So ... there are a few issues with this. First of all, all casino bets have a negative expectation (except the odds in craps). So when you put more money down on the table, you increase the amount you are expecting to give the casino. If it were possible to win by betting red, black, and 0/00 in roulette simultaneously, someone would have figured it out by now. If you do the math, you'll see that you are always losing two bets out of three, and those losses outweigh the wins on the third. (As a result, unless you have a poorly trained dealer, the casino will *always* let you place multiple bets "against" each other -- every single one of them is a winner for the house on average! There's no need to "fool" them with a second person involved.)

The principle is no different with Match Play. Your roulette example shows that this is roughly equivalent to just betting $100 cash on red -- if red hits, you get about $200, and if it doesn't, you get about zero. The only difference is that the casino is "giving" you that first $100 (some casinos just give you a "free bet" coupon that you don't have to match, which would be essentially the same thing). And if you are getting Match Play offers in the first place, it means you are doing plenty of other gambling, so why wimp out and try to "arbitrage" your match play offer? Just bet the Match Play on your usual game and you will leave the table, on average, with a bit more money than you would have without Match Play (or you will leave the table with no money a bit later than you would have without Match Play).

What's more, your roulette example shows you taking away $50 on red and $50 on black if 0/00 hits ... but you are really losing $150 on red, since you also lost the value of the match play. So that really sucks.

Even if you fancy yourself a card counter or have some other system which you imagine improves your odds (most likely it does not), just use the Match Plays when the count is in your favor/your "system" tells you that a red is "due" on the roulette wheel/the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars.

See www.wizardofodds.com for a lot more on these types of things. He has a specific article to address the point that taking counter-balancing bets always loses in the end, but I can't find it just now.

That said, in theory there are "better" and "worse" ways to use Match Plays. See here: http://www.beyondcounting.com/pdfs/b...ouponsbjfo.pdf . However, most of these depend on using a Match Play for a non-even-money bet, so they don't work at the Borgata. In addition this article assumes that your coupon has lots of nasty restrictions on it (lost in case of a push, just pays even money if you get a natural in Blackjack rather than the full 3:2, can't be doubled or split in Blackjack, etc.) and in my experience Borgata is better than that -- they are as generous as you could expect them to be (ticket is kept to use again if you push, pays out fully in all Blackjack cases), so some bits of advice in that article do not apply.

(That said, I am not actually sure what Borgata does about the half-back rule when a Match Play is involved. If they take half your cash and the entire coupon, then it is a terrible use of the Match Play. If they take half your cash and leave you the entire coupon, then it is an excellent use of the Match Play and BrooklynMatt's strategy actually does have a hugely positive expectation above and beyond any house edge since the "half back" rule is effectively a "75% back" rule. If they take all of your cash and leave you "half" in the form of the Match Play coupon, it's still pretty bad since $100 Match Play coupon is worth less than $100 cash.)

Full value? What? If you have $200 in Match Play you can print 8x $25 coupons, 4x $50 coupons, 2x $100 coupons, or 1x $200 coupon. If you prefer to bet $25 a hand, then you can use Match Play 8 times. No difference in net end result...