The latest real-time sports book trial ended Thursday - but Friday's target betting results were just too good to ignore! Hey, I'm in charge here...

_
[I am no longer posting daily selections and finals
here - but I'm still an enthusiastic winning patron
of my local bookies]

All joking aside, the whole purpose of this blog and the countless samples and examples posted here is to demonstrate that losing more often than you win does not have to mean losing more money than you win.

Random betting means that in the long run, you can only make a profit if you win more bets than you lose.

And unless you have somehow managed to find the only game in the world with a positive expectation, that's just not going to happen.

Target betting ensures that over time, you will win more money when you win than you lose when you lose, making playing - not gambling - a profitable venture.

Gambling means losing for the vast majority of punters, and strangely, most of those people truly believe that they are having fun in the process.

Maybe they are.

But to me, there is no sense at all (and, for sure, no fun!) in playing a game that you can't beat.

For the first six months, this blog was focused entirely on casino table games, with the primary emphasis on blackjack and baccarat.

Then I started looking at sports betting, which has the great advantage of eliminating the need to spend countless hours in dim-lit casinos, sucking up other folks' cigarette and cigar smoke and (in blackjack, at least) sometimes suffering when they make suicidal mistakes.

In all betting situations, the key to success is the obliteration of subjectivity, replacing it with a method that chooses both bet targets and bet values by the numbers.

In casino games, you have to bet the next hand of cards, roll of the dice or spin of the wheel, but how much you bet each time determines whether or not you make a profit in the long run.

Betting sports, you get to pick what to bet on and when to bet on it as well as the amount to put at risk - and all that choosing makes for a potentially dangerous, expensive game.

Far better to let one set of numbers over which you have no subjective influence - the odds - make your selections for you, and another objective reference (your win target) determine each bet's value.

Subjectivity, aka emotions, hunches, insight and even experience, is the enemy of winning.

But then, regular readers already know all this...

The latest two-month, real time trial of target betting principles applied to the sports book, "officially" ended after finals were in on September 23, and at that point, my opening $5,000 bankroll had ballooned to $24,105.

Not much wrong with that!

But I was disappointed, because the total was about $1,000 shy of the best win to date ($25,430), and the collective unrecovered loss to date (LTD) was almost $10,000.

If only...

Obviously, it was not my plan to stop betting just because I was no longer posting selections ahead of time on this blog - the whole idea was to put more time and energy into winning, not less.

So Friday brought a full bet schedule, putting almost $3,500 in play.

At the end of the day, target betting's tally looked like this:


So even though I shoulda quit posting finals on Thursday, setting a new best win to date called for celebration.

Before a 20-bet schedule meets its fate when all today's playing is done, target betting's current state of winning looks like this:


As always, the most noteworthy numbers cover the average win value vs. the average loss value (+$280/-$175 = 160%) and the comparison between winning days and losing ones (37 profitable days worth an average of $1,220 vs. 26 losers setting me back an average of $930).

Readers are invited to draw their own conclusions.

Meanwhile, I could use some help with target betting's next phase!

From now on, as daily betting continues, I plan to post selections 1-10 minutes after game times, via e-mail and text messages instead of in this blog.

Finals (win or lose, of course) will be distributed the same way on the morning after.

Anyone out there who would like to continue tracking target betting's performance in the real world in real time is invited to e-mail me to be added to the distribution list.

My thinking is that target betting has already proved itself in two major real-time trials stretching over 11 long but exciting and satisfying months.

So there is really no need for me to keep giving away daily selections along with the betting method that can already be found here free, gratis and for no charge!

One last screen shot, showing how the primary 15 series or lines were doing at end of play on Friday:


Just TWO of 15 series or lines containing enough bets to make them worth tracking are in the red after 63 days.

I expect dangling LTDs to be recovered soon (although it's my job to expect that, and today's heavy betting load my thwart my cock-eyed optimism - who knows!).

The most important message in all of this is that stepping back from emotional involvement and betting strictly by the numbers is, in my experience, the only way to win in the long run.

Unless, of course, you get lucky...

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._

If you don't believe what's happened in the past can help us beat the bookies (and the house) in the future, this blog is a waste of your time!

