June's doom and gloom continues for the 7-dog trial with one happy exception: Sunday's five right picks out of seven (finally!).

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[Please scroll down for "dog picks" for Wednesday, June 23]

The bad news is that while Sunday's sunshine smiled on the bottom line for 5x, 50x still red-lined because most of the wins had piddling returns.

It raises the old question about the long-term wisdom of making each series step up for the collective good when the combined LTD (loss to date) exceeds 7x the minimum bet, 7x being the critical number because we are running seven series or lines per day.

We have already established that 50x is too tight a spread to overcome a DWR (dogs win rate) which for the baseball season to date is quite a bit less than the hoped-for 45%.

At that spread, we are almost $100,000 in the hole and have not seen green ink on the bottom line since February.

Add a zero to the spread (making it x500) and take a zero off the minimum bet (dropping it to $10), and the picture changes dramatically, putting us at above 80% of our best win to date, achieved on June 10.

Requiring each series to bet at least 2% of the collective LTD rather than falling back to a minimum bet after turnaround puts the June 15 win to date at 98% of its best.

All this may be fuel for skeptics who say I keep changing the rules to alter the outcome, but the truth is that I have been making these points - and offering this advice - for decades!

I'm sold on backing underdogs, for sure. The process is so civilized! (No wasted hours at ash-peppered table layouts, fighting an uphill battle against suicidal players who want to take everyone else down with them, or grumpy dealers and suspicious pit bosses...oh, the bliss of it all).

This week's efforts were hampered by a computer glitch that sent my new Toshiba laptop back to Best Buy for a couple of days.

That's a story in itself! The system was under warranty, and according to the BB "Geek Squad" all the hardware checked out fine and required no attention.

Mysteriously, however, in spite of the presence of McAfee anti-virus software, diagnostics found 500 or more "infected files" that would require almost $200 to clean up and eight more days of geek TLC.

I said no thanks to the "disinfectant" and brought the computer home to run tests of my own.

So far, there's no virus anywhere.

I mention all this because Best Buy has been caught before trying to pull a fiscal fast one on customers, and this looks like another classic example.

To wit (or woo): Computers that require warranty work are a drain on the service department's resources because they generate no revenue. Solution: When hardware problems are fixed for free, why not offset that cost by inventing non-existent viruses and make a freebie revenue-productive???

I have no proof of this, of course, but I am sure as hell gob-smacked that not one of 500-plus viruses said by Best Buy to be plaguing my computer can be spotted by virus-sniffing software! (Software that's not being operated by the Geek Squad, that is...).

Here's today's update:-


Saturday, June 19 at 4:10pm

I'm behind start times with today's picks thanks to an odd development in my Toshiba/Best Buy/Geek Squad experience.

Today, after the hardware part of my system was given a clean BoH by the Geeks, my morning began with a rude crash, countless failed attempts at a boot-up, and then (when I finally had all my stuff in front of me) a succession of Windows warnings about an imminent hard drive meltdown.

Best Buy wanted about $100 to back up all my files earlier in the week, and I refused their offer, preferring to rely on the Carbonite account that I set up in late April.

While the Toshiba POC was on a shelf at Best Buy, I tried recovering Carbonite data on a spare laptop, and after much messing about was presented with files that were not current.

So today I sprang for a 1TB backup drive, then had a phone conversation with the Grand Geek in which he conceded that given the relentless "Wait for it...!!!" warnings I have been getting from Windows (along with "Back up NOW!!!") it seems likely that the hardware OK that his guys pronounced was, er, premature.

I'll be closing my Carbonite account, obviously! Why the hell would I want to work on files for the best part of a day only to find that the latest data has not been backed up as promised?

Sorry, folks, had to vent a little.

Here are the latest "dog" selections:


Sunday, June 20 at 10:10am

A squeaker again today, timewise...


Tuesday, June 22 at 5:10pm

It's hell being without LAPZILLA!

