Back in the good old days when gambling discussion forums were not fatally targeted by spammers (and newspapers still made a profit), the topic of progressive betting brought frequent posts from a contributor who always signed his name with "Ph.D." after it, his presumed purpose being to tell us he was smarter than us, so we'd better shut up and listen.
The other day, I came across an old post from the guy I came to know fondly as "Harvey Phudd" and I offer it to you for your comments...
"The pythagorean theorem is more than 3000 years old, and it is still correct. You are implying that since the mathematics you blithely ignore is more than a century old that that the theorems are invalid. Sorry, the various theorems of probability and statistics that lead to the inevitable conclusion that "money management" or progressions can (sic) change the fundamental expectation of a gambling game are still valid.
"Progressions due (sic) skew results. That is, the chance of walking out at even or better is significantly increased. In some case, the increase is significantly in excess of 99%. No one disputes this. What you don't seem to understand is that the average win, when the progression system wins, is reduced, sometimes greatly, and the average loss, when the system loses, is significantly elevated.
"This is comparable, in the extreme, to a game where there are 2 blue marbles and 999,998 yellow marbles in a jar. A marble is drawn at random. The player wins $1 if a yellow marble is drawn and loses $1,000,000 if a blue marble is drawn. In this case, the player will almost always win this game. At some point, assuming that many players play, a player will lose now and again. The house (the casino) will make money on this game and yes, many players will also make money on this game. Heaven help the poor souls who lose however."
Harvey's argument typifies mythematics, which requires its followers to fudge facts and fiddle numbers and do whatever it takes to support the casinos' ordained right to beat the (stuffing) out of the rest of us.
Funnily enough, a believer in progressive betting or money management does not defy ancient axioms, whether Pythagorean or not, because it stands to modern as well as ancient sense that if you lose more bets than you win and bet flat or randomly, you must also eventually lose more money than you win.
My argument is with the assertion by Harvey Phudd and his ilk that a betting strategy that follows known and broadly predictable patterns in random outcomes cannot ever turn negative expectation on its ear.
Hell's bells! In the current BST trials, we're up to almost 75,000 outcomes and as you can see from the summary below, 68% of the series from which we made a handy profit were either negative or neutral, indicating that target betting "should have" lost 37% of the time and at best broken even 31% of the time.
It.
Didn't.
Happen.
Expectation is being in effect reversed in more than 2 series in every 3, and is being exceeded in those that remain.
Harvey is at least expanding the usually rigid, tiny-framed picture a little by saying that progressive betting can win close to 100% of the time but among thousands of players who make money from it, one or more is sure to go broke. It's the billion-bet runaway sim in a different guise.
I can't fight the argument that if a player takes no defensive measures whatsoever, he will lose eventually. But what does it tell us? That stupidity in a casino (often in the form of greed, ignorance, fatigue, distraction, or over-consumption of free booze) is a bad idea? I think most of us knew that already, Harvey.
Harvey concedes that progressions do skew results, and as long as my odds are being skewed to the good, I am in favor of that idea.
In the end, the choice is between negative odds of 495 to 505 (in a 1.0% game such as blackjack) or positive odds of 9,999 to 1 or better (13,328 to 0 in the current blackjack trial!) and I think I can guess which option most gamblers would prefer.
Harvey's million-marble analogy is interesting, but absent a Ph.D. I struggle to get his point. If the "winning" marbles don't go back in the jar, then sure, the odds of picking the right color will diminish with each bet until some sucker is sure to make an expensive mistake. Otherwise, odds that good are far better than those we face every time we get out of bed in the morning.
I know it's just an analogy, Harvey, but are there really people out there willing to risk $1,000,000 to win $1?
I'm comfortable risking a virtual "mill" at target betting because I know that soon enough, accumulated winnings will exceed my original seven-figure stake and I will be able to put it back in the bank and play on with my profits backing me.
Harvey is wrong when he says that average wins are reduced by progressive betting: the diametric opposite is true. And I doubt he meant to say, as he does above, that money management can change negative expectation, even though, for once, he was right.
It may also be true that even if you and me and everyone we know adopts target betting and wins consistently with it until we each fall off our perch, it will not alter the fact that casinos collectively will continue to reap fat rewards from the house advantage.
That has more to do with the nature of most gamblers than the numbers for or against progressive betting. Most gamblers expect to lose, even want to lose, and will do little or nothing to improve their chances, so perhaps they deserve their inevitable fate.
I have been warned on occasion that challenging or tampering with the status quo is immoral and unfair, and that casinos have a divine right to profit from the idiocy of the average gambler.
I say that if house games can be beaten without cheating or breaking the rules in any way, as many people as possible should be taught how to do it.
Here's the latest BST session. And OK, it's time for me to admit to myself that I am addicted to this process! I keep hearing the skeptics cry, "But it won't work next time!" and I have to keep on saying, "Just watch me win again!" And then I do.
(Good news that will be supported in detail in a later post is that almost TWO of ever THREE winning series will end with a single win, rather than the "twin" wins that are required for recovery without the OL and MSL rules in place. OL is short for opening loss, and calls for NB=PBx5 if the first bet in a new series goes south; MSL is mid-series loss and says that if PB is less than or equal to $1,000, the NB=LTD+ rule is repeated).
An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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