Thanks to my iPod touch, I am on my way to developing the fastest thumb in the west. Which may not be anything to boast about...

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One last little thing this time out!

A skeptical reader (the one who said I'm too obsessed with simulations to play real table games!) now accuses me of mounting a campaign to put casinos everywhere out of business.

Quelle crappe, as they say in Montreal. Or is it quelle merde?

I admit to being no admirer of casino operators, especially the saintly 60 Minutes subject who put a stop to all the good "RFB" deals that made Las Vegas affordable fun, and replaced them with outright rip-offs that set Sin City beyond the reach of most people's wallets.

I also despise craven "lawmakers" who would rather pretend that legalized gambling benefits the national economy (and morals) than fearlessly do their jobs and fund state and federal services by legitimate means.

But I know that barely one gambler in a thousand has any serious interest in learning how to win consistently, and most members of that microscopic minority doubt that it can be done.

Even Saint Youknowwho boasts that gambling's only long-term winners are the people who own casinos.

My best hope is to be a mosquito who extracts a little blood here and there while buzzing under the "gaming" industry's radar and avoiding its gilded (and guilt-free) swatter.

Gambling without a viable strategy is, in my opinion, akin to setting your money on fire and flushing the ashes down the toilet.

Gambling without casinos would be a frustratingly unprofitable proposition (although as long as there are suckers, there will always be games for them to bet on).

I will tire of one-thumb 21 soon enough...and then I'll be back to the casinos in my neighborhood.

Let's be clear: I love casinos.

I just don't think they should be allowed to get their greedy hands on our hard-earned money without a fight that the math says they will probably lose.

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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The more you try to play it safe, the more likely you are to fail. The casinos know that, and it's a lesson players need to learn!

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This just in from the Lilliputian world of one-thumb blackjack...



I ran a couple of random checks between shuffles and discovered no repeats in the single-deck game.

That, I guess, explains why the iPod app is recommended as a handy practice tool for card-counters.

In my experience, counting cards can be helpful as long as Ed Thorp's rules are largely ignored.

Prof. Thorp recommends tying the bet value to the deck value, so that a +8 count would call for a bet 8x the minimum.

I gave counting an extensive trial back in the early '80s and found it more trouble than it was worth.

It's a "rock and a hard place" method that, in my experience, creates more problems than it solves.

It is important to avoid detection as a counter by pit personnel, because in Nevada, at least, you can be barred from a casino for winning "too much."

You can also be barred in Nevada for breathing too much air under a casino's roof, or for any other reason that takes a game operator's fancy, since gambling in the Silver State is regulated to protect the state's interests, not the players'.

At what was then the MGM Grand in Reno, I watched a gentleman of evident Oriental extraction (or extinction as my late Aunt Betty would have it) bet $5 against a neutral or negative deck, and $500 when the deck became fractionally "rich" in fat cards.

He played for maybe 15 minutes before he was led away, but soon after dismissing him as an idiot, I had second thoughts: he was probably at least $1,000 ahead before he was shown the exit, and if he had played "sensibly" it might have taken him an hour or two to make that much money.

And even in Reno, there are plenty of casinos ripe for the plucking.

Never, ever, underestimate players from the Far East: they are a smart bunch, although the gent I watched in action was certainly far from inscrutable.

My problem with counting is that when the deck is "rich" it helps the dealer about as much as it does the player, unless said player is willing to quickly reveal his tactics.

Let's say you have drawn 16 with your first two cards, the deck value is +5, and the dealer has a 7 up.

You know that a hit is likely to bust you, and also that the dealer's hole card is probably a 10, costing you your bet.

If you stand after placing a bet 5x your minimum, you will be yelling "I'm a card counter!!!" in the dealer's ear. If you take a hit, you will lose your bet.

Tough call...

I once spent an enjoyable evening in downtown Las Vegas with a card counter named George Williams, who believed (as I do) that greed is as dangerous for a gambler as ignorance or inebriation.

George bet a modest $25 when the deck was neutral or positive (we only played at single-deck tables) and $5 otherwise, and he did very well without attracting attention.

He told me that he was working with Ed Thorp on a counting method for baccarat. I have heard nothing about that since, maybe because the project was a huge success and everyone involved was sworn to secrecy.

Wooooooshhhhh...There goes another flying pig!

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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"I think you have simulator fever, you can think of nothing else. You continue to contradict yourself, when all I'm asking for..."

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The only feedback worth having is the kind that challenges my ideas about consistently beating games of chance, and this one identifies the biggest dilemma I face with this project.

