Yesterday's e-mail brought a tentative suggestion that maybe a syndicate backing target betting to 1/10th of the recommended bankroll might stand a chance of making a profit.
It might, but it is not something I would be willing to support.
I sympathize with everyone who says that I have arbitrarily chosen a BR value that no one but the highest of high rollers (high in both senses of the word!) would dare to risk.
All I can do is point yet again to mathematical models that demonstrate that the widest possible spread and a BR to match together reduce long-term risk rather than increasing it.
Better yet, an optimum spread/BR combo promises greater profits at a faster pace, paying down an initial investment far more rapidly and building the strength of the bankroll so that threats are much less devastating.
And there will always be threats.
Win-loss patterns are broadly predictable, even if we can never know which way the very next bet is going to go.
And one of the things we can be sure of is that once in a while, we will have to work extra hard for our money.
My critics and I clash all the time over the question of whether or not a player can affect his long-term fate by relying on intuition and experience to apply judicious damage control when conditions get rough.
I am not interested in lectures about independence of trials and probability because I hear what they say and I have no quarrel with them.
A random bettor is just as likely to jump from the frying pan into the fire as he is to land in a safer haven.
Not so the target player, who only needs two consecutive wins to get out of trouble and more often than not will be saved by a single win.
With each fresh loss, the haphazard gambler becomes more likely to be a loser.
Without a plan that adjusts to every possible eventuality, luck is the only winning option, and anyone dumb enough to rely on luck had better be ready to pay a high price.
Both sides of the argument can go blue in the face repeating their conflicting mantras, but target betting at least is supported not just by past outcomes but ongoing tests against rounds as yet unplayed.
Here's my response to yesterday's query, followed by the latest BST set.
Interesting!
I have been posting baccarat-related data on the blog lately.
SPREAD is the critical factor, far more important than total bankroll, although of course the two are related (you can't have one without the other!).
To be more specific, a $1,000,000 bankroll is not in itself a guarantee of success with TA, any more than a $5,000,000 bankroll is sure to win without a PROVEN progressive money management method.
A spread of 1-5,000 ($5 to $25,000) and consistent application of the TA/Target rules, however, is a guarantee, assuming adequate funding.
I don't recommend a bankroll of less than 40xMax but have test data that suggests 20x might be adequate.
I have never posited viability for a $100,000 bankroll! I'll attach some numbers from my baccarat and blackjack data sets so you can see why.
The great frustration inherent in bucking the conventional wisdom is that any test outside of an actual casino environment must assume that a player would have no reaction whatever to a prolonged negative trend.
Sims fail if they are denied that unscientific "assumption of inertia," and so sims have little or nothing to tell us: they simply cannot recreate real play conditions, because they necessarily exclude the human element.
The data set I use has some of the problems associated with RNG-based sims, since each evaluation of minor changes in the strategy's parameters has to be applied to all 400,000-plus outcomes and that would be an impossible task in real time.
What's good about my data is that every outcome is derived from actual play and most are verifiably objective, since the two baccarat sources (80% of all the outcomes) are unconnected with me (they might even be hostile to me, since I have developed a betting method that is vastly superior to either of theirs!).
Anyone considering any form of investment in my method, whether using it in actual play without my involvement or participating in a syndicate like the (one) you propose, should understand that I do not offer success against my (expanding) data set as PROOF of anything.
What we get from applying different versions of the target betting strategy to such a large sample of outcomes is a powerful INDICATION of what works and what doesn't.
My critics often claim that I developed TA by tweaking the rules against a fixed data set until I stumbled on a combination that would beat that sample, and that sample alone.
Given that the strategy has been out in the open on the Internet since 1997 and the data set I am using today post-dates that publication, along with the fact that the TA rules are essentially the same, I believe I have earned the right to ignore the skeptics!
Potential investors are strongly advised to test the strategy rules for themselves against outcomes as yet "un-played" with the help of any of the countless online simulations of casino table games.
I use Ken Smith's blackjack strategy trainer (http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bst/bst.htm) because I know it never repeats the same card between shuffles. I have yet to find a similarly trustworthy baccarat app, but I am sure they are out there.
Properly applied, TA works very well for blackjack (of course!), baccarat, field bets at craps and even money bets at roulette, and I have had some great results against 3-card poker of all things.