_
(Please scroll down for updates for Thursday, September 23)

For almost a year now, the focus of this blog has shifted from casino table games such as blackjack and baccarat to a gambling platform that does not require you to inhale second-hand smoke or watch other people flush their money down the toilet.

Back in the summer of 2009, I had zero interest in sports betting, and so obviously had no idea that it would enable me to find a way to make steady money at gambling without going anywhere near a deck of cards.

Credit for my awakening goes in part to my old friend "Peter Punter" (who prefers to remain anonymous, especially when I am writing critically about his ideas).

Not that Pete was out to do me any favors.

He knew I am obsessive about the unbreakable link between mathematics and successful gambling, and was confident that if he bombarded me with enough e-mails, I would take the bait and look into his outrageous claims.

Pete is not a numbers man himself. He barely knows one end of a spreadsheet from another, and lacks the patience to thoroughly research a new betting method before putting actual money at risk.

He's a gambler - but not an entirely foolish one.

In all the years I have known Pete, the one thing we have had in common is the belief that math can be every bit as effective at beating the odds as it is at making losers out of more than 99% of all players.

But our approaches to the challenge are very different.

In July of 2009, Pete got the idea that since the most widely-marketed sports handicappers (known as "cappers" for short) claim year-round win rates of 65% to 85%, there had to be a way to exploit all those accurate predictions and make big bucks out of them.

My immediate response was that a 65% win rate is nothing to boast about if all of your "brilliant" selections pay a whole lot less than even money when your followers cash in their winning tickets.

It's just the numbers: A 50% WR from hundreds of selections paying even money, on average, means a long-term wash or break even if all your bet values are randomly determined.

Still assuming random bet values (because most gamblers bet random amounts), a 65% WR will make a profit only if paybacks average more 54 cents on the dollar or -185, a number that indicates that you must bet $185 to win $100.

In 100 bets at a fixed $100 each time, you would then win 65 bets at $54 ($3,510) and lose 35 bets at $100 apiece ($3,500), for a grand profit of $10, derived entirely from rounding your wagers up or down to keep things relatively simple.

Professional handicappers will often post picks at much better odds than -185, but you can be sure that the higher their verifiable long-term win rate, the shorter their odds on average.

(And it should not come as a surprise to anyone that the shorter the odds on a given team, the more likely they are to win - unless the bookies know something they're not telling us! It's also no surprise that when cappers list their successful picks, they never detail paybacks, just WIN!!! or, shhhhh, lose).

Early on, I advised Peter Punter that betting odds shorter than even money (+100) was a sure way to kiss his bankroll goodbye. S-l-o-w-l-y, maybe, but surely.

Instead, I recommended backing underdogs, never favorites, as a matter of policy, while capping acceptable or qualifying odds at +180 to keep the dog win rate (DWR) as close as possible to 45%.

On a season-to-season basis in all bettable sports (which covers pretty much everything, including tiddly-winks), underdogs do in fact win 40-45% of all games, enabling bookies to make a sizable profit that would not be achievable if favorites won more than 55-60% of the time.

The most important advice I gave Pete was that he should apply the target betting rules he knew from baccarat to his sports bets, creating series, or lines, of wagers in which the first bet on one day would be linked to the first bet the next day, the second to the second, and so on.

There could be no cross-pollination whatsoever, no switching large bets from one series to another, no reduction in bet values to "reduce risk," no deviation from the simple but strict set of rules.

Too risky, said Pete. And he embarked on a cancellation system that cost him thousands of dollars...before he stopped sending me his daily betting records.

I have no way of knowing how much Pete has won or lost since he cut me out of the loop at the end of September last year. I hope he's a long way ahead. But I doubt it.

One of the greatest strengths of target betting, other than its proven long-term profitability, is that it enables the player to bet by the numbers, meaning without any subjective or emotional involvement.

Bet values are set by the rules, which never waver. Unless, of course, the player wavers.

When betting on sports events, all that matters is the information the bookies give us - odds being the final arbiter of which teams are worth a bet and which are not.

