You answered your own question. You can't make a profit when the outcome is 50/50. Anyone who says you can is subscribing to what's known as gambler's fallacy. The majority of these people are losing gamblers, the rest are lucky. They don't understand probablity and favour superstition, emotion and incorrectly applied math over real statistics and common sense... see below: This is an example of gambler's fallacy. Now what if we take the eleven game winning streak but change it to a losing streak? Then, what if we apply the infamous Martingale System? Suddenly we find ourselves facing a whopping 10240M bet for the original 10m return.