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Good question!
And it gives me just the kick in the pants I need to wrap up a few loose ends before devoting the next few posts to sports betting without fear of interruption!
I abandoned the "one-thumb" blackjack game on my trusty iPod with my win cut back to a healthy "$386,489.75" (beats me how you can get a 75-cent return on a $5 minimum bet, but that's the number I'm left with) because after more than 20,000 rounds, the house edge remained north of 3.0%.
Twenty thousand rounds!
Seems like I have way too much time on my hands. Or thumb.
But the experiment was worth the multiple hours I spent on it because it showed what target betting can achieve, even against a blackjack game far tougher than anything found in a real casino.
The undoing of my seemingly relentless race towards a cool million bucks was my application of a stop-loss forced on me by the reality that the iPod game imposed a 1 to 1,000 ($5 to $5,000) spread limit.
As my (handful?) of regular readers know, a wide spread is essential to long-term success against casino table games, and 1 to 1,000 is at the bottom end of the recommended range.
The whole purpose of spread limits is to cripple a losing player's chances of winning his money back, not (as many house-trained mathematicians claim) to limit the casinos' liability.
And that last sentence is not a contradiction, by the way!
Casinos know that 999 out of every 1,000 players bet in a way that is essentially random, most of them limiting themselves to a spread as tight as 1 to 5, with an occasional looney-tune well-heeled enough to attempt to recover all his prior losses in one or two extra fat bets.
A lot of high rollers think of themselves as being too rich to lose, and some of them are able to "buy the pot" over and over again before the house edge leans extra hard on them and cleans them out.
The casinos know that most gamblers on a losing streak are either too lazy or too excited to step away from the table when the game goes against them.
So table limits serve to rein in the potential benefit of a short-lived player winning streak, making recovery all but impossible.
A fat cat loser with big money behind him stands a much better chance of getting back in the black if he stops betting when he bumps up against the table limit, and goes looking for a game with much higher limits.
But that would be contrary to the nature of most humans.
And if there is one thing casinos know a whole lot about, it's human nature.
After twice pushing my win past $700,000 on my iPod blackjack game, only to fall foul of the 50 max bet (50 x $5,000 = $250,000) stop loss I set myself, I figured it was time to move on.
There was no higher-rent alternative for me!
In real play, I would have faced an overall house edge of less than 1.0%.
The iPod game, which even in its revised form breaks several real-play rules, had 9841 player wins, 10572 dealer wins and 1763 pushes.
That's a house edge of 3.3% with pushes included, or 3.6% without them...and neither figure shows any respect for blackjack reality.
I have to say that I am surprised that any self-respecting game developer would create an application that falls so far short of honesty and accuracy.
But MobilityWare is not the only culprit.
I fooled around for a while with a nifty-looking iPod version of 3-card poker, and was amazed to find that it allows "the house" to rake in the player's bet on a push.
No, no, no!
That might sound like a trifling error to some of you.
But when a maximum bet is on the line, theft is not an option that casinos should be permitted. Beating an honest game is tough enough.
Three-card poker has a real house edge of close to 7.0%, making it virtually impossible to beat in the long run even without the standard 1-40 spread limit ($5 to $200) imposed in most Nevada casinos.
It is, by any standard, a blatant sucker trap.
But it can be both profitable and entertaining in the short term, so long as any losses are transferred to safer games such as blackjack or baccarat when recovery is thwarted by those piddling table limits!
I admit I am disappointed that I didn't get to see my one-thumb blackjack win click over to seven figures.
But a big part of long-term success in casino betting (never, ever, call it gambling!) is knowing when to move on...
And my enthusiastic interest in sports book betting is all about moving on without abandoning casino table games entirely.
I urge you to come back often to check on my frequent updates on that topic.
For now, I'll simply look back to yesterday (Sunday, October 11, 2009) and the fate of the five NFL picks I posted last week.
As with the hockey picks (not pucks!), three of the five went south and two brought home the bacon.
Using the odds that prevailed when the bets were placed, the two winners brought in $275 and the three losers cost $300, handing the bookies a flat-bet profit of $25 on action of $500 (5.0%).
But target betting is not about flat betting.
My next post will deal with the MLB database, up from 700 or so baseball games to more than 1,100 with at least 1,000 more to come from the 2009 schedule.
It will show that target betting can be used to win steadily on both underdogs (the best bet) and favorites, day after day, month after month, sport on sport and season after season.
Flipping yesterday's NFL outcomes to three winners and two losers, backing the favorites all the way, we'd get flat-bet wins totaling $300 and losses of $315.
Oops!
As I often say, long-term profitability means winning more when you win than you lose when you lose, because chances are you will lose more bets than you win.
Here's a betting opportunity that permits you to lose even when you pick more winners than losers.
No wonder sports betting is so popular...it's a masochist's dream!
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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