Forget team stats, individual player performances, weather conditions or any of that tedious stuff: It might make the process marginally more involving for a true sports aficionado, but it won't win money in the long run.

I learned from the nine-month "Seven-dog Trial" that played out in this blog day after day from November 1, 2009, to July 31 this year, that +180 is too high a "cap" on qualifying dogs, and since then I have lowered the ceiling and raised the floor.

Thanks to Pete and another of his brief enthusiasms, I have also learned that so-called "added value" bets (run- or puck-line, spreads and over/under bets) can increase the overall win rate and make it just a little easier for target betting to make money over the long haul.

The "floor" limit for all those bets is the same as always - even money, not a penny less - while the upper limit is a tad lower than it is for straight money-line or "sides" bets.

As I write this, target betting is 60 days and 702 bets into the current two-month real-time trial set to end this week, and its win of $18,160 on top of its opening bankroll of $5,000 represents almost 13% of total action ($142,050 churned so far, giving an average bet value of $202).

Other important numbers show an average win value ($281) that is 59% more than the average loss value ($177), enabling me to smile yet again at the memory of the target betting critics who used to scoff, "Yeah, we get it, you have to bet more when you know you're going to win than you do when you know you're gonna lose!"

As I remarked at the top of this blog, target betting does not require psychic ability - just guts and discipline. Oh, and a little money...

The risk or exposure for target betting in the current trial is, at $285, far less than I would expect and perhaps the result of our old friend blind luck.

But it happens to be a demonstrable fact that more often than not, a betting method that seems to be less "aggressive" than target betting will actually increase risk.

That's because when bet values are capped too low, potential recovery or turnaround opportunities are inadequately exploited, causing battles to get "out of the hole" that drag on far longer at much greater cost in the end.

Right now, we stand at 34 winning days and 26 losing days, and I believe the credit for that goes to the revised selection rules I mentioned earlier.

All in all, I am more than happy with the way the sports book experiment has turned out, and relieved that from now on, I won't have to spend as much time in casinos to make money out of beating the odds.

Naturally, not every day will be a walk in the park!

Yesterday (Tuesday, September 21, 2010), for example, I managed an unprecedented win rate of 0-10.

The only positive comment to be made about a day like that is that things can't get much worse.

And to be fair, target betting has delivered some pretty spectacular successes in the last few weeks.

My critics like to quote something they call the Law of Large Numbers, which states in essence that individually and in small groups or samples, outcomes are always unpredictable.

Given that unpredictability, the L of LN comes down to three little words: You Can't Win.

That's what every casino and every bookmaker needs you to believe. And happily for them, most gamblers subscribe to the conventional wisdom.

Target betting proves otherwise, again and again.

But it is never likely to catch on in a big way because, according to many punters, it drains all the "fun" out of gambling.

It rejects the comforting notion that inside knowledge or expertise that took years to develop is the most effective antidote to losing.

Instead, it tells you to bet strictly by the numbers, banishing ego, emotion or anything else remotely subjective from the gambling experience.

To me, it's a small price to pay for long-term profitability, because in my book, losing is no "fun" at all. And losing is the fate of most gamblers.

Today's updates:




Thursday, September 23 at 9:35am

Another skinny day at the salt mines - although yesterday's short list brought in some decent money, so I shouldn't complain!



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._

I'll be wrapping up the current real-time trial this week, win or lose, so today's skimpy pick list is a disappointment!

_
(Please scroll down for selections for Tuesday, September 21)

But hey, that's how it goes sometimes.

Between them, the MLB and the bookies have made today's already thin schedule unappealing.

For a while, I toyed with the idea of sitting on the sidelines until Tuesday - but in the end, I decided that in the last days of this experiment, a little action was better than none at all!

The money-line plus run-line trial will have run for two full months come bedtime on Thursday, and that seems like a reasonable cue to wrap it up and move on.

I know I'm not up for another nine-month slog, and given the success of both trials, I don't believe another real-time marathon is necessary.

After this week, this blog will morph into an occasional bulletin board for my comments (and sometimes, tests) on betting strategies that come my way from time to time.

Seems to me my efforts are better applied to making money from my ideas than on teaching others how to beat casino table games and the sports book!