I just spent the best part of an hour trying to access my blog because although I carefully backed up the Toshiba POC before I handed it over to Best Buy for an HDD replacement, I didn't copy over the encrypted passwords file.

Dummy!

So, today's bets are late AGAIN, with the usual apologies to anyone who looks to me for inspiration about where to venture their wagers.

This has been a truly awful few weeks for MLB "dogs," with the DWR hitting 40% or better on only four days out of 21 so far. Hell's bells...

Obviously, DWRs below about 42.5% day after day after day are going to hurt my chances very badly.

The worm will turn eventually, but will I still be in the game?

Here's today's update:


Wednesday, June 23 at 11:40am

Baseball continues to defy statistical expectation and deliver a DWR that is killing the 7-dog trial...for now!

Tuesday, there were six dog wins in 15 games, but underdogs won both WNBA games at hefty odds.

No use celebrating bets that woulda won if they'd been placed, mind you!

I am a long, long way from understanding how the bookies set their odds, and because the odds are what they are when my money goes down, I am not going to lose too much sleep over that.

The crappy DWR for the baseball season to date is a cause for concern, though.

By the end of the 2009 MLB season, dogs stood at better than 46% after almost 2,500 games, and while that's not a guarantee of anything, this season's 41% after 1,070 contests (give or take) does seem a tad out of whack.

It's not nearly so much of a problem for a sensibly w-i-d-e spread, but the bottom line for 5x and 50x is dripping red ink more and more each day.

I doubt there will be another post before next Tuesday, June 29, because tomorrow I'm off to L.A. for a long weekend and will not have my Toshiba POC with me.

Meanwhile, here's today's update...


InvestaPick continues to sit out the MLB season, and if they were in the habit of backing dogs, that would seem like a smart move.

But since all three IP "sports funds" have been betting the favorite more often than not since the beginning of 2009, that can't be the reason.

Who knows what's going on? I only care because I was having great fun updating their records at the end of each month and seeing how much better InvestaPick's win record woulda been if they had been using target betting instead of a wobbly old Martingale!

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. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bodog, spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this._

June is proving to be a deadly month for the 7-dog trial and the only way to climb out of the hole is with betting spreads much wider than 1 to 50.

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Not much I can do about mythematicians who wag their fingers at me and say, "See, it's classic - whenever you start to lose, you simply raise your bet limits!"

Never mind that I have been arguing for years that a wide spread (much wider than 1 to 50, for sure) is essential to long-term profit from any game with a negative expectation.

It would be downright bloody wonderful to come up with a wagering method that guarantees consistent profits at little or no risk.

But that is never going to happen on planet Earth, at least as long as casinos and bookies insist on requiring all their games and propositions to include a built-in house advantage.

Looking back on the first couple of weeks of June, it happens that a surprising number of underdog wins have been at +100, or even money.

For the ongoing 7-dog trial, I have tended to make selections that pay at least +110, figuring that if I can't put money on all the promising dogs in each day's lineup (any team at longer odds than +180 being rejected as unpromising) I should target those paying better than 1 to 1.

In the larger analysis, dogs have been doing pretty well this month: I just haven't been making the right choices!

Here are today's picks and Saturday's results:


Yesterday, a minor brain fart stopped me from posting all the info needed to illustrate the merits of tailoring underdog bets to the odds that apply at the precise moment that the wager is placed.

As I explained, the idea is to mitigate risk somewhat in recognition of the reality that whenever we bet on an underdog, the odds are against us, and we can therefore expect to lose more bets than we win.

So if we have lost five bets in a row in a given series, with an LTD of -$420 and a win target of $120 (6 x a minimum bet of $20) and the odds on the next bet (NB) are +130, we can cut the wager from $540 to [540 x 100/130] rounded up, which is $420.

Naturally, this ploy loses less and wins less too!

The reverse can be applied to favorites so that bad ideas like the InvestaPick policy of counting a partial win as a complete recovery will do less long-term damage.

