Gambling is not a word I am fond of, because it suggests a foolhardy disregard of the odds and a reckless trust in luck.
I have not thought of myself as a gambler in more than three decades. A player, sure. But let's face it, gambling is for suckers!
I have spent the last day or so making my spreadsheet models more accessible to other people, so that I have less explaining to do when I agree to polite requests for copies of the files than enable me to make the claims I do for target betting.
It is just a matter of tidying up the boilerplates so that the function of the conditional formulas is less of a mystery.
I know what they are for (I created them, after all!) but some of the functions have been in place for so long that even I have forgotten how some overall results are arrived at. I just know that they are accurate.
I need answers to a lot of questions whenever I plug in a new data set and every so often I clean house this way to make sure that errors have not crept in and then gone unnoticed.
Spreadsheets are wonderful things, but it is far too easy for an occasional small glitch to grow into a major problem if every cell is not carefully reviewed once in a while.
Along the way I have been looking at whether or not the "Push-plus" rule I apply to blackjack (PBx2, PB+$100 max) would not be a good policy for baccarat.
I have come to the conclusion that backing Banker all the way is, contrary to the advice of most of the experts I have read, a very dangerous idea, with or without what would technically become "Tie-plus."
I have tried to make sense of the "no commission" variations that have been spreading through casinos since around 2003, working on the assumption that "new rules" are never introduced to benefit the player.
After an excess of open-minded analysis, I am back to my long-held belief that betting on Player only is the surest way to stay ahead of the game.
The "Tie-plus" experiment highlighted what is really the only major difference between me and the self-styled experts in gambling mathematics.
They cannot fault my methodology or the accuracy of my results, so they switch gears and complain that the target betting strategy is "not practical."
I say the player has control over his eventual fate.
They say that whatever he does to try to dodge the bullet, eventually the invincible house edge will find its mark and do him in.
They say that runaway sims provide an honest and accurate gauge of any betting method's chances of upsetting the odds.
I say that as long as we are willing to accept what I now think of as the "presumption of inertia" (not to mention idiocy, insanity, and ineptitude and eventual insolvency), then simulations that eliminate the human element, along with cards, dice, wheels, tables and dealers, may have something to tell us.
But given that actual casino table games are played by human beings, not mindless robots, their only useful lesson is that if you play like a total idiot, you will lose all your money!
Since I believe that experienced players can sense when it is time to back of from a bad situation, helped by betting rules that tell them when a change of location is due, I reject runaway sims completely.
Ah, say the experts, that's because computer simulations prove that your target betting strategy is bogus.
Au contraire, say I - very large samples of actual outcomes from reliable sources, along with on-going play against games that I have singled out as suitable for target betting, prove that my method is the only way to win consistently.
To get back to the topic of ties in baccarat, my policy has always been to ignore them, except when a dealer gets really pushy about trying to sell them as a sensible option.
When that happens (usually at a mini-baccarat layout), I smile my very best smile and say, OK, from now on, your tokes go on the Tie. The subject very rarely comes up again.
I found from reprocessing the Jones baccarat sample (more than 225,000 rounds with ties reinstated) that applying blackjack's push-plus to baccarat ties can add from 5% to 50% to the final win.
Here's a breakdown:-
Probably the first thing that jumps out at you here is that betting "Tie+plus" suffered two crippling busts while ignoring the ties (as I have for years) had just one minor hiccup that was quickly reversed in the next few shoes.
But then in 23 of 30 data sets averaging more than 7,000 rounds or 100 shoes apiece, the more aggressive betting approach paid off handsomely. That's better than 76%.
So what about those deadly busts?
Let's take a closer look at them, forgetting the illogical and unscientific caveat than in gambling, what's past can never be a predictor of what the future holds.
As the caption comments, not a pretty sight.
Now please consider the important fact that in real play, it would be impossible for prolonged downturns like these to do anything close to the damage indicated in the results summary you see here.