The blog has been updated almost daily since March of 2009, and if nothing else, it provides a historical record of target betting and an insight into its on-going evolution.

Sunday was frustrating: Baseball dogs won more than 65% of their games and my picks had a 55% win rate, but I still ended up more than $100 out of pocket.

Small potatoes, for sure, but like I always say, winning is more fun than losing, even if most gamblers behave as if they don't believe that to be true.

Today's numbers:



Tuesday, September 21 at 10:15am

Target betting scored an equal number of wins and losses yesterday (3-3), but winners were worth more than losers, on average, giving the bankroll a small but welcome boost.

That's what we're here for.

Not a lot of attractive betting options today, Tuesday, but we'll do what we can:



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._

OK, everybody, to the tune of "Love the One You're With," sing along with me: Win the ones you need...

_
Yesterday, I broke a hallowed target betting habit by checking on the New York Mets score long before the game was over, and paid the price by suffering through a 0-2, 2-2, 2-4, 2-6 scenario.

That was a big, huge, enormous (to quote an old friend of mine) bet, after all, and I would have hated to see it go down.

It didn't, and now the target betting bankroll for the current real-time trial, is back on track with a new high and an impressive 55-day performance.

There was really no need for me to sneak an advance peak at the score.

The whole point of this method is to make subjective or emotional involvement obsolete, replacing it with a cold-blooded selection process that depends strictly on the numbers.

Stepping back that way means you can't make bad choices, since you are not making any choices: selections are dictated by the odds, and their order depends on the day's game schedule.

The irony is that after Thursday's big bounce, bet values for today are all over the place, ranging from $25 to $1,200. And that must make my old friend Peter Punter smile, if he's paying attention.

This time last year, I berated him for "throwing away" wins by betting, as I saw it, too little on them - prompted by a bet list that one day ranged from $50 to $3,500.

I defend myself still by remembering that Pete was following the questionable advice of professional "cappers" who make their win records look artificially impressive by picking prospects priced so punitively that paybacks are pathetically paltry. (Sorry about that...today's a P-day, it seems!).

PP wasn't taking my advice and betting in independent series...he was following some cockamamie cancellation system that he tells me is still working for him.

The way I see it (and the math agrees with me), a cancellation method is essentially random because it has no recovery target - and random betting in any shape or form is a very, very bad idea in the long run. Oh, well.

Today's updates:




Saturday, September 18 at 10:00am

Baseball's dogs won 10 of 15 games on Friday and seven of my 12 picks were winners, but target betting fell back again because the day's two biggest bets went south.

Bleep happens!

Busy day today, with 17 bets and a bunch o' bucks on the line

The target betting rules applied in the current real-time test don't change from day to day, obviously, but it is helpful to be able to see from the template what woulda happened if the approach had been different.

The key switches involve the limit on how much a bet can be increased after a win (currently NB=PBx5 max, meaning the next bet cannot be more than five times the previous bet), the win progression (now x1.5) and the number of times the bet can be re-doubled after an opening loss in a new series (4).

These choices have to be made ahead of time, not bet by bet, and the decision must be based on an educated assessment of risk vs. return.

By that I mean that if the objective is to maximize profits and make a living from the sports book, the "switches" will be set higher than if - as is the case with the three InvestaPick funds - all that's required is a decent annualized percentage return on the initial investment.

Given bank CD and savings interest rates falling far short of 1% in today's market, safe bets are in short supply.

Those two goals - a living or an attractive ROI - are not mutually exclusive, assuming a sizable initial bankroll!

As things stand, target betting has more than quadrupled the opening BR in one day less than eight weeks, and its win to date represents almost 13% of total action to date.

Impressive, but it does mean a bumpy ride for that roller-coaster I am always talking about.

Today's updates:




Sunday, September 19 at 10:05am

Baseball's dogs barely managed a 25% win rate yesterday, and target betting's WR was only a little less dismal at 5-12 or 29%.

The good news is that those 12 losses averaged about $120 apiece, and the win average was close to $600.

And that's really the whole point, isn't it?

You have to win more when you win than you lose when you lose so that losing more often than you win doesn't hurt you.

