Positive Progression

By Howard Moon 

Part of a series of articles on blackjack betting systems.

The positive progression is the opposite strategy to a negative progression. Instead of doubling your bet after every loss, you double it after every win. The logic behind this is that you are looking to take advantage of a “streak” of good hands. Truthfully streaks do occur in any gambling game. That is a fact. However, a streak cannot be predicted by any legal means so is only evident or indeed only exists in hindsight.

The problem with positive progressions follows the same logic that I described for negative progressions. Past events have no bearing on what will happen next. You can think that you are the luckiest person alive when you’ve won the last 15 hands of blackjack in a row, but luck is an insubstantial concept that has no practical applicability as you cannot tell whether you are lucky in any particular event until you have been successful.

The major flaw with a positive progression should be fairly evident to everyone – if you double your bet ever time you win, then when you finally lose, you lose everything that you’ve won so far. And unfortunately losing is inevitable if you play for any extended length of time. Ultimately these systems depend on the player walking away at the right time to conserve the win, however having won the last several bets has this irritating habit of making people want to bet again.

All sorts of variations on the positive progression have been invented, with stop limits to tell you when to return your bet to your minimum, external indicators to try and predict when you should raise your bet, a number of wins before you start etc etc. Unfortunately each and every one of them is based on a principal that is inherently flawed and so all of them fail to gain any actual advantage over the casino.