IP basically uses a straight Martingale, or did before it abandoned betting across the board on April 27.

That meant that when, say, an $800 bet intended to cover prior losses of $775 won at -110, the payback was $72 short of the target and InvestaPick simply wrote that off and fell back to a minimum bet next time. Weird! Given odds in their favor, the smart thing to do would have been to allow for the expected payback shortfall and make the bet [$775 x 110/100 = $875ru].

What I intended to do yesterday was put up the summary for odds-adjusted underdog bets, then the matching numbers for dog bets at full value.

So here you go...



As expected, action and exposure was hugely reduced, along with the final win value.

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. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bodog, spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this._

No need to mourn the mocked and much-maligned Martingale - it's alive and well and making money for those with the courage to use it!

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In the cut-and-dried, pedantic and permanently pessimistic world of conventional thinkers, the following statements (among many others) are, to use one of their favorite words, axiomatic.

1. Any betting strategy derived from past results cannot be effective against future outcomes and is therefore sure to fail.
2. Progressive betting in any shape or form (specifically, a method that increases bet values as cumulative losses grow) must fail because it will eventually reach a point at which table or house limits make the required wager unacceptable to the house.
3. Since every casino game or sports book proposition has a negative expectation or a house advantage, anybody who bets regularly is certain to lose in the long term.

All of these points and many others in similar vein have been answered in past posts, but here's a quick recap:

1. In gambling and mathematics, as in life in general, it is not possible to learn from the present and the future until they become the past and can be accurately recorded and analyzed. If it were true that the past has nothing to teach us about how we can best deal with the present and the future, then all of the wins that have been achieved with target betting in the past two or more decades could not have happened, and recent results summarized in this blog could only have been obtained by cheating.

2. The only alternatives to progressive betting are flat or random betting and regressive betting. The first two options must logically fail against any game or proposition in which more bets are lost than won (the inevitable long-term consequence of the house advantage). Reducing wager values in response to successive losses can't work, because at some point the bet value must be increased; the method then becomes progressive and, according to CoWs' logic, it is therefore doomed.

3. Given that all gambling options must in the long run suffer a greater number of losing bets than winning ones, the only logical and mathematically demonstrable alternative to long-term failure is for the average value of all winning bets to exceed the average value of all losing bets by a percentage that is greater than the deficit between wins and losses. Example: 52 losses and 48 wins with an average bet value of $10 indicates a house advantage of 4% and a loss of $40 on action of $1,000 (also -4%); however, an average win value of $11 and an average loss value of $9 results in combined wins of $11 x 48 = $528, combined losses of $468 and a profit of $60/$996 = +6% against a negative expectation or house edge of 4%.

There are only two ways in which a win/loss (W/L) percentage can be achieved that is sufficient to provide a positive long-term outcome against more losses than wins: blind luck and targeted or progressive betting.

CoWs, and their friends in the gambling industry, are happiest when players trust to luck and bet randomly and timidly, win or lose.

That happens to be how most people bet, and it is the reason that very few casinos or sports books go broke.

When "Peter Punter" first lured me into the world of sports betting last fall, he complained that many of the cappers whose selections he was paying for recommended doubling the bet after a loss.

Like everyone else, Pete had been brainwashed to believe that the simplest loss recovery method was too good to be true, and ultimately doomed.

The standard argument against successive doubling - known for some obscure and unGoogleable reason as a "Small Martingale" - is that while prolonged losing streaks are rare in games with a relatively low house edge (blackjack at +/- 1%, for example) they happen.

When they do, bet values rocket off the charts, and if a win comes along before your money runs out, your profit is limited to the minuscule value of your opening bet.

Take a $5 bet doubled nine times, for instance: the hole you're in is $5,115 deep, your 11th bet must be $5,120...and if it wins, you will have risked over ten grand to get ahead by a miserable five bucks! How insane is that?!!!