But then, we all know that...

I haven't posted the money-line vs. run-line numbers for a while and when I checked them today, what I found came as both a surprise and, I confess, an annoyance.

Since this real-time trial began on July 24, there have been 200 RL bets and 81 winners for a 40.5% WR, and 452 ML bets with 211 winners (WR 46.7%).

I shouldn't be irritated that RL bets are ahead $14,725 vs. an overall win of $5,410 for money-line picks, but I am - partly because it seems I should have been betting the run-line all season!

Today's updates:





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._

Winning bets worth 65% more than losing ones, winning days netting 30% more than losers, and 30 profitable days vs. 20 losers - all blind luck!

_
(Please scroll down for target betting picks for Wednesday, September 15)

That's what the "experts" say, at least...


Saturday was another solid winning day for target betting, providing me with an opportunity to review how these impossible results are being achieved.

Firstly, picks are being posted here every day ahead of game times, most recently with target betting dollar values included.

Next, the applicable target betting rules are always summarized at the top of each "pick list" - and any change would have an immediate effect on the overall result shown, destroying my credibility in the bargain.

Third, selections are entirely By the Numbers, eliminating any possibility for me to apply subjective judgment or to move options up or down the list to line up with optimum bet values. And selections must "qualify" according to odds ranges that are set ahead of time and are inviolable.

Lastly, results for individual series are being regularly posted here, demonstrating that target betting rules are effective and profitable not just overall, but series by series. Right now, just two series out of 15 being tracked day by day are in the red.


Is it possible that target betting is headed for a dramatic crash-and-burn scenario?

Possible...but very unlikely.

Applying the same by-the-numbers selection and betting rules to the entire 2009 baseball season woulda resulted in an average profit of $195 per day in 195 days (an odd coincidence, but I'm bound to report whatever the databases throw at me!).

In the next few days, I will post a more detailed summary of Baseball 2009, knowing that notional profits achieved retroactively are much less impressive than wins achieved day after day in real time.

I'm going for shorter odds these days, based upon my analysis of more than 8,000 games from the baseball, pro football, hockey and pro basketball databases.

Shorter odds (but never shorter than even money) result in more wins over time, making results for the first 50 days of the current real-time trial (30 wins, 20 losses) predictable but very welcome.

Here are Saturday's results in full, followed by today's target betting selections (a heavier day than usual, and a good thing too!).

Please note that a critical selection rule outside of odds analysis is that whichever sport is the lead on a given day is always listed first - meaning that baseball will head the list until early November, when the NFL schedule will take precedence.



Monday, September 13 at 1:00pm

Wow!


It would be crass idiocy to pretend that days like Sunday are the norm for target betting - but when a 70% win rate happens and all the bets line up for a big, fat payday...hell, it's worth crowing about.

A pattern might be said to be emerging in the first 51 days of the current real-time trial, given that we have achieved substantially more winning days than losing ones (31 winners averaging +$1,154 and 20 losers averaging -$851).

These days, I am less concerned with proving the efficacy of the target betting principles (been there, done that!) than with improving the win rate by honing my bet selection method.

The range for money-line bets is +110 to +140, and for run-line bets, it's much tighter at +100 to +115.

That's not my idea: The ranges currently being applied are dictated by "the numbers" established in the 2009 baseball season, and 2010 to date.

As I have said before, bookies are not infallible. But they are creatures of habit, and from our point of view, that's a very good thing.

I admit that whenever I'm in the middle of one of these real-time trials, with picks posted ahead of game time and complete transparency applied, I worry that today or tomorrow will bring total collapse.

I have been proved wrong so many times that now that I just tell myself that the moment I assume target betting and my bet selection method are bullet-proof, I'll go down with one to the heart or the head!

Here's the updated chart for results since July 24, followed by selections for today, Monday, September 13.



Tuesday, September 14 at 10:15am

Like I said, life's a roller coaster...

...and the analogy is especially apt in gambling!

It's hard to imagine a roller coaster that did nothing but climb skyward: After a while, gravity would have to intervene, and a backward slide to rock bottom would wipe out prior gains.

