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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