In real life, most $5 layouts limit the maximum bet to $500, and tables with a cap higher than $5,000 are hard to find outside of Las Vegas. Or so goes the anti-doubling disinformation campaign.

Truth is, casinos set table and house limits precisely because they are aware of the numbers that support the wisdom of doubling.

Blackjack is a popular target for hit-and-run "Martingalers" because a bet that has been pumped huge by a long losing streak can coincide with a 3-2 payout on a natural, or by a well-timed doubledown or split that goes strictly by the book.

The house solution: Block blackjack players from stepping in and out of the game between shuffles, and slash the natural bonus by 60% from 3-2 to 6-5.

Craps is another double-up haven because of the "bonus" field bet payouts on 1-1 (x2) and 6-6 (x2, and sometimes x3).

No doubt the day is not far off when step-up craps players will be barred from placing a bet until a new shooter rolls!

The thinking must be that while it is impractical to stop Martingalers entirely, they can at least be slowed down by defensive rules that have little or no effect on other players.

And the argument that after a high level of risk, the win in the example I quoted is "only five bucks" is specious: that long-awaited win recovered all prior losses in a single bet, plus a profit.

Any other betting method, target betting included, would require at least two successive wins to achieve that end.

So, Pete's knee-jerk dismissal of the double-up response to a loss was perhaps a tad premature...

Sports betting lends itself particularly well to controlled doubling, as these two summaries illustrate.



These summaries cover the same data as earlier versions, with some new questions answered.

The first is for underdog betting, which has to deal with an overall win rate of barely 37%, or far less than the 45% DWR that can be expected when odds are shorter than those shown here, but still well above even money.

There's a lot of information in the summary, but among the most important is the relationship between the average win value ($950) and the average loss value ($345).

Knowing ahead of the game that you are sure to lose more bets than you win, it is absolutely essential to ensure that you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

You will see that bets at the $20 minimum (26.9%) far exceeded those at the maximum (0.2%).

In the second summary, betting favorites at any odds was also profitable, but the 62.65% overall win rate eliminated the pressure to keep winning bet values higher than losing ones.

Backing favorites, the overall win value was at 3.64% of total action far less than the 33.6% achieved by target betting backing underdogs - but the risk was also substantially reduced.

Playing it safe the way InvestaPick did most of the time until it suspended all three of its sports funds at the end of April means more wins than losses.

That's a good thing, maybe, but probably not if you apply a simple Martingale and fail to cover all of your prior losses before falling back to a minimum bet after a win.

The underdogs summary above shows what woulda happened if doubled-up bets had been controlled by factoring dog odds into the equation before setting the value of the next bet (NB) after a loss.

Suppose, for example, that you're $1,000 in the hole, your win target after eight successive losses is $180, and the dog odds on the bet you are about to place indicate a payback of +140.

At even money, your NB would total $1,180. But to get a payback of that amount at +140, your bet need only be $843 rounded up to $860, because $860 x 1.4 would bring in $1,204 and meet your target.

For most punters, betting is not about the math - it's about emotion or greed or haphazard hunches.

Let the math rule, and you can win consistently, as the summaries above demonstrate.

In a casino, any variation of progressive betting attracts attention, and unwanted attention can lead to all kinds of problems, including being barred from making that critical next bet that you hope will end a losing streak.

None of that applies if you are betting sports.

The process is slower than at any casino table game, obviously - but having no one watching and attempting to block your next move is a big plus!

You still need a lot of guts and big money behind you, but big bets can be spread across several books, and you have all the time you need to figure out the best way to protect your bankroll.

I should add at this point that the 7-dog trial is continuing.

But after seven months of almost daily posts, I plan to reduce the number of updates to a couple every week at the most.

I will post picks when I can, as below, but from now on, some days you readers will be on your own if you plan to do the smart thing and back underdogs.