Monday brought a disappointing performance by underdogs, resulting in a loss of $775 for target betting.

But target betting, like a roller coaster, needs regular downward plunges to gather the momentum required to climb to a new high when an upward trend comes along.

Hey, just look at the latest chart below!

Today is potentially even scarier than Monday in my view, since most of the selections are run-line bets, and I am still not entirely comfortable betting on favorites.

RL bets don't win as often as ML bets do, at least in the first 7+ weeks of the latest real-time trial for target betting:


As you can see, run-line picks have scored a WR of 39.5% so far, compared with 47% for money-line selections.

Overall, my stricter selection process is averaging a 45% WR, vs. 43% for underdogs so far this baseball season. Two percent doesn't sound like a big deal, but believe me, those "piddling" points really matter!

Monday, my picks delivered 4-4 or a 50% WR.

It didn't help, because the big bets tanked.

C'est la vie...

More updates, including picks for today, Tuesday, September 14:





Wednesday, September 15 at 11:10am

The roller-coaster slipped a few more notches yesterday, giving target betting its second setback in succession.

The charts posted here in the past few days confirm that the current pattern is far from unusual.

There's some big money at stake today (most of it depending on a win for the San Diego Padres in an early game!) and I confess I always feel a little nervous in these situations.

The upside is that wins in the last seven-plus weeks of the current trial mean that today's big bucks don't eat into the opening bankroll.

You gotta speculate to accumulate, remember!

Today's updates...



Thursday, September 16 at 11:45am

One word covers yesterday's final outcome: Ouch!

As always say in this situation, I wish I could win every day, but years of experience and research tell me that's just not possible.

Here are today's updates:




Wednesday's big losers for target betting, the San Diego Padres, highlight the occasional hazards of betting strictly by the numbers.

The rule I apply in the selection process requires me to opt for the shorter odds when the numbers for a run-line or money-line wager are close.

With the Padres, the odds for the RL bet were +130 and the ML bet was at +125, making ML the required "choice" (in quotes because since the rules dictate the bet, it was actually no choice at all).

I have no regrets about the bet because I know that flouting the by-the-numbers rules is a fatal error more often than not.

But I would be a liar if I didn't concede that a situation like this is very frustrating, especially after a boffo succession of wins!

The topic of rule-fudging leads naturally to an update on InvestaPick!


What's going on here...?

IP's slow and steady wins the race performance since I first started monitoring the website's three "funds" always achieves added allure when target betting is demanding huge wagers that go south.

Smaller bets and reduced risk invariably equals smaller wins and less dramatic long-term returns, but after a day like yesterday, I am tempted to think that's an acceptable trade-off.

On the other hand, if IP is suddenly breaking its own rules to keep its funds afloat, the rose's bloom becomes no bloom at all.

Why would a bet that the IP rules (as I understand them - and remember I have no connection or contact with InvestaPick) say should be $260 show up as a WIN worth $520-plus?

How come on other occasions (usually during a losing streak!) the next bet value stands still instead of doubling?

IP's method is (or used to be) a simple Martingale made effective by a selection process that mostly plays it safe, rarely straying from odds shorter than -110.

The policy works, it seems, with the single drawback that I have mentioned many times before: a failure to offset the shortfall from paybacks that return 90 cents on the dollar or less.

Yesterday was the mid-month marker, so I updated my file on how target betting woulda performed against the bets selected by IP in each of its three funds since January 1, 2009.

Given the, let's be gentle here, flexibility of IP's rules of late, I should emphasize that the target betting rules applied throughout are rigid and unchanging.

Here's the latest comparison:


Both InvestaPick and a target betting approach to the same selections show results that call into question the skeptics' axiom that a betting method that prevails against anecdotal outcomes will always fail against games as yet unplayed.

I'm hoping to be back tomorrow with better numbers in the ongoing real-time trial.

And I promise I won't achieve them by changing the target betting rules retroactively...

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._

Baseball's "dogs" are on a roll this week, so does that make target betting's latest recovery (and new high) a fluke? Hell, no!