How can I reconcile my deep distrust of runaway sims with the need to know the effects of different tactics against more outcomes than I could hope to encounter in a lifetime?

Along with that comes what might be described as a "sub-dilemma": Should I offer a strategy that works most of the time, or one that works all of the time?

Against a game with a 1.0% NE (blackjack comes to mind!), a simple Martingale has favorable odds of around 4,000 to 1, assuming a $50,000 bankroll and the (unlikely) absence of any interference by casino personnel.

Target betting comes through hundreds of thousands of actual and simulated rounds with a win rate of 99.9919%, which equates to favorable odds that are better than 12,000 to 1.

The author of the above comment wants me to provide him with a betting method that will reduce his exposure while guaranteeing steady profits, and is angry with me for supplying mathematical models that show it can't be done.

I guess he wants to be able to blame me when he loses, when the more likely culprit in his failure will be his own refusal to follow any set of rules when a temporary negative trend threatens his bankroll.

Target betting is, in a way, like an elephant gun taken on a duck hunt.

You won't needed it 99.9% of the time because it does not require much fire-power to bring down a duck.

But you had better have that big gun locked and loaded, so that if a rare flying elephant swoops down and tries to make off with all that you own, you can blast it out of the sky and recover what's yours.

I was about to say that the unfortunate truth is that target betting does best when the pressure is on, but the truth is not unfortunate at all: the money you rake in each time you achieve turnaround, which happens on average in six rounds or fewer, adds up pretty fast.

But the big bucks really pile up when your LTD+ bet has several zeroes in it, and you pull a natural or a winning double-down.

In other words, the bigger the threat, the more important it is that you stick with the program and come out on the sunny side of a rough spot with more money than you started with.

To resurrect a favorite analogy, the author of the comment above is like the guy who knows that he has to drill to 5,000ft to strike oil but would rather keep drilling 500ft wells because they are cheaper.

Never mind that a dry well will never pay for itself.

Every change that is made to the target betting rules in the name of safety or economy will almost certainly prove to be more dangerous, rather than less so.

Years ago I listened patiently while a student of target betting suggested that session limits or loss limits should be incorporated into the strategy to control exposure.

I explained that because bet spread is the key to my method's success, the narrower the gap between min and max, the more likely it is that losses will exceed wins and that negative expectation will therefore prevail.

If you were to decide, for example, that NB can never be more than PBx2 in response to a mid-recovery win (limiting the next bet value to a parlay), then most of the time, that will not be a problem.

But when a prolonged threat pushes up the LTD, you need to recover prior losses in as few consecutive wins as possible, keeping in mind that three-win streaks are statistically half as frequent as paired wins, that pairs occur half as often as isolated wins, and so on.

Trust me, halving your chances of recovery will not help you to be a long-term winner!

High as the recommended bankroll requirement for target betting may seem, it becomes a diminishing concern as time goes by.

That is because if the rules are followed with disciplined confidence, the bankroll will keep growing rapidly until the original exposure is paid down and the strategy becomes self-supporting.

Over the years I have generated models which show target betting racking up huge profits without ever risking more than 10% of its BR.

But because I have applied a $5 to $25,000 spread and a $1 million bust limit, I prefer to honor and accept the very long odds that at some point the strategy will crash and burn, and warn everyone that a $1,000,000 BR might be needed.

My long-running victory over Ken Smith's BST simulation, and now the iPod blackjack game (right now I am $82,150 ahead against an AV of -4.67%), shows that in real time play, a monster bankroll may never be necessary.

But I am not willing to defy what statistical analysis tells me and advise anyone to tackle casino house games without enough money in hand to soundly thrash them.

The core principles brought to light by target betting can help any player who has a BR that is at least 40x his maximum bet value, especially the proof that fixed sum or random betting will always fail in the end.

Spreading as wide as you can afford does not increase risk. It has precisely the opposite effect.

But most people, like my friend quoted above, assume that the more you bet, the more you will lose.

Those models or simulations that he scorns say that a spread of less than 1 to 1,000 (the range permitted by the iPod app) is sure to lose eventually, and that 1 to 2,500 is a far safer bet.

BST has a 1 to 200 limit, meaning that once in a while, a large session loss can only be turned around when the relevant outcomes are keyed into a model and a more realistic spread is applied.

The blog archives cover this topic in far greater detail, with summaries from simulations (oh, no!) attached.

I'm sorry, but it is simply not possible to win without risk. Even a casino owner cannot hope to do that.