I will post screen snaps from the Excel 7-dog worksheet from time to time, but bets when posted will be in the format you see here, with upcoming bets at the bottom and prior wins highlighted as shown.

Right picks have been depressingly hard to come by since the end of May. But the math is on our side, and the slump will end soon enough.


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. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bodog, spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this._

When it comes to target betting, most questions worth asking begin with the words "What if...?" So, What if we backed both Faves and Dogs every day?

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One of the hazards of swimming upstream is that every so often, someone comes at me with the accusation that since the results I am getting defy mathematical expectation, I must be fudging my numbers.

That's been happening off and on for almost 30 years now, with the attacks intensifying since I first published the principles of target betting on the Internet in 1997.

There's not a whole lot I can do about it, beyond hoping that from time to time, players with open minds will stumble on this blog and take away from it the realization that losing is not the inevitable long-term consequence of challenging the house advantage.

The results from the 7-dog trial from November 1 through May 31 beg a number of intelligent questions, most of them opening with "What if...?" - words best answered by processing actual outcomes and variable rules through a spreadsheet program.

Some examples:

What if...the 7-dog trial rules could have been applied to all 7,500-plus actual games in the pro-sports database?
What if...the data were sorted in chronological order, and every underdog paying odds of 1 to 1 (even money or +100) or more had been backed?
What if...the same actual games were organized so that as many daily bets as necessary could be tracked in separate series (numbering far more than seven, for sure!)?
What if...the same target betting rules were used to back favorites instead of underdogs in all those real-world sporting battles?
What if...target betting backed favorites AND underdogs every day?

Good questions all.

You will find some answers below.

But first, let's look at the last idea above.

Try picturing a betting situation where you can back both sides by following a strict set of rules that determines bet values by referring to the wager that preceded it...and achieve a long-term profit in both the Favorites and Underdogs categories.

If "hedging to win" sounds far-fetched to you, remember that bookies do that a thousand times a day, in theory offering inducements to encourage punters to collectively match the sums ventured on both the road team and the home team in any given game.

The bookies make a buck or two by setting odds that favor them either way.

Target betting delivers long-term profits by happily accepting whatever odds are offered (there's no choice, after all, except when a bad bet can be thrown away for a better one) and then calibrating wager amounts according to a set of rules every bit as strict as those that protect the book.

Sports betting offers just about the only opportunity for a solo punter to play both ends against the middle.

It's possible in a casino at baccarat or craps, but it would take two players seemingly betting independently to avoid setting off alarms in the pit.

And sports betting has another huge advantage: large bets that might otherwise attract attention can easily be spread across as many books as it takes.

I live in an area where there are probably 20 sports books within an hour's drive, but the expansion of online options offers everyone an array of choices that don't guzzle gas!

Personally, I love the idea of draining a tiny percentage of their profits from online outlets because I know at least one - Bodog - that I believe blatantly cheats with its "virtual" table games (see the note at the end of this post).

But this is not about animus, it's about math!

Speaking of which, it's worth reminding ourselves that bookies do a happy dance when underdogs win, because in most situations, more than 70% of punters will put their money on the favorite.

On June 6 (yesterday!), for example, the San Diego Padres won at +110 against the Philadelphia Phillies at -130; those odds suggest perhaps a 70-30 bias towards the favorite, meaning that in every $100,000 of action, $30,000 backed the Padres and $70,000 went on the Phillies; so, $33,000 was paid out on the dog and $70,000 was collected on the losing favorite - a nice little $37,000 (37%) profit for the book.

Had the game gone the other way, $63,700 would have been paid out on the Phillies, offset by $30,000 contributed by losing dog bettors: a net LOSS of $33,700.

An over-simplification, perhaps, but it helps explain why sports books not only expect dogs to win around 45% of all games, but count on it to fatten their bottom line and salve the sting from winning favorites.

The intricacies of odds-setting are usually explained by supposing that action is equally divided between two options. But that is, to use a non-technical term, a load of old cobblers.

