The Ibrox club doubles down on their Rohl gamble. They are addicted to this now.

Let me tell you a little history of gambling and one of the most popular, and most discredited, betting systems in the world.

The Martingale system originated in 18th-century France. It was designed around a very specific gambling proposition, the idea of an even-money bet. In short, it belonged to the world of heads and tails, red and black, win or lose. But there were a couple of problems with the system, and as time wore on those problems became impossible to ignore.

Martingale works by doubling your bet until you win. That is it.

If you put your original bet down and it wins, congratulations. Off you go with your winnings. If it loses, you put down double what you bet initially. Win that one and you take your cash. Lose, and you double down again.

There is nothing complex about it, although a million mathematical probability papers have been written on the subject, and there will be a million more.

Time has proved that Martingale has obvious flaws.

First, the system only looks plausible if you assume a clean 50-50 proposition.

The moment roulette wheels started adding the green zero, the odds shifted slightly against the player. In some US casinos, they have both zero and double zero, which pushes the odds even further out against you.

But the original problem with Martingale is even more obvious than that.

If you start your Martingale betting with just £1, by the time you get to betting round 15, if you have the stones for it, you need more than £16,000 just to stay in the game. By then, of course, it has already cost you an absolute fortune just to get there.

The game is not worth the candle.

Yet all over the world, every day, people gamble on some variation of Martingale without knowing the raw numbers that underpin it.

Doubling down is borderline crazy. It is one of the surest paths to absolute ruin you could ever hope to find. If you try that in a casino on the roulette wheel, be prepared for pain, because the house numbers tilt the odds against you in ways that make the risk unacceptable to most sane players.

So why do people do it every day?

Because they come at it from a fundamental misunderstanding.

They look backwards at what has already happened and convince themselves that the next event must somehow compensate for it.

Let me put it this way. In the above example, the odds of you flipping heads 15 times in a row when what you need is tails are 32,768 to 1. That is statistical theory. But here is what is harder to grasp.

On the next flip, the odds of tails over heads remain exactly what they were on the very first throw. 50-50.

How can that be?

A thousand broke gamblers have asked that very question, and there is a phrase you sometimes hear which explains it all very succinctly.

The coin has no memory.

The coin does not know you have flipped it 15 times in a row and got the wrong call every time. The coin does not know you are broke and desperate and need this one to come off. The coin does not understand abstract concepts. It does not believe you are due a break.

You flip a coin, and it can only come up one of two ways. The odds on that do not change, no matter how many times you flip it or what results you got before.

That is the fundamental truth about doubling down.

Given finite resources, table limits and enough time, every player of that game eventually hits the wall. Yes, that means you have to keep playing over and over again, taking your winnings and reinvesting them in the next game.

But in the end, the house gets it all. Because the cardinal rule in a casino is to keep them playing until they lose.

I like a bet. I like to gamble. I enjoy it. But I realised a long time ago that I do not gamble for money, and that makes it easier to set limits.

When you are gambling for pleasure, for the enjoyment of placing a bet and seeing where it goes, you know you are betting on a drug of sorts. Low-level, maybe, but a drug all the same. So you set limits because you want to keep that in some kind of recognisable order. If you do not set limits, and if you enjoy it a little too much, it can turn into an addiction.

Every high is different. It does not matter whether the addiction is drugs, gambling, sex or booze. Everyone experiences the high in a different way and through a different element. Some people like to drink on their own. Others like to drink socially. You can get alcoholics in both groups, but the experience is different.

It is the same with drugs. It is the same with gambling. It is the same with sex. For some people, it is all about conquest. For others, it is about carving notches. Sometimes it has nothing to do with the act itself.

There is a great moment in Casino which explains addiction well, and the psychological side of it better than almost anything else.

A gambler called Ichikawa visits the casino and takes it for $2 million playing baccarat. What happens next is classic casino tactics. They tell him his private jet has broken down. They make sure he misses the commercial connecting flights. Then they give him a suite of rooms all to himself. When he comes down to the casino that night, he plays small.

He knows what they are doing. He knows the jet did not really break down. He knows they are trying to keep him in the building. So, he adjusts his game in response.

But they understand him better than he understands himself.

What they know is that when he is betting $1,000 a hand instead of $10,000 a hand and winning, an ordinary person might see that as winning $5,000. He sees it as losing $45,000.

