Roulette Systems Hub

Column & Evens

1 unit bet on the 3rd Column & 1 unit on black

Labouchère System

The classic split Martingale positive progression. Favoured by Author Ian Fleming & seemingly mis-named after Victorian politician and noted gambler Henry Du Pré Labouchère

Run Simulation

Not the James Bond system

The system often incorrectly described as being used by James Bond.

Layout

See the layout position of different neighbours on the wheel

Labouchere Notes

According to Labouchere's nephew & biographer, Labouchere himself discovered the formula in a letter composed by French Mathematician Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet (1743-1794).

Bibliography:

Thorold, Algar. The Life of Henry Labouchere. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1913. Available at Project Gutenberg.

The "feel" of the Labouchère system

Imagine you sit down at the roulette table with 300 chips, planning to stop playing as soon as you either:

make a modest profit of +30 chips (10% gain), or
lose your entire 300-chip session bankroll.

You're using the Labouchère system — which works by keeping a little list of numbers, adding bets to the list after losses, and crossing them off after wins. Each time you clear the list, you simply start the same list over again.

We also give ourselves two "house rules" that help the player:

If the ball lands on zero, our bet is "imprisoned" until the next spin (the En Prison rule).
If our list says we should bet more than we have left, we just put the rest of our bankroll in.

What actually happens

When we simulate thousands of these sessions under those rules, we find a very consistent pattern:

About 88–89% of sessions end with the player reaching their profit target of +30 chips.
About 11–12% of sessions end with the player losing all 300 chips before hitting the profit target.
This ratio is stable whether the starting list is 1,2,3,4 or ten 1s in a row.

In other words: in most sessions, the player does win their 10% goal — but in a minority of cases, a streak of bad luck forces the bets to grow large, and the 300-chip bankroll isn't enough to keep the system alive.

Wins without winning "half the time"

Here's the striking part:

For the 1,2,3,4 starting list, about 33% of the profitable sessions reached the target even though red appeared less than 50% of the time.
For the "ten 1's" list, it was even higher — about 42% of profitable sessions had red appear less than half the time.

So nearly half the time, people walk away with a win despite losing more spins than they won. That's why the system often feels like you only need to be "right one-third of the time" to succeed.

The catch

The cost of those frequent small wins is that every now and then you hit a losing streak that forces very large bets (on average 70–80 chips in the losing sessions). That's when the bankroll collapses.

So the system produces:

Many short sessions with a modest win, sometimes even when your bet colour came up less than half the time, and
Occasional blow-ups where you lose everything.

In plain English:

With a 300-chip bankroll and a 10% profit target, the Labouchère feels like it "works" most of the time — roughly 9 sessions out of 10 end in profit. What's more, in about a third to two-fifths of those winning sessions, the player actually had their colour come up less than half the time. But the price of that illusion of control is that about 1 session in 10 wipes out the whole 300-chip bankroll.