Target betting enables a player to do what "the house" does, which is to build up a BR that far exceeds the original investment, so that when a crash and burn eventually comes along, it will be fully covered by prior winnings and will represent overhead rather than ruin.

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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Taking dumb chances is never a good idea. But sometimes, calculated risks should be welcomed, not avoided.

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There is probably a Google Analytics report out there somewhere that says blogging activity drops right off in the summertime.

I haven't posted a peep for almost a month, with endless sunny days beckoning me out of doors here in rural northern Nevada, but thankfully that has not stopped feedback from coming in.

I was happiest to hear from Daniel Rainsong, whose betting method was soundly trashed by the online shill who plies his trade as the Wizard of Odds.

The Wiz used one of those runaway sims favored by academic mathematicians everywhere to "disprove" Mr. Rainsong's ideas, pocketing a $4,000 bet in the process.

Apparently, Mr. Rainsong expected a fair shake and coughed up the cash like a gentleman, happy that the forfeit was covered at least 20 times over by his winnings from online and conventional (meaning regulated!) casinos.

All I can say about the Rainsong "procedure" (as he describes it) is that it has two things in common with target betting: it is a progression, and a clever one at that.

Readers who would like to know more about it can contact me via one of the links on this page, and I will pass on their requests.

I was also pleased to hear criticism of my suggestion that target betting can at times be profitable at long-odds games such as craps field, roulette and 3-card poker, the consensus being that anyone who blunders into one of those sucker traps deserves to get skinned.

True enough.

Constructive criticism is useful when it provides an opportunity to refute misunderstandings that only a masochist who has read every post to this blog could avoid!

In everything I have ever written on the subject, I have always qualified my embrace of games with a high house edge by saying that whenever bets start to look like serious money, it's time to beat a retreat to safer havens such as blackjack and baccarat.

I learned a long time ago that even in a game with a crippling HA such as the 5.26% that applies across the board in roulette, target betting can exploit the ping-pong effect that can be observed in the win-loss pattern almost as often as at blackjack.

But the greatest advantage of flexibility is that it helps throw casino bloodhounds off the scent.

When a pit prodnose sees someone winning at blackjack more than he "should" his first assumption is that card-counting is the problem, and when bets don't drop dramatically in response to a shuffle, dumb luck gets the blame, at least for a while.

Pit staff are first taught, and then learn from observation and experience, that no one can win forever at house games, and when counting and a hot streak are both ruled out, cheating is for them the last remaining explanation.

Occasional winners are more than welcome in a casino...they are essential to the business, because they're the lure for losers.

Regular winners are as popular among pit personnel as flagrant cheats, which some of them probably turn out to be.

As the known value of negative expectation at different games increases, so does the likelihood that the undramatic undulation of the win-loss pattern will pitch a fit and lurch egregiously in the house's favor.

But even the 2-1 vertical numbers columns at roulette offer opportunity for a target player, within reason, the trick being to halve and round up the current LTD when the time comes to update the NB value.

My guess is that an unbreakable accord between Israel and its neighbors is a whole lot more likely than progressive betting being embraced by supporters of the conventional gambling wisdom, and that is just fine by me.

And we will also disagree in perpetuity about the relevance or fairness of a testing method that assumes that all gamblers are suicidal idiots.

I have been lectured over and over again about the inability of even the smartest player to avoid absolute subjugation by the house edge at games of chance.

The message is that even if you can stay out of fatal trouble for a million bets or more, the house will always beat you in the end.

All samples of bets, however large, are anecdotal and therefore irrelevant if they show a player winning against a clear long-term house advantage.

Conversely, any sample of any size that depicts a gambler getting his clock cleaned is proof that the house edge cannot be beaten.

I do not suggest that a player who takes a break before a potentially fatal negative trend can destroy him will never get into serious trouble.

What I do say is that prolonged negative trends are a relative rarity and that a cautious response to early warning signs will avoid a significant percentage of them.

Remember that target betting generally requires just two consecutive wins to achieve turnaround (or "get out of the hole") and in many situations, just a single win will do the trick.

It is possible to encounter a win-loss pattern that defies probability and excludes paired wins or any player wins at all for an extended period. But that is not a common occurrence.

If you play like a mindless robot and take whatever comes at you without applying any form of damage control, you will lose sooner or later, even if you faithfully apply the rules of target betting as I have laid them out.

Many gamblers believe that stepping away from a punishing game and resuming play at another time in another place is futile, and they are encouraged in that self-destructive belief by the Wizard of Odds and his casino industry sponsors.

A target player knows better.

Occasional tough times are inevitable and they cannot always be avoided.

