There are times when common sense does not make sense, and it happens a lot in gambling.
Table and house limits are often touted as a way for a casino to reduce its exposure and avoid having to pay out too much if a high-roller gets lucky.
In fact, tight spreads are more often imposed by players upon themselves than by a casino seeking to limit its losses.
And only a self-styled expert who has not bothered to study the numbers would dare to pretend that spread limits are really intended as a defense against big-money players.
The math demonstrates with absolute finality that limits are a weapon that the gambling industry uses against everybody!
Worse news than that is that at least 99.99% of the time, a casino does not need to haul this deadly weapon out of its armory.
Most players bring their own means of destruction with them every time they play, and eliminate themselves from the game long before they can be a threat to the house's bottom line.
Let's be clear.
Tight spreads can only win on those rare occasions when a player makes more right bets than wrong ones.
And thanks to the house advantage, that doesn't happen often.
The purpose of this post is to examine the wisdom of the linchpin of the academic argument against any and all betting strategies, which is a rejection of analysis of past outcomes, however large the sample.
Only in the field of gambling mathematics are we required to accept that what's past has nothing whatever to teach us about the present or the future.
And it is, of course, a wholly unscientific and illogical premise.
We are told that gambling outcomes are so unpredictable and erratic, so totally devoid of patterns or trends that are likely to be repeated at any time in the future, that they have an almost magical, mythical quality (one that has led me to make frequent references to mythematics!).
Utter twaddle! Codswallop, too.
If casino table games were as inconsistent and unreliable as academics (the Math Mob, or You Can't Win Brigade) would have us believe, they would be profitable only in the very long term.
And anyone who knows anything at all about gambling knows that against random or fixed-bet punters, the house makes short-term gains as a matter of routine.
The gambling industry exploits the fact that it is not just players who are predictable, but the games themselves.
The only uncertainty is the outcome of the very next bet. But analyzed in groups, from a handful (no pun intended) to dozens and scores, then hundreds and multiple thousands, outcome patterns are considerably more reliable than the weather.
Imposing narrow betting spreads increases the mathematical reliability of the house advantage. Widening spreads does the opposite, just as logic would suggest.
The catch is that the gambling industry and its house-trained numbers experts do not want us to even take a glancing look at the past, let alone learn from it.
And for some reason, intelligent people who really should know better are happy to accept that gambling is only about the future, and an uncertain one at that.
For many gamblers, not knowing is where the excitement lies, and that is why the best betting strategy in the world will never be a serious threat to the casino business.
One assumption most gamblers make, even those with fat bankrolls and a proportionately greater prospect of profit, is that higher bets and wider spreads must always lead to greater risk and, in the end, bigger losses.
And that simply is not true.
It is not possible to use spreadsheets and formulas to model the behavior of a random bettor because imposing order as a simulation must is the antithesis of a haphazard gambler's path to ruin.
But it is possible to clamp down on table limits and examine the effect of restrictions that players as a whole impose on themselves, either out of ignorance or because their bankrolls are woefully inadequate.
For example, the 80,000 outcomes in the ongoing BST blackjack trial offer an opportunity to discover how many bets of $1,000 or more would be required if the spread limit is set at 1-200 or $5 to $1,000 (higher bets being permitted when double-downs or splits come up, and higher returns applied for player naturals).
In one simple test, I eliminated most of the target betting switches that I recommend in the rules, "playing" a streamlined version of the strategy.
One element I left untouched was the WPx2 rule, which doubles the bet after an opening win in a new series, redoubles to $200, adds $100 thereafter, and ends the series after a loss of $500 or more.
Any player who does not exploit winning streaks, rare as they are, is missing a critical opportunity and probably deserves to lose!
With target betting's 1-5,000 spread limit in place, there were 3,796 bets of $1,000+, amounting to less than 1 in 20 (4.56%). Target betting won $293,000 overall in spite of two busts, retaining 0.67% of its overall action.
The gross HA was 4.76%, cut to 0.67% (a coincidence) by doubles/splits and naturals.
With the 1-200 spread limit applied, TB LOST a little over $100,000 (-0.32% vs. the HA of -0.67%) and was "in the hole" most of the time.
The most damaging effect of the spread limit was that $1,000+ bets were needed 26,735 times, or almost every third bet (32.13%).