_
Please scroll down for target betting picks for Saturday, September 11

Every time one of my real-time betting trials hits a major slump, I reassure my readers (and myself!) that a recovery is inevitable.

And every time, I'm right.

Reversals of fortune of the positive variety do not always come as quickly as I'd like, but they always show up eventually.

Climbing out on a limb the way I have been with this blog for almost 18 months non-stop makes me an easy target, and I admit that I relish proving skeptics wrong over and over again.

That does not mean that sometimes when the going gets truly tough, I don't have twinges of doubt.

But I have been doing this long enough to know that as long as I apply the rules of target betting fearlessly and faithfully, I can count on winning more when I win than I lose when I lose.

And as long as that objective is achieved, losing more often than I win will not stop me from winning more money than I lose in the long run.

The principle was dramatically vindicated at the end of the nine-month "7-dog trial" that ran from last November 1 through the end of July, and this new real-time test simply underscores what we have already learned.

Nothing I do will silence the skeptics who either accuse me of fiddling my numbers (in real-time, with selections posted ahead of game starts every day!), or argue that past success is never a guarantee of future wins.

I also get blasted from time to time for not providing proof that the bets I list were actually made.

Fact is, even scanning betting tickets and posting them here day after day would not be accepted as irrefutable evidence that target betting beats the bookies' edge.

I am much more concerned with providing my readers with verifiable data that demonstrates that a totally objective bet selection method coupled with a disciplined betting strategy will "beat the book" (or beat the house) time and time again.

To that end, bets are selected "by the numbers," meaning that not only do they comply with a prescribed odds range, but that each day they are listed in numerical order, with bet/team ID numbers taking precedence over chronological order.

If it sounds complicated, it isn't.

Bet selection takes me maybe five minutes each morning, because I have no emotional or subjective involvement in the process.

Smarter people than me agonize for hours over stats, injuries, weather forecasts and, for all I know, wind direction and the length of the turf.

And I doubt that for all their expertise and effort, they win more often than I do.

Documentary evidence that the bets I list were actually placed is completely irrelevant.

What's more important is that readers looking for a reliable way to make steady profits betting on sports have the target betting method explained to them in a way that enables them to take what they have learned and conduct their own evaluations, with or without "real money" at stake.

When I shifted my focus from casino table games to the sports book about a year ago, I knew I would have to develop my own databases if I hoped to effectively analyze and learn from the historical record.

There is a wealth of ancient sports data online, and I chose to rely almost exclusively on Scoresandodds.com, because their records are easy to read, as well as (I fervently hope!) honest and accurate.

What's missing online are databases that can be queried in the way that I can pull up the 2009 baseball season, and discover what woulda happened if I had chosen to bet only on favorites at odds of -120 or better, or on "dogs" at +120 to +150. Or...whatever.

None of that impresses skeptics who dismiss history as irrelevant - but I have already talked about the unique view they have of the back of their teeth, and will move right along.

The first essential in the Battle to Beat the Book is an effective betting strategy and the discipline and the means to consistently apply it.

Close behind that comes a bet selection process that of course only matters outside of casinos and away from table games.

In blackjack, a player can marginally improve his win rate with strict adherence to the basic playing strategy, but in baccarat, only bet values matter.

And let's be clear: "win rate" in this context has nothing to do with the amount of each bet, but with the percentage difference between the number of winning hands and the number of losing hands.

In sports betting, it is logically self-defeating to accept odds that are either too long or too short.

Long odds mean fewer wins with paybacks that fall short of offsetting the reduced win rate (WR) and short odds provide a better WR with paybacks that collectively fail to overcome the bookies' edge.

So the trick is to make like Tiger Woods and aim straight down the middle (and here I'm talking about golf, and not his second favorite sport).

There is nothing I can say to critics who claim over and over again that I simply "got lucky" each time target betting bounced back from a downturn and set itself a new high, the way it did yesterday.

They have a right to their opinion, even though they're wrong!

First in today's picture gallery, yesterday's detailed results, followed by the target betting chart after Monday's bets and selections for today, Tuesday, September 7.




And just for the fun of it, here's how I stand with one-thumb blackjack on my iPod, which I plan to put on indefinite hold now that I have passed the quarter-mill mark in funny munny.

