Paroli is a popular strategy also known as the reverse Martingale. Quite simply because it works essentially the opposite of the Martingale strategy.
It’s a rather intriguing strategic method because, unlike most other roulette strategies, it works by focusing on winning streaks, rather than regaining what has already been lost.
How it actually works in practice, whether you’re playing in an online casino, our live casino, or at a land-based casino, will be explained here. At the same time, you will get a fun and interesting story about the background of Paroli’s strategy, and the necessary knowledge about how to use it at the roulette table.
The story behind Paroli
The Paroli strategy is named after a gentleman named Paroli. That’s pretty much what we know, because no one is quite sure who he really was. What we do know is that the strategy is quite old, dating back to the 1600s. The Paroli strategy was then used in a game called ‘Basset’. It was a card game that came from Italy at the end of the sixteenth century.
Paroli is based on the assumption that you win and lose in bunches. The assumption is that in some cases the table is hot and therefore pays. In other cases, it will be cold, with the result that there are many losses.
With Paroli’s strategy, you try to take advantage of the shoals by betting more when the table is hot than when it is cold.
Paroli
How Paroli works
Paroli is one of the simpler strategies you can use in roulette. It’s great to have around the roulette table in online casino roulette, or in a live casino roulette, also because it’s really easy to remember. It is used on the squares that double the bet if you win. So it’s about the red/black fields, and the even and odd numbers.
When you want to play using this strategy, you first need to decide on a base bet that you will use throughout the game. Each time you lose, your next bet should always be this amount.
When you win, on the other hand, you must double the base bet. In one of the following rounds, it must be set back to the base bet, even if you keep winning. In which round you set the bet back to the base amount is entirely up to you, but the strategy recommends doubling only twice. Let’s look at an example:
- You decide on a base bet of 10 DKK. Now you play and unfortunately you lose your first bet, so your next bet has to be placed with another 10 DKK. So we follow the principle that the base bet should always be placed on a loss.
- This time you win, so your next bet must be increased to 20 DKK, as the bet is always doubled when you win (up to twice).
- Once again, you are lucky and you win again. You double the bet again, so you now put down 40 DKK. This is the second time you have increased the bet, so whether you win or lose, your next bet will again be the base bet.
As you can see in the table, the bet is reset to the base bet in the fifth round because you have already doubled it twice successfully.
Of course, if you want, you can adjust Paroli’s strategy and increase your bets all the way to the fifth round.
Pros and cons
The main advantage of following Paroli’s strategy is that you will never place a bet that is greater than four times the base bet. This way, the bets will mainly consist of the profits from the rounds you have won.
This ensures that you don’t overbet to try and cover your losses, but instead try to maximise your winnings. So you’ll never risk sudden big losses. If you do lose, the losses will only slowly increase.
For every three successful rounds of winning, which statistically happens one out of eight times, you will get a total win of seven times your base bet. So this win can cover your losses if you are unlucky for seven consecutive rounds.
While losses are rarely likely to reach really high amounts when playing with Paroli, the obvious downside is that this doesn’t happen for wins either. While three winning rounds in a row can happen relatively often, unfortunately it will also often happen that the streak is broken by a round of losses. Each time you have two winning rounds and one losing round, you lose the profit you made in the previous two rounds.
If you prefer higher winnings, one of the advantages of Paroli’s strategy is that you can easily adjust it and choose to double the bet more than once. This has the potential for higher payouts, but of course it’s important to be aware of the increased risk.
The more times you double your bet, the higher the risk that a winning streak will be broken before it is completed. Therefore, the more times you double your bet, the longer sequences of losses you will experience. However, you will also achieve increasingly higher winnings when you manage to complete a winning sequence.
Should I use Paroli?
Paroli can certainly be a good strategy if you want to make the roulette experience more exciting by following a certain playing pattern. This way you can also easily balance the risk against the potential reward.
The basic strategy, which recommends doubling the bet only twice, involves a low risk. You can therefore continue playing at the roulette table for longer, experiencing both losses and hopefully good wins.
There is nothing special about Paroli that can magically give you any advantage over the house. You will, as is always the case in roulette, have the odds against you.
Conclusion
Paroli is based on the assumption that wins and losses always come in separate streaks. Of course, this is not true, as outcomes are random. Therefore, you can’t beat the house even if you use this strategy.
However, it still makes good sense to play according to Paroli’s strategy. On the one hand, you get a different and more entertaining time at the roulette table. Secondly, your losses will never escalate, as the bet is only increased by what has been won in previous rounds. This way you will always be in control of your game and it is easy to stop the game when you think it is time.
The disadvantage of this strategy is that it rarely leads to very big wins. It does, however, allow you to keep playing for longer. If you want, you can adjust the strategy, but this is at a greater risk, as the sequences in which you lose will be longer.