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._
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