If that were so, the bookies in our Padres/Phillies example would have paid out $55,000 on the dog and raked in $50,000 on the favorite - still not a model business plan, with a 5% loss on the deal.

But it ain't so.

At Scores and Odds dot com, among other excellent online odds sites, you will find a daily breakdown of how the money splits on each game. And while there is no need to let betting trend-lines affect your picks, they supply useful intelligence that confirms the unsurprising inevitability of so-called surprises.

Here's today's breakdown about five hours ahead of the first game, with thanks to the source:


On average, 73% of bettors have their money on favorites, and 27% are bucking the odds. The standout here (the exception that proves the rule?) is the number for the Texas Rangers, who are underdogs at about +105 but have more money on them (61%) than the Seattle Mariners.

It will be interesting to see how that turns out...

Followers of the conventional wisdom (I call them CoWs in recognition of their herd mentality and their bovine stubbornness!) reject the target betting concept entirely and would have fits at the very notion of hedge-betting, and of course that's their right.

They will not be swayed by evidence such as this:


The charts above speak for themselves, but the data needs to be interpreted as follows:

Favorites won 65% of the 467 games in the data set, and target betting delivered an overall win of $11,400 (8.6%) against exposure of $800 and an average bet value of $285.
Underdogs won about a third of their games, risked $13,220, and with target betting made an overall profit of $75,500 (34.6% of all action thanks to routine paybacks far exceeding even money). The average dog bet was $470.
Favorites and Underdogs combined risked $4,700 to win $86,900 (24.75%) on an average bet value of $760.
Underdogs had to battle against a "house edge" of 34% and in consequence had to lay out much larger wagers when target betting was applied, to a maximum short of the permitted $50,000 but not by much: $41,000.
The highest target betting wager on Favorites was a relatively conservative $5,000.

Please try to contain your response to the bet values shown above.

Although the supporting data are real and easily verifiable, this is for our purposes a purely academic exercise intended to dramatically demonstrate that target betting overcomes negative expectation and routinely delivers a "player's edge" against the house advantage that is inherent in all gambling situations.

Here are 12-series summaries for target betting on dogs and faves separately throughout the two-year period reviewed:



No doubt I will be hearing from Cows that all this information is anecdotal and irrelevant because a data set of 7,500 games is not a representative sample.

All I can say to that is...Mooooooooooooo!

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. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bodog, spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this._

Seven months of the 7-dog trial tell us what we have known all along. The key to consistent wins in sports betting lies in one wee word...S.P.R.E.A.D.

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I want first of all to revisit the core premise that evolved when a friend persuaded me to travel to the (to me!) alien world of sports betting.

Since I first learned to shuffle a deck at the age of eight, I have been a card player, and occasional forays into horse racing after I hit my late teens failed to fuzz my focus on casino betting as the most reliable way to stay ahead of the game.

My pal "Peter Punter" contacted me early last fall with a request that I "do the math" on an idea he'd had that centered on the high win percentages claimed by some professional handicappers ("cappers") in the field of sports betting.

Pete reasoned that casino games - his favorite poison is baccarat - have a predictable and inescapable negative expectation, while top cappers can prove a year-round success rate of 70% or more.

That amounts to a player edge instead of a house advantage, and that has to mean money in the bank, said Pete.

My immediate response was to pour cold water all over the notion.

Handicappers pick mostly favorites to boost their chance of being right substantially more than half the time.

And since favorites almost always pay much less then even money on a right pick, the book is bound to make a long-term profit in spite of losing more bets than it wins.

Let's assume that favorites win 60% of 1,000 games and that the average return per win is 65 cents on the dollar.

The book would then collect $400 on 400 punter losses at $1 apiece and pay out 600 x $0.65 on wins: $390.

Add a dose of reality to those best-case numbers and it quickly becomes clear that my pal Pete had been gripped by a truly lousy idea.

