How to Protect a Roulette Bankroll

Total vs. Session Roulette Bankroll

It is important to understand that you need a larger bankroll if you want to have some longevity at the roulette tables. The casino has a substantial bank to play with against you and can easily take you down if you approach the table with say $20 or $50 in your pocket. This would be as dangerous and futile as warding off a rhinoceros with a fly swatter. It is recommended to grow your bankroll for as long as it takes you to arrive at a decent amount.

Your overall roulette bankroll should be divided into smaller portions per session. A session bankroll is the amount you take for a single sit-down at a given roulette table. This amount is typically based on the stakes you plan to play and the table limits.

Many experts suggest that players should have at least 40 times their biggest bet per session. Others recommend that your bet per session should never exceed 5% of your overall session bankroll.

So suppose you are a flat bettor looking to wager $5 on the even-money propositions per spin. In this case, you need at least $200 per session. If you plan on five sessions during your gambling trip, you should take $1,000 with you. This way, you meet both the 5% and the 40x criteria for your session bankroll.

We recommend you to refrain from applying this approach in roulette, though. Roulette players inevitably face negative EV unless they manage to find a biased wheel, which is a mean feat these days, or use some sort of roulette computer that would enable them to predict with accuracy the spin results. The latter practice is illegal in many jurisdictions so we strongly advise against it.

How Much is Enough – Profit Target

Greed ultimately leads to the demise of undisciplined roulette players who would abuse their luck during a good streak until they eventually lose their entire bankrolls to the house. Remember you are playing a game with a negative expected value so the longer you stay at the table, the more likely the odds are to turn against you.

An astute roulette player is one who enters the casino with a large enough bankroll but is willing to accept smaller returns. We suggest you do the same and determine a profit target for each roulette session in advance.

This target is percentage-based, so the exact amount again depends on your session bankroll. Experts recommend that the win target should range between 15% and 30% of the cash you have taken with you for the session. Of course, the percentage ultimately depends on you but do not set your target too high. Otherwise, you risk turning a winning session into a losing one.

When to End a Session

Knowing when to quit is essential for any roulette player, and gamblers in general. It makes no sense for you to persist until the game completely wipes your session bankroll out. You can prevent this from happening by determining a loss limit beforehand. An individual roulette session ends for you when you reach this limit.

Similarly to the profit target, your loss limit is a percentage of your overall session bankroll. Loss limits are again individual for each player but the recommended percentages for roulette generally range between 20% and 50% of the session bankroll.

Some players argue against using a loss limit or a “stop loss” as it is also called. According to them, this approach is useless in random games like roulette where outcomes are determined by pure chance. Roulette players are fighting an uphill battle that ultimately costs them money because of the house edge.

Each roulette session is interconnected with the last and the next session. Thus, ending one session with a given stop loss makes no difference to one’s overall chances in the long turn. From a mathematical perspective, all your sessions together make for a single long session, they say.

Some opponents of the loss limits draw comparisons with a relay race where only the first top-three finishers win. They argue that using a stop loss is similar to a race contestant who decides to stop running when they reach fourth place. This contestant would never win the race in this case. However, they potentially could have won if they had continued running.

Similarly, a roulette player could have scored a huge win on the very next spin if their stop loss had not prevented them from doing so. Stop losses are for losers, not for winners, their opponents would argue.

While this line of reasoning makes sense to some extent, we would like to remind you no player can emerge a “winner” at a fully random game of roulette (i.e. a game without bias where outcomes are unpredictable) in the long term.

We still advocate the use of stop losses, especially if one plays rarely and for entertainment purposes. Playing until you lose everything down to your last cent makes no sense to us and is certainly not something that “winners” do. If anything, setting one such limit saves you from tilts and the compulsion of chasing your losses.

Understanding Variance in Roulette

Streaks are inherent to chance games, so it is not unheard of for a roulette player to experience long strings of wins or losses. It is important to understand that such streaks are due to the game’s variance, which is something no gambler can escape.

The house extracts the same long-term profit margin from both inside and outside bets, which inevitably evens out to 2.70% or 5.26% over time. Inside and outside bettors both have winning and losing streaks in the short term, but the patterns and variance for each category of bets are different.

Inside bettors are more likely to experience high variance, especially if they bet straight up on single numbers because the odds of any inside number occurring are poorer at 1 to 36 or 37 to 1.

It makes sense for such players to experience longer losing streaks because they cover insignificant sectors of the wheel with their wagers (between one and six numbers at a time). Of course, the opposite where your number hits twice in the very beginning of your betting session is also possible.

Outside bettors, on the other hand, are more likely to see shorter winning/losing streaks and less variance, because their bets comprise considerable portions of the wheel. For example, an outside bettor can cover up to 30 out of 37 numbers with two chips only, one on the first dozen and another one on the high numbers (19-36).

Betting on the inside numbers is not a good idea when one is on a tight budget because variance might eventually wipe out one’s small bankroll. In other words, the types of bets you place should be based on the size of the bankroll you play with.