore, you double your stake once again, which means that your next bet will now be placed with £4. This is the second time you doubled your stake, which means that regardless if you win or lose this round, your next bet will be reset to the base stake.

Round	Stake	Win	Loss	Action
1	£1		x	Bet the base stake
2	£1	x		Double your last stake
3	£2	x		Double your last stake
4	£4	x		Bet the base stake
5	£1	x		Double your last stake
6	£2		x	Bet the base stake

As you can see in the table above, we reset the stake to the base one on the fifth round as we had successfully doubled our stake twice. Should you like to, you can of course decide to step out of the frame that is suggested by the Paroli strategy and keep increasing your bets even on the fifth round.

Pros and cons

The main benefit of following the Paroli strategy is that you’ll never place a bet that is higher than four times your desired base stake and that a bet like this will mainly consist of profits made on previously won rounds. Therefore you never find yourself risking a lot of your money to chase losses, but instead you’re trying to maximize the winnings. This means that you’ll never experience any sudden big losses, but if you’re having a bad session the losses will just increase slowly.

Every time you’re managing to complete a sequence of three winnings in a row, which is fairly common as it on average happens one in eight times, you’ll win seven times your base stake. This profit could therefore cover as much as seven losses in a row.

While the losses rarely reach any higher amounts with Paroli, the downside is that the winnings don’t either. Even if it’s quite common to manage to get three winning rounds in a row, it’s unfortunately also quite common that the winning streak will break before this happens. Every time you’re getting two winnings in a row and lose the third bet, you’ll lose any profit that you made on the two previous rounds.

If you like to reach higher winnings, an advantage of the Paroli strategy is that it can easily be adjusted by choosing to double the stake more than two times. While this creates a potential to reach really high winnings, it’s also important to know that the risk is increased. The more times you’re doubling your stake, the higher the risk of the winning streak breaking before it’s completed. Therefore you’ll experience longer sequences of losses the more times you’re doubling your stake, but you’ll also reach higher and higher winnings when you manage to complete a winning sequence.

Should I use Paroli?

Paroli can most definitely be a great strategy to use if you would like to spice up the roulette experience by betting after a certain pattern and easily be able to adjust the risk versus reward. The base strategy that only suggests doubling the stake twice is a very low risk one, which means that you’ll usually be able to enjoy long sessions of roulette, where some will end in a loss and some in a profit. There’s no magic behind Paroli that will give you an advantage over the house, but as with all roulette strategies you’ll always have the odds against you.

Conclusion

Paroli is based on the fact that winnings and losses always come in streaks, which of course is inaccurate. Therefore the strategy can’t beat the house, but it could still be a good choice if you would like a different and more entertaining roulette experience. The losses will never escalate as the stake is only increased by profits from a previously won round, which puts you in full control and makes it easy to end a session whenever you want.

The downside to the strategy is that it rarely leads to any bigger winnings, but function best as a way to prolong the fun at the tables. If one would like to it is however very easy to adjust the strategy so that the potential winnings are greatly increased, but which also comes at the cost of a higher risk, meaning that the sequence of losses will become longer.