Note from the stats on the right that the house edge remains ridiculously out of whack with the -1% negative expectation that basic strategy play can count on (no pun intended) in single-deck blackjack.


Wednesday, September 8 at 2:15pm

Baseball's underdogs put in another (7-8) solid performance yesterday, boosting target betting's bankroll by another $1,000.

That's the way it's supposed to be!

Here's where we stand before today's games begin:




Thursday, September 9 at 9:35am

The best I could do was scare up four qualifying bets for today - barely worth the trip to my local sports book, so...I'm taking the day off!

Wednesday was a so-so day for baseball dogs in general (6-9) and that was reflected in the target betting results, which ended this week's upward surge.

Here are Wednesday's finals, and an update on where target betting stands right now:



Friday, September 10 at 12:35pm

Yesterday's skimpy sports schedule would have given me just one win in four bets if I had not decided to stay home, so I guess I made the right choice!

I saved some money, and the other good thing that came out of it was that I started thinking about a betting option that I have ignored so far.

Future "pick lists" will from time to time include bets categorized as "S" - short for Squeaker - to indicate that money's on the dog losing by less than two runs.

Given my refusal to risk money on paybacks at less than even money, it won't be often that odds offered for "+1.5" on the underdog will qualify for a target bet.

But when it happens, the bet will pay if the dog wins the game, or loses by a single run (or goal, if I decide to extend the category into the next hockey season).

I didn't waste my time on four bets yesterday because the series with the biggest unrecovered LTDs are Nos. 11 and 14.

Those two series won't be covered today either, it turns out, because I could only find nine bets worth the bother in the Friday schedule.

Meanwhile, I have been having some fun querying the 2010 TD database to compare optimum odds ranges for this year and last, and to find other ways of betting by the numbers.

The whole point is to eliminate all stripes of subjectivity - gut feelings, team or player preferences, educated guesses and so on - and bump up the win rate (WR) to make it just a little bit easier for target betting to deliver long-term profits.

One or two percentage points can make a big difference, and even with target betting working for us, we need as many winners as we can get.

You can use pretty much any sorting or categorizing method that appeals to you, so long as you maintain independent series or lines and follow the rules of target betting to the letter.

"Serious" baseball bettors are outraged by the notion that experience and inside knowledge may actually be a liability when it comes to making steady profits from the Nation's Pastime, but there is nothing I can do about that.

The numbers generated by the odds-makers are not totally consistent, given the fact that no human is infallible, and in this baseball season, quoted odds often seem capricious.

But using the numbers as a guide reduces the risk of zigging when you should be zagging and vice versa!

On the rare occasions when I stray from blackjack and play roulette, I am a proponent of the French betting method that backs whatever option came up in the round before last - B,R or B,B would indicate a bet on Black, for example, and R,B would make Red the next choice.

Those clever Frogs also use avant dernier for baccarat, but since I never put money on Banker, that doesn't help me.

Avant dernier is useful because it simplifies the bet selection process and introduces a consistent rhythm to the process.

I'm all for that.

Here are today's selections:


Wednesday's bets set us back a little after a succession of very welcome bounces and a new best win to date, but as we all know, downs are as inevitable as ups.

What we have to do is bet in such a way that the ups are bigger than the downs, keeping us ahead of the game even when we lose more often than we win.

Right now, our average winning bet (+$274) is 66% bigger than our average losing bet (-$164) and winning days are bringing in 36% more than losing ones.

Saturday, September 11 at 09:00am

My first two "Squeaker" bets were a wash yesterday, but overall, target betting won more bets than it lost and recovered at least some of the money lost on Wednesday (no bets Thursday).

Statistically, backing dogs to lose by less than two runs is a good bet, winning more than half the time last season, and this season to date.

Any option that helps land more winners and boost the bankroll has my vote, that's for sure.

Right now, just two of the 15 series with enough bets to be worth tracking are in the red.


The summary above is consistent with what I have been saying for years: You can "Beat the Book" by applying target betting to independent series the way I'm doing in the current real-time trial, and did throughout the 9-month 7DT.

Today's updates...



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._