The 'Artingale' System
Don’t ask me why (I don’t know why I get interested in things) but I’ve been studying gambling lately. Not to become a gambler per se, but to get a better understanding of what it is to be a better. How does one think, and approach, something entirely based in luck and literally swayed against your favor?
Well, it turns out there is something you can do—you can mitigate loss. What this means is you can defend yourself such that you lose slower, and the blows you take aren’t as hard. You can’t stop death, but you sure as hell can put it into slow motion.
I should be clear here that this is not ‘strategy’—that’s a word that should be reserved for games in which strategy is even possible. What I’m talking about here is a system—something that you keep to because you know that if you just wing it, you might behave in a way that makes things worse for you. The system knows better than you do as you enter into an environment that is not just unfair, but biased against you. You will not ‘win’ in any sort of long run, but you may live to fight another day.
The gambling system which currently fascinates me the most is the Martingale system. It’s been around for at least a hundred years, and its concept is very simple. Bet as little as possible each time you win—let’s say $10. Each time you lose, bet double your previous bet until you win again. Lose a $10 bet? Bet $20. Lose a $20 bet? Bet $40. Etcetera. This goes against your natural instinct, as a person will typically want to bet less when they’re losing—but the less you bet while you’re losing, the more wins it will take to recover your loss (if you’re in the hole $100, you’d need ten $10 wins to break even again). If you use Martingale, your next win will set you right again.
Now, there are some problems with this system. First of all, it only works perfectly if you have unlimited funds, as there will come a point where you simply can’t afford to double your previous bet. It also only works at a table game where the maximum bet they allow is higher than what you need to double to. All this to say, it’s a fun tactic to employ in a video game or something, but you should probably not use it in an actual casino (and you should probably stay away from actual casinos in general).
However, if we envision the ‘money’ in Martingale as something else, something that each one of us does in fact have in unlimited supply, then it can become quite beneficial as a system. It is with that realization that I have coined what I call the Artingale system. (It’s the Martingale system, but for artists.)
Why do artists need the Artingale system? Well, because a degenerate gambler and an artist aren’t that far apart. An artist creates even though everything is stacked against them and luck is responsible for virtually all success. We keep coming back to creating even though it does not make rational sense to do so. We are willing losers—it’s who we are. Some of us ‘make it big’, but our natural end is to either die penniless in a gutter, or give up art just before that.
I don’t find that previous paragraph morbid at all, by the way—I love being an artist. I love the gutter—it’s worth waving to every time you see one. I know exactly what I’ve signed up for, and I couldn’t ask for a more beautiful existence. But, if I can employ a system by which I can lose at life slower or less fatally, I’m all for that.
Here’s the Artingale system, as devised by me:
Each time you make art that does well, make your next piece equally as good as your least good art that has ever done well.
Each time you make art that doesn’t do well, make your next piece twice as good as that one, until you make a piece that does well.
Your ‘least good art that ever did well’ is your minimum bet, basically—it’s your threshold, your standard for what constitutes a successful piece. Once you learn what that is, never go below it.
The best example I can give of the Artingale system in practice is through the medium of standup comedy. You start upon your journey as a comedian, and you tell better and better jokes until, finally, one actually lands with an audience. That joke becomes your minimum bet. Now you need jokes equal to that, or better than it. And each time you tell a joke that by chance doesn’t land, you need a joke twice as good—or many jokes, each twice as good as the last—in order to win the audience back and get out of the hole. Once you’re out, you’re safe again, and can go back to your least good material that has ever landed.
This approach works, and is virtually indistinguishable from what any successful standup comedian has unconsciously, or semi-consciously, employed in their own career. Now that I’ve spelled it out, it can be consciously, deliberately employed—and not just with standup comedy, but with any artistic output.
Everything I have just said in this Substack post might be a bit confusing unless you’ve seen the Martingale system work in action. Pull up any free roulette game on the internet and try it out for yourself. Place a bet of $10 on either Red, Black, Odds, Evens, 1-18, or 19-36. Each time you win, place another $10 bet on any of those—it doesn’t matter which, they’re all the same odds. Each time you lose, double your previous bet until you win again—then go back to $10 bets until you lose again. Within a few minutes, you will be up $100 profit.
The Artingale system is in its absolute infancy—there’s a lot I haven’t spelled out of it, because it’s brand new, I came up with it yesterday. But I hope that it will give you something to think about in regards to how you approach making art. If you have any thoughts about it, let me know in the comments. And if you enjoy this Substack, or my podcast, or my movies, consider contributing $2 per month to my film studio, Kill The Lion Films.