The idea that it should be possible to win more from fewer winning bets than you lose in a greater number of losing bets first occurred to me in 1978, and the following year I bought my first computer.
The new system was a Xerox 820 CP/M contraption with a trailblazing 64kb of RAM, no hard drive, and twin floppies with a combined storage capacity of less than 100kb.
The whole kit and caboodle, including a daisy-wheel printer only a little smaller and lighter than the family car, set me back $13,000 and was intended primarily as a word processor because words were the source of my living back then.
I was intrigued, though, by the prospect that the Supercalc spreadsheet program that was bundled with the system might help me speed up the process of testing my ideas for betting at blackjack.
As it turned out, it took around another ten years for computers and spreadsheets to grow powerful enough to be of much use to me as a betting aid, and quite a bit longer for me to become proficient enough to properly employ all that theoretical muscle.
By then, I had a vast backlog of questions that needed answering, and boxes of notebooks packed with real-time play logs that looked about the same as the ones you will find in this blog.
All the logs had to be keyed into my third or fourth new system (an early Gateway, as I recall) and that alone was a monumental task.
I had learned early on not to trust random output from a computer and to stick faithfully to actual game records.
The problem with "sims" is not just that they tend to recycle huge chunks of output, delivering blocks of outcomes in the same order over and over again, but that use of them requires an assumption that simply cannot apply to "real play."
Mythematicians love sims to bits because in just a few minutes, they will "prove" that no betting strategy can ever hope to beat the house advantage in the long run, and it is very important to the economic health of the gambling industry that players everywhere believe that to be true.
But sims depend on the daft presumption that a player who is losing his shirt in a prolonged downturn will sit still and suck it up until his money runs out, at which point he will slink away from the game and start saving his pennies so he can lose another shirt another day.
If the same logic were to be applied to automobile safety tests, the rules would requite that a car survive being sent at full throttle down a winding mountain road with no one behind the wheel and the brake and gas pedals disabled. Come on!
Anyone who has ever gambled in a casino for more than an hour or two knows the value of taking a break when a prolonged losing streak sets in, and listening to a combination of experience and gut feelings that signal when a change of scene is needed.
This isn't hocus-pocus or silly superstition, it's just common sense (something gamblers are meant to be lacking, it's true).
I am asked from time to time why I use QuattroPro for most of my spreadsheet work, instead of following the herd and relying on Excel. Simple answer: It's a better program, just as WordPerfect is still a better word processing program by far than Microsoft Word.
For one thing, Excel limits users to nine conditionals in any one formula. QPro allows as many as can be squeezed into 1024 characters, and that's a lot.
The spreadsheet platform is perfect for betting analysis. It enables different rules or conditionals to be applied to the same set of outcomes so that the long term effects of a specific method can be measured at least to a degree.
Of course, no one set of outcomes from a truly random source such as real play can ever be exactly like any other (a reality that does not apply to RNG-based sims that constantly recycle old data). But large data sets do not differ that much in terms of win-loss patterns, and certain assumptions can be made.
For example, isolated wins and losses are about twice as frequent as paired wins and losses, which are in turn about twice as frequent as triples, and so on. If the house edge for a given game is known ahead of time (and you should not be playing it if it isn't!) it is safe to predict that the larger the sample of outcomes, the closer the actual value (AV) of the sample will match negative expectation (the house advantage).
The "gamblers fallacy" that a very large number of losses increase the probability that a given bet will be a winner deserves its name, because it is nonsense. But study of any representative sample of outcomes (more than 100) will confirm that very large swings in one direction will be to some degree offset by swings in the opposite direction.
To me, the ideal losing streak is one where the NB value is low (surprise!) because I am happy to watch 15 $10 bets in a row go south knowing that sometime soon, there will be a positive swing that will recover all my losses and give my bankroll a handy boost.
Anyone who doubts the certainty of swings and offsets is welcome to e-mail me and request an Excel file that will prove the truth with every tap of the recalc button! Wins of course cannot be predicted on a bet by bet basis (it wouldn't be gambling if they could) but we can be confident that over the long haul, there will be about as many wins as losses, less the prevailing house edge.
The chart at the top of this post serves to illustrate the effects of specific "tweaks" in the betting strategy rules.
Look to the right of the bold labels and then at the green numbers along the center of the chart. You will see that against the current set of outcomes (my blackjack trials never end!) a bare-bones version of TA/T with only the after-a-win LTD+ bet applied managed to overcome a gross house edge of 4.6% and an expected LOSS of $195,000 to deliver an overall profit of $72,000 (+1.7% of action).
The numbers head north as more and more target betting "switches" are flipped on, and they are as follows:-
OLx is the response to an opening loss in a new series (1 means follow it with a bet of equal value, 2 means x2 and so on.
2Lx is the response if the second bet loses and
3Lx shows the 3rd loss response, if any.
WPx is the PB multiple after an opening win in a new series, and any subsequent wins until the streak ends with a loss. The value is usually 2, but 1.5 also works well and I will add it to future summaries.
WP max is the maximum amount NB can be in relationship to PB (keep redoubling until PB is $200, then add $100 after each additional win.
Tgt is the profit you aim for each time an EOS opportunity comes along. I recommend a minimum of $25 or 5u.
Min is the value of the opening bet, $5 in most trials but $5 tables are becoming increasingly hard to find, at least in Nevada.
Max is the self-imposed maximum bet for these trials. A target bettor won't reach this stratosphere for quite a while, but this method is not about making easy money with minimal risk (let's face it, that simply is not possible in the long run). $5,000 to $15,000 table limits are commonplace in Nevada these days, even in rinky-dink Stateline, and high-roller rooms or salles privees offer much bigger limits.
Bust Crash-and-burn limit. No one should imagine that a million bucks in the bankroll is a guarantee against losing. It's spread that makes the difference, not how much you can afford to lose.
MSL to MSL means mid-series loss, and it's a little wrinkle that ought to make for riskier betting, you might think, but doesn't. It's basically a "do over" bet when a hoped-for EOS wager fails. Here, a second EOS bet follows a loss if PB is $1,000 or less. Above that amount, you have to wait longer for another shot at the brass ring!
WP to is the PB value at which loss recovery attempts are abandoned when an opening winning streak ends. By the time you lose a $500 bet, you will be at least $1,090 ahead on the series and "eating" the loss will drop you back to a profit of $590 from a string of nine bets (8 wins and 1 loss). Not bad. When the WP max is reached, a loss is followed by a minimum bet and the start of a new series.
Push+ is the maximum amount by which NB can exceed PB after a push. Note that in the chart, introducing the after-push rule boosts the win by about 10% but also inevitably cracks up the overall action.
Pushx is usually 2, meaning that after a push NB=PBx2 to a maximum of PB+$100.
You will see two different AV (actual value) or HA (house advantage) numbers in all blackjack trials, so I will explain why again. The GROSS value summarizes the number of overall wins less the overall loss total, counting naturals and multiples of the original bet as single wins and losses.
The NET value tallies the absolute value of each outcome (-2, +1.5 and so on).
So for example, the GROSS value of -2,-10,-5,+4.5,+15 is -1 and the NET value is +2.5. In the summary above, the NET value matches expectation for blackjack much more closely than the GROSS number. The discrepancy exists because 3-2 payoffs for naturals exceed the original bet value (naturally!) and double/split opportunities in blackjack give about a 20% edge to the player, assuming he plays "by the book."
I'll sign off with the latest BST log:-
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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