Right there is the mentality they exploit. So he ups his bets, loses the $2 million, gives up another million of his own money, and finally quits.

That is not just gambling. That is psychology. That is ego. That is identity. That is a man who sees the trap, recognises the trap, understands why it has been set for him, and walks back into it anyway because the trap is shaped exactly like his own self-image.

In gambling, there is something called the sunk cost fallacy.

It lies at the heart of Martingale. It lies at the heart of the entire industry. It is one of the reasons people keep coming back for more. The more you play, the more you lose.

The sunk cost fallacy happens when you start chasing losses. You start looking at how much you have already lost, and you start calculating how you can get it back.

It is the mental jump between losing it and getting it back that kills you.

The smart thing to do once you have lost is to walk away and accept that it is gone. The sunk cost fallacy is when you start believing you have to spend more in order to make back what you have already lost.

That is why people double down. That is why they take crazy actions they would never normally consider. As long as you are still at the table, you can tell yourself there is still a chance. Still hope. Still a possibility that you can turn it around.

You have to turn it around, because the alternative is admitting absolute failure.

Where does that road lead? To even bigger failure. To even greater catastrophe. Every gambler who has re-staked his winnings, lost them back to the bookie and then chased them with his own money knows what that feeling is like.

You cannot give up now. You cannot stop now. Not with all that you have put into this. You have to go on. And the longer you go, the more you lose.

Which brings me, by the natural evolutionary road, to the decision the Ibrox club has just made on its manager, Danny Röhl.

The reason everything I have written above is relevant is that they have now taken their biggest decision. They have sat down at the table. They have sunk a fortune into Project Danny Röhl, and now they believe they have to continue. They believe they have to double down, or all of it is gone.

The smart thing to do here is to cut their losses, get rid of him and admit that it has failed.

But they will not.

I am willing to bet they will spend another goodly sum of money trying to make this right. It will end the way it always does, with them having to sack the guy anyway. Then they will be back to square one with a brand-new manager.

The only thing is that they are playing at a table with limits.

Table limits are the anti-Martingale mechanism casinos use to stop people with the means to keep going from trying to create an edge out of statistical probability. But the table limit also stops players from getting into a catastrophic situation too quickly.

If there is a natural point beyond which you can no longer place a bet, you will stop sooner on the Martingale ladder. Either because you realise two more bad bets will end your ability to chase, or because you reach the pot limit and have no choice but to stop.

For this, read UEFA Financial Sustainability Regulations.

They add their own table limit. Ibrox cannot go completely wild, but they can spend up to the limit if they have the nerve. At least, that is how their fans are going to frame it.

But it is not about nerve. This is another trap gamblers fall into. They mistake the game for a test of ego and will. It is not about ego or will. It is about money.

It is about the most cold-blooded thing there is. You have to take raw emotion out of it completely and deal with it on that level.

The media is going to needle this lot to prove they are serious. If Röhl is going to be the manager, the media will say he has to be backed to the max. But any serious organisation with doubts about a senior executive would not give him a massive budget to spend.

It would reduce his department size. It would make cuts. It would see whether he really can work on a shoestring. If he cannot, it would move him on as quickly as possible. It certainly would not give him a budget beyond the acceptable level of risk.

There are only two reasons right now for keeping Danny Röhl in a job.

The first is the sunk cost fallacy: the idea that they have already put so much into the guy that calling it quits now means admitting they have lost it all and will never get it back. The second is fear of the unknown. Fear of what happens if they take him out and replace him with someone else.

When your two choices are sunk cost and fear of the unknown, you are in a bad, bad place. A sane and rational business would already have cut its losses. It would already have walked away from the table.

I understand the first gamble. I understand the initial intent behind what they did in January. They made a big bet. In the summer, they had spent a lot of money. The manager they spent that money for was not up to the job. They brought in a new manager, and his first role was to work with the team he had.

In January, they could have bet small. But they thought they saw a moment.

Celtic looked historically weak. Hearts, as first-time contenders, might not have the staying power. So they took a shot. In some ways, that was a worthwhile risk. In some ways, it made sense. It was not crazy. It has failed.

But it was not, in itself, a bad idea.

This gamble is different.