He's not a guy who likes to hear the word NO! and he countered with confidence that surely target betting could overcome the bookies edge.

As things turned out, he was right.

But in the end, Pete went with some cockamamie progression that had nothing whatever to do with win targets, and he dumped thousands of dollars into an ever-deepening hole.

I, in the meantime, rejected the irrelevant win claims of pro cappers (who make a lot more money for the bookies than they do for bettors crazy enough to buy their picks), and opted instead to take a close look at underdogs.

Underdogs lose more often than they win, obviously...otherwise they'd be favorites.

But they also pay, at worst, even money on every win (assuming we never bet at odds below +100 or 1-1), and paybacks are routinely considerably more than 100%.

I began to build a database that has now topped 7,500 games from baseball, pro football, basketball and hockey schedules going back to the fall of 2008.

Backing ALL underdogs (including teams that didn't have a snowball-in-hell's chance of winning) we woulda had a win rate of 38%, giving the book an overall advantage of...24%!

With those numbers, we woulda needed an average payback of 62/38 = +164 just to break even.

And, of course, that didn't happen.

The overall average odds for underdogs for all 7,525 contests were +202, or a hair better than 2 to 1.

Average odds for winning "dogs" were +151 - not enough to break even on flat bets.

And the two words that count the most in that sentence are flat bets.

Bet fixed or random amounts in any gambling scenario and you are, in the end, doomed.

Which is where target betting comes in - and how spread saves our bottom line from being submerged in red ink.

In the 7-dog trial that I set rolling last November 1, I chose a minimum bet of $100 and created separate worksheets to track spreads of 1 to 5 (maximum permitted bet $500) and 1 to 50 (max $5,000).

I learned a very long time ago that against table games (blackjack especially) the only way to win is to spread as wide as you can afford, with your overall win percentage inexorably tied to your max/min multiple.

Most players bounce around within a 1-5 spread, which is why most players lose most of the time.

Combining target betting with a 1-100 spread is a good start, and the more zeroes tacked on to the larger of those two numbers, the better your chances of beating the odds.

The standard, knee-jerk response to this easily proven truth is that "no one can afford bets that high" and if that's true, then no one but the house can afford to win.

Some perspective here: Casinos (and bookies) have such a high level of confidence in the numbers in their favor that spreads do not bother them in the least.

As long as players bet randomly, the house will always win in the end.

Punters who deviate consistently from expected betting patterns - Martingale or double-up bettors especially - will either be thwarted by table and house limits, or will be dealt with in other ways.

Casinos think of consistent winners (as opposed to occasionally lucky players, who are good for business) as cheats, and respond to them accordingly.

The house has the edge against 99.99% of all players, but that's not enough in their book!

Readers who have stayed with me for the past seven months or longer know that while both variations of the "dogs only" concept (5x and 50x) prospered for the first few weeks, those limited spreads began to take their toll.

I should at this point explain that some of the tables and graphs that follow differ from interim versions in earlier posts because I ran a comprehensive error check after May 31 and found some anomalies that had to be fixed.

The corrections reduced the overall wins instead of the opposite, which should at least spare me from skeptical claims that the 7-month error check was self-serving.

The 5x strategy hit its peak on January 18 at $6,000 (a ten-week winning run for a method that played out day by day in real time)...and then the wheels came off:

The wider 50x spread approach stayed in profit for an additional three weeks, hitting $37,000 in winnings on February 10, and then it too succumbed to the bookies' edge:


The second of the two worksheets had linked cells that enabled primary parameters (minimum and maximum bet values and the response to individual series turnarounds) to be varied.

The first two factors speak for themselves. The third involves the strategy applied when one or more of the seven series achieves its win target, but others are still struggling to recover.

Does it make best sense to make each series an entirely independent entity, falling back to a $100 minimum bet regardless of the overall "seven dog" bottom line, or should each series help the others when the combined loss to date (LTD) exceeds 7x the minimum ($700)?