The problem is of course that the quicker you bump up against your "green ceiling," the less likely you are to win in the end because at that point you are totally at the mercy of the house edge.
The tight spread run-through generated total action of $31.24 million, required an average bet of $388 and lost the equivalent of $125 for every hour of play.
Betting wide won $290,000 from $43.7 in action, needing an average bet of $542 but WINNING $363 an hour.
Overall action was higher with the wider spread, as expected. But the difference (40%) was far less than suggested by the considerable gap between a maximum permitted wager of $1,000 and one of $25,000.
I will have baccarat comparisons soon, but here are more detailed summaries of the blackjack results. First the "tight" application of limits, then the "wide" one.
Runaway sims produce meaningless, deliberately disingenuous results because they assume absolute inertia on the part of a player under pressure. To some extent, the same problems plague my spreadsheet models, even though the outcomes that they analyze are derived from "real" play.
"Busts" are always a bone of contention, because I argue that a non-suicidal player would not stick around when a potentially deadly downturn develops, and academics insist that bailing out of a bad run is ultimately pointless.
That fact is that prolonged series occur less than 10% of the time when target betting rules are fully and consistently applied, and when a potentially fatal pattern is avoided, the odds are better than 10 to 1 that more favorable conditions will be found when play resumes.
The odds can also be said to be 10-1 that the win-loss pattern will improve if you stay where you are. But smart gambling has to be about a "better safe than sorry" approach.
With target betting, all you are looking for by way of a more "friendly" environment after a bail-out is two consecutive wins, and often, a single win will save the series.
For the random bettor, it may be statistically a wash, because a player who is, say, five bets behind will often need an equal swing in the opposite direction to get out of the hole.
The whole point of target betting is to win more in fewer bets than you lost in a greater number of bets.
Here's how target betting did against the same set of blackjack outcomes with the rules fully deployed:-
Worth noting is the big drop in the average EOS number (the number of hands or rounds it takes to go from opening bet to recovery). bove, it's 5.1, as it was when the rules were modified for the spread limit comparison. The "tight spread" reading was 6.7 rounds.
You should also know that the risk assessment or maximum exposure number shown here is a "worst case" estimate, indicating that at one point, the strategy had to put almost $400,000 on the table to achieve eventual recovery.
Because target betting wins almost all the time, the bankroll keeps growing stronger, and in this test the true exposure was less than 20% at $182,000. At the point when the most money was at risk, the method had already more than doubled the bankroll.
You will see in the next screen shot that the big bucks were in play in session #13, about 60,000 rounds after the first bet, and with a profit of almost $1.2 million providing the fire power.
Watch this space for the same rules set applied against first the "LR" baccarat outcomes, then the much larger "LJ" sample (the initials indicate the verifiable sources of both data sets).
Lastly, my answer to the question, Why are you posting all this information? Are you looking for big-money backers, or what...?
This blog is intended primarily as an information resource for players who genuinely want to learn how to beat the house at its own games by overcoming the effects of the house advantage.
Secondly, it is a record of the work I have done down the years, serving as proof that my research is both unique and meticulous.
I went the backer route years ago. Twice.
Both "money men" were good company and fun to work with, to a point.
But both of them had far less hard cash at their disposal than they claimed when they initially contacted me, and both sought to undermine the principles of target betting to (as they wrongly saw it) minimize their exposure.
Caution and restraint have their place in gambling, but generally they work more in the house's favor than the player's.
"Scared money never wins" is an old Las Vegas cliche, and it's the truth.
My early backers were, like most gamblers, looking for quick profits for minimal risk, and I had to tell them that they were deluding themselves.
The analogy I used was an oil-drilling survey of a gigantic field that showed that 99.99% of the reserves were at 5,000ft or deeper, with a few little puddles or pockets at 500ft.
Target betting's backers wanted to keep drilling 500ft wells all over the place, hoping for a brief gusher, because digging deeper costs a lot more money before the big payday.
Drill deep, and you will have profits forever. Do the other thing, and dry wells will far outnumber "wet" ones. And even the mini-gushers will soon dribble away.
Remember, it takes money to get money. And knowledge and experience, discipline and commitment are a big help, too.
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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