I cannot understand this one at all. I can only surmise that it is either fear or sunk cost. I can only surmise that they believe they have invested in this guy and now have to see whether he can turn it around. To do that, they are going to have to throw good money after bad.

That makes no sense, except in those two scenarios.

Because I think all of us know how this ends. I do not think there is even the slightest doubt that Röhl is already a dead man walking.

Everyone reminds us that the American owners know what they are doing. But these people came from the health insurance industry. They do not know anything about football, and it is easy for otherwise hard-headed businessmen to get carried away when they enter a world built on emotion, noise and identity.

There has been a lot of talk about Andrew Cavenagh having fallen in love with the club. I laugh at it. Not because it might be false but because it might be true.

If Cavenagh and his people are emotionally invested now, that makes sunk-cost chasing more likely, not less. They have not only put capital into Röhl, they have put hope into him as well. After a point, you start to think of him as your man, just as you think of it as your club. You have to keep your man propped up. You have to keep the club going.

That is how major mistakes get made.

The Ibrox club has gone through cycles of crisis because it does its own version of Martingale all the time. It spends a lot of money. That money is ultimately wasted. So, it doubles down and spends more. By the time it hits the wall, it is all gone. There is no value left in the squad, and they have wrung out and tossed away another manager.

Instead of walking away from the table, they come straight back and start again.

In doing so, they fall into another familiar trap gambling trap.

A casino does not want to clean you out in one go. That is another reason for having a table limit. The casino does not want you bankrupt in a single afternoon. It wants you financially solvent when you leave, so you can come back.

Ibrox has not yet had the catastrophic wipeout season, and so every time it fails, it comes straight back to the table and starts playing again.

The result is the same every time.

I already think Röhl will be gone by October. A new manager will have to settle in. He too will have to hit the ground running. He too will face difficulties and challenges.

If he does not overcome them right away, then by the time the season ends, hard questions will be asked about him. Then he will have to start the following campaign perfectly. If he does not, his future becomes another shallow grave.

When I started thinking about this piece, I thought Scottish football itself was the giant casino they cannot escape from. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised there were two additional factors here.

There is the addiction itself, the thing that lies behind so much of what happens in casinos and gambling generally.

I recently reread Rogue Trader by Nick Leeson, and the lesson of that book is that anyone can get themselves into a situation they cannot get out of. Leeson understood the maths. Yet he nevertheless played the assigned role and doubled down. Almost everything that happened to him was because of the sunk cost fallacy. The more he chased the losses, the more he lost. The more he lost, the more he felt he had to chase the losses.

On and on it went, until he had literally broken the oldest merchant bank in the world.

That is the problem with the Ibrox club’s American owners. If they get into that emotional headspace, if they start letting some connection or perceived connection to the Ibrox club override their thinking, it is very easy to see how they get into serious spending without thinking straight about it.

Then the problems and consequences will start to multiply. They will have lost a lot of cash for their own investors, to no benefit whatsoever.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that Scottish football is the wrong metaphor for the casino. This isn’t about Scottish football at all.

It is not the high they are chasing.

As I said earlier, everyone chases a different high. For some people, it is money. For some people, it is the rush. For some people, it is the ego trip. In some people, all those elements are in play at once.

The Ibrox club is consumed by one thing and one thing only; Celtic.

Their ego trip is all about beating us. It is all they care about. In order to beat us, they will risk everything. They will do anything.

They will double down and chase as long as they can. The reason you know this, the reason you can identify it, is because David Murray ran up so much debt with the bank that they ended up part-owning the club. When the bank money ran out, the club moved into the tax schemes which eventually helped propel the whole thing towards disaster.

That is what happens to gamblers when they get towards the end of the cycle. They start moving towards the crash. They go above and beyond what they can afford. They start running up debts. Some even resort to outright criminality.

The Ibrox club has not learned from that. It has not changed a bit.

I wonder if the mentality inside that club is now such that it is past the point of rational decision-making. Certainly, keeping Röhl on for another year does not fit the profile of rational decision-making.

It is not even that he will get another year. He will get six months if he is very lucky. I expect he will be gone in five, by October, once they realise that the start of next season is no different from the end of this one.

Then they will once again go through the horrible spasms of managerial change, and the whole cycle will start again.

That club is addicted to this now. What looks like chaos to you and me is baked into the system over there. They do not know how to stop.

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