The first thing the 50x worksheet tells us is that a 1 to 50 spread is not enough. Surprise!

Here's what woulda happened if we had applied a 1 to 250 spread from the start:


We woulda been making money all the way from November 1 through May 23 before last months tail-end tail-spin started siphoning off our hard-earned profits.

Here's the effect of "spreading the load" by making each series bet more than the minimum after recovery, as long as the combined LTD exceeds $1,400:


Again, plain sailing for month after month, and then we hit the rocks.

There are countless skeptical mythematicians out there who will howl that it's easy to come up with a change in betting rules that wins after the fact against games (or hands) that have already been played.

But they will be wasting their breath in this instance, because the rules applied to the 7-dog trial outcomes shown in these charts are almost identical to the target betting strategy that I have been publishing for free on the 'Net with very minor updates and modifications for more than a decade.

Specifically, those rules call for a very wide spread (much wider than 50x, for sure), and after a fixed number of double-ups in response to a losing streak, we freeze the bet until a mid-recovery win, and only then effect an increase that matches the win target.

Check the archives predating November 1, 2009, and you will see minor variations on the following theme:-

After an opening loss, increase the bet in pursuit of a quick recovery of prior losses (the LTD).
After a preset number of successive losses, freeze the next bet (NB) value until a win.
In response to a mid-recovery win, boost NB to cover the loss to date (LTD).
If the recovery bet is lost, repeat it and maintain its value until the next mid-recovery win, at which point the LTD+ process is replayed.

It is a very simple but consistently effective strategy that depends on discipline, confidence, and adequate resources (aka money).

Those same three factors are success essentials for bookies and casino operators.

A book would very quickly fold if it had a loss limit that did not adequately allow for what some pedants like to call "standard deviation" (a temporary suspension of the known house advantage) - and the same applies to all casinos.

It is safe to state categorically that more often than not, tight betting spreads and shoestring bankrolls are far more risky and reckless than the seemingly aggressive approach that I have been publicly advocating since the start of the 8th decade of the 20th century!

Game operators of all stripes count on their customers to bet randomly within a limited range and to carry a bankroll too puny to survive the briefest spasm of so-called bad luck.

Luck has nothing whatever to do with winning in the long-term.

Of course, very few people have unlimited resources - and that's why a wide spread requires a minimum far lower than the $100 I applied throughout the 7-dog trial.

Here's a replay of the 7-dog/7-months data with a $10 minimum, the max set at 300x and the post-recovery minimum pegged at LTD/70, meaning that if the combined LTD for all series exceeded $70 after an individual turnaround, the minimum would double, jumping to 3x at -$141 and so on.


Dispense with the LTD/70 "load sharing" divisor, and you get a chart that looks like this:



Aha! Says the skeptic. You're just increasing the maximum after the fact to distort the real result.

OK, so here's what we woulda seen if the max had been 5,000x the minimum, permitting bets from $10 all the way up to $50,000:


As you can see, massive 5000xMin bets were never in play, and the average bet value throughout the seven months stayed the same as for 300x.

Next, a different way of looking at the effect of dropping the max back down to the 50x ($100 to $5,000) that still applies to the ongoing 7-dog trial:


At 5x ($100 to $500), the picture becomes sadder still...


The screen snaps above contain a wealth of useful information for readers motivated to make the most of it.

What we see is proof that spread is to gambling what location is to the real estate business (which happens to be much more of a risk than target betting against table games or a sports book!).

Each summary above breaks down final outcomes series by series and shows total action for the entire seven months of the 7-dog trial, along with average bet values.

At 1-5, the average bet is $420. At 1-50, it's $980. At 1-300 (or 1-5,000!), the average bet value is between $680 and $760, keeping in mind that the wide-spread charts above show a $10 minimum.

What really matters is that at 1-300, we end the seven months in profit - and we do it at less risk.

QED, as Pythagoras would put it!

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. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bodog, spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this._