But if you are going to put your good money at risk in a game in which the odds are against you, you at the very least need enough sense to come in out of the rain.

You are sure to lose more bets than you win, in the long run, so you have no choice but to bet in such a way that you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

Perennial losers (a term that describes more than 99% of all punters) think that what I just described is an impossible dream.

It is not impossible. It is essential.

And even the most corrupt "mathematical" methods devised in the service of the gambling industry cannot prove otherwise.

One of the distractions I have been enjoying since my last post is an iPod touch, a present from our youngest son, and among the apps I downloaded was a blackjack game that can be played at speed with just one thumb.

There are many better uses for the ultimate iPod, I realize, but naturally this was one I could not resist.

The game starts you out with a $1,000 credit and automatically allows a "marker" for $500 every time you go broke.

Most important, the permitted spread is from $5 to $5,000, which is better than most virtual blackjack games.

As I type this, I am almost $40,000 ahead after a total of maybe five hours of play in three weeks.

The free app has a stats utility that tells me that I won 622 bets, lost 714 bets, and pushed 109 times, indicating an overall house edge of -92/1445 = (6.37%).

So...this is not a game honest enough to survive in a real casino (since when was single-deck blackjack tougher to beat than roulette or pai-gow poker?).

The app does not track action, but it is clear that I did not lose 6.37% of whatever the "churn" number might have been, in spite of negative expectation.

Target betting commonly delivers a win equal to 5.0% (or more) of the final handle, so my $40,000 in profits suggests an average bet of around $550 and an indicated LOSS of $50,000. Oops...but at least we know where I went right!

In response to an earlier post, a regular reader recently chided me for, he said, confusing actual value (AV) with the house advantage (HA) or negative expectation (NE), which he argues never varies.

Technically, he may be right, but if in a <1.0% game such as single-deck blackjack, the dealer wins more bets than expected, the house clearly enjoys a greater advantage than if (in the sample mentioned here) it had won 14 more bets than I did in 1445 rounds, rather than 92.

The same old friend bemoans the fact that target betting offers no (to use his term) bankroll protection and takes too many risks when the going gets tough and the "hole" is already too deep for comfort.

In fact, the reverse is true.

First of all, an adequate bankroll is the best protection a player can have assuming his disciplined adherence to a viable betting strategy.

Protecting the protection is the equivalent of refusing to use sophisticated weaponry in a firefight because the ammunition is too expensive.

The only alternative is certain death. But look at the money you save!

Obviously, no one wants to push their entire bankroll into the fray willy nilly, but significant threats are shown by the conventions of mathematics to be very rare indeed.

Cutting the method off at the knees right at the moment when its forceful approach is most needed is, to put it bluntly, suicide.

Target betting certainly seems at first blush to be riskier than most betting methods and far outside the comfort zone of the majority of gamblers.

But its ballsy concerted assault on the house edge rapidly generates a mounting stockpile of fresh ammunition that proves that attack is the best form of defense.

And because of that, the size of the bets required becomes a diminishing concern.

But we knew that already, didn't we?

Gambling has countless cliches that can be heard any night in any casino, covering speculation and accumulation in a wide variety of words and phrases that describe every player's dream of going home a winner.

The one that says it best, in my opinion, is Scared money never wins.

In other words, If you can't afford to win, you shouldn't bet.


As the caption confirms, the above results from the iPod blackjack app don't prove that target betting will always win. But they do illustrate what is possible, and given the consistent success of the betting method, probable. I have not checked the fairness and accuracy of the app, but the stats shown above suggest that it falls far short of Ken Smith's clever little Blackjack Strategy Trainer. Given its head, target betting will flip the house edge into a far greater player edge. But weakening it by imposing unrealistic bet limits, thereby requiring longer winning streaks to enable turnaround, is worse than counter-productive: it is suicide. I know from years of careful analysis of data from a wide variety of sources that a spread of less than 1,000 to 1 is not viable in the long term. The iPod app allows a $5,000 maximum bet, and that is its only practical advantage over BST. It is encouraging to see that in spite of a consistent AV far greater than expected, the house was unable to sustain streaks long enough to defeat target betting. What is important is that a disciplined betting strategy requires the house to be far "luckier" than negative expectation predicts, putting it on the defensive, in effect. That's a good thing!

The iPod touch is a brilliant piece of technology, and I am looking forward to seeing Apple's rumored expansion of the interface to tablet size. This little do-hickey cost about $300, and ballooning it from 2x4 to 10x12 or whatever will probably put the resulting tablet computer in the $1,000 neighborhood. Bring it on, Steve!

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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