What I am saying here is that no one should take my word for anything.
And as for the presentation you suggested, I would hope that the blog would do a good job of convincing a potential investor/winner that target betting the TA way offers a viable, reliable and exciting alternative to losing. This response to your suggestion should also be helpful, and you have my permission to pass it on if it will benefit your new idea.
The potential for TA is huge. But the backing for the strategy has to be real, not ephemeral.
Those who study and then apply the target betting method are always rewarded with confirmation that it is indeed possible to "win more when you win than you lose when you lose." More importantly, they learn that doing so is the only way to overcome the negative bias in casino table games, and flip the house edge into a player edge.
It does not take an Einstein to figure out that if you lose, say, 2% more bets than you win, but your average winning bet is 10% greater than your average losing bet, negative expectation becomes irrelevant and a positive end-of-game result is inevitable.
Blackjack is an easier game to beat than any of the alternatives, and it is not uncommon to see an AWB/ALB value of 130% or more. Given an overall house edge of 1.0% or less, an overall player win is a mathematical certainty.
You will see from the (blog data) that a max of $25,000 and a bankroll of $100,000 can succeed repeatedly. It is entirely possible that in real play, results would be even better than the baccarat and blackjack data sets indicate.
I would, however, be unable to confidently predict long-term success for an initial BR of $100,000.
The mathematical support for a higher BR to back the recommended max can be found in every model that indicates a serious threat. In order for a max bet to be reached in any series, the house edge must have run amok, which it does rarely but reliably. It then becomes inevitable that there will be an opposite win-loss pattern (WLP), or in Wall Street parlance, a "correction." Otherwise, it would not be possible for the overall house edge to average out at known negative expectation levels, which it always does.
The offset is very rarely equal to the downturn that preceded it, but it does not have to be. That's why TA works. And works, and works...
I have to fall back on my 'old faithful' analogy describing an oilfield survey that shows 99.999% of the black gold is at 5,000ft with occasional small pockets at shallower depths. If you keep on drilling 500ft wells, hoping to save money, you might see a little oil now and then. But the drilling costs will always outstrip your profits.
Better to drill one deep well and be done with it - that way, you will be swimming in oil for life!
As you know, games of chance are all about probability. If you know the numbers and have the confidence and resources to back what you know, those games can be consistently beaten. If you keep backing off and fiddling around with the strategy rules, they can't. That's the bottom line.
The thousands of summaries and analyses I have generated over the years are the antithesis of gambling. But that does not bother me one bit, because gambling, as most people define it, is the antithesis of winning. So why gamble?
The question that is unanswered by my control data set is the effect of a player responding to table conditions by suspending play before a recovery, and resuming betting elsewhere. The losses shown in the target betting summaries occurred because the house advantage reached and then exceeded 30% vs. the negative expectation of <1.0% for blackjack and <1.4% for baccarat.
Would you stay in your seat when the house has streaked that far ahead of you in a given series? Of course not!
And it would not just be a question of intuition, because it simply is not possible in real play to bet from $5 to $25,000 in one place (assuming you were crazy enough to want to!).
A player would have to back away from a prolonged recovery according to the dictates of common sense: perhaps $5-$200 would be an acceptable spread at the bottom level, but thereafter, it would be best to stick to a 1-5 spread in any one location. That tactic alone would make losses like those we see in the models far less likely.
As always, the math supports what I am telling you. Target betting needs just two consecutive wins to turn a recovery series around, and in most (65%+) cases, a single win will do. WLPs without an early dual win are a 1 in 10 rarity, which means that every time a strategy player walks away from a potential threat, the odds are 10-1 in his favor that he will walk into a favorable pattern.
Last year, a cable channel ran a series called "Man Against Las Vegas" in which a disorganized, erratic egomaniac tried to recover claimed prior losses of $3,000,000 with a $1,000,000 bankroll and a TV camera crew at his elbow. It made me spit nails! I didn't watch the show for fear of fatal apoplexy, but I read all about it online and gnashed my teeth vicariously.
The MALV dingbat lost a big chunk of his money, as he deserved to, and the series was not renewed because his failure was an embarrassment to all concerned.
With TA/Target he would have cleaned up, dammit.
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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