There is not a casino on earth that would permit you to open with a $5 minimum bet and progress all the way to a $25,000 wager, spreading 1-5,000.
Table limits exist solely to encourage gamblers to "spread tight," greatly limiting their chances of recovering from egregious downturns like those you see here.
In fact, spreads are getting tighter all the time, requiring a target bettor fighting a temporary slump to move several times from layout to layout before recovering prior losses (the all-important LTD) and starting over with a minimum bet.
Generally, I will suspend a new series when I lose a $100 bet at a $5 table, or lose $200 after a $10 opener, but there is wiggle room on the lower rungs of the ladder that enables playing conditions to dictate the first bail-out.
I do not always walk away from a $100 loss.
In fact, most of the time, I just fall back to a minimum bet, and make a mental note of the LTD/NB numbers from the unrecovered loss. Then I keep playing, perhaps suspending a few more series, until my brain cries out for a break so I can write those targets down before they evaporate!
The critical question that is begged here is How likely is it that when you bail out of a downturn, you will encounter another (and maybe another after that) when you resume play elsewhere?
For a haphazard, seat-of-the-pants gambler, the odds may be as bad as 50-50 that his lousy "luck" will continue and he will sink ever deeper into the hole, however often he bails out in search of greener pastures.
Not so the target strategist. He needs just two wins in succession to turn a losing series around. And more often than not a single win will do the trick.
The "worst case scenario" charts above confirm what you and I already know. Most of the time, the win-loss pattern in a game of chance is like ping-pong with more bounces: a win, a loss, two wins, three losses, a win, a loss, three wins and so on.
In blackjack, the average EOS comes in quite a bit less than six rounds. In baccarat, turnaround takes just a little longer.
The random bettor who is five bets behind is on a slippery slope, often needing to get the same number of bets ahead in order to escape the noose.
That is never true for a target player. Ever.
Because baccarat has only even-money payouts (less if you are crazy enough to bet on Banker!) it makes sense that it would have longer recoveries and lower EOS profits than blackjack, with all its doubles and splits and naturals to boost the player's bottom line.
For that reason, I strongly recommend adding the Tie-plus rule to your target betting strategy.
The painful busts you see above represent nothing more than a reminder that a player who will not take steps to mitigate the damage from a downturn probably deserves to lose.
My critics constantly parrot the notion that damage control is a fantasy for fools, but the math says otherwise.
Target betting enables a player to repeatedly recover his losses in fewer bets than it took to get him into trouble in the first place.
A random bettor can only achieve that end by accident.
As long as you are able to win more when you win than you lose when you lose (my turn to be a parrot!) then losing more often than you win will not hurt you.
Finally, more about the cliff-drop downturns illustrated in the charts above.
Here are details of the first few bets in each "killer" series.
The red shading shows where bail-outs would have been required by the target betting rules, or by house-mandated table limits.
Most recovery series wrap up in five bets or less, enabled by the paired player wins that are a consistent and reliable feature of every game's win-loss pattern.
Longer series occur more often in baccarat than in blackjack: about 10.5% of the time vs. 8.5%.
But even so, every time you bail out of a bad run, you have much better than an 80% probability that the WLP will level out enough to enable turnaround.
You also had an 80% chance of seeing an improvement if you had stayed where you were. But as the Chinaman once said, a killer losing streak must always begin with a handful of losses, so DBO (translation: don't bend over).
You cannot know ahead of time if the negative trend that just showed up will continue long enough to wipe you out. All you can know is that the threat you are facing is an aberration, one that probably will not continue if you suspend play for a while, and resume the LTD/NB elsewhere.
One of the many failings of the runaway sim is that by totally excluding the human element, it must ignore the simple question of morale and the extent to which intuition and good sense can enhance a player's winning prospects.
They dismiss gut feelings or intuition as pathetic irrelevancies.
They don't know what they are talking about.
A winning system that never fails is a mathematical impossibility. Even the house does not have one of those.
Does that mean that we should all play like fools and accept that losing is inevitable?
I don't think so.
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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