Last March, the 10
th anniversary of this blog
passed me by unnoticed, and I’m embarrassed that I have apparently not had
anything new to say for more than three years now.
I have let my sleeping blog lie (supine, not deceitful)
because it’s still getting an impressive number of hits every day from all over
the world, even if I am never going to be able to claim viral status.
All that activity reminds me that there are still plenty of
people out there who don’t swallow the glib idea promoted by casinos
everywhere, that “You can’t win in the end, but we can offer you a thousand
ways to have fun while you’re losing.”
My excuse for keeping quiet is that since I moved back to my
native land I have been distracted by a different area of gambling that is also
doomed to fail according to the conventional wisdom: betting on horse-racing.
There was also a long spell in which I did what little I
could to put a stop to one of the biggest rip-offs in the sad history of lousy
bets, casino machines in betting shops that permitted befuddled and benighted
punters to bet up to £100 a spin against a house edge greater than -4.0%.
When I landed in the old country and very soon afterwards
popped in to one of those High Street betting offices that are pretty much
unique to the UK, I could not believe my eyes.
Slot machines legally permitted to gouge as much as £3,000
an hour against crooked odds? Insane!
Turned out that a loophole in gambling laws intended to
limit high-stakes casino games to actual bricks-and-mortar casinos which would
in turn be closely monitored, allowed video versions of those same games to be
offered in thousands of locations all over the country.
So instead of gambling addicts having to go out of their way
to play at fewer than 200 casinos spaced far apart in controlled locations,
more than 8,000 betting shops offered punters big-money roulette and blackjack
on four high-tech machines per shop.
And often these mini-casinos could be found clustered in
clumps of a half dozen or more in town centres, a few steps off the pavement in
High Streets and residential areas.
My contribution to the national campaign against machines
known here as FOBTs (fixed odds betting terminals) may have been small, but I
cheered as loud as anyone last year when the British government finally
announced that the maximum permitted bet-per-spin would be slashed from £100 to
£2.
It took the pols in Westminster a decade to get their
fingers out, with Britain’s Gambling Commission refusing to bite the hand that
feeds it more than £20,000,000 a year to fund fat salaries and pensions, and
doing its darndest to muddy the waters and slow the process down.
The odds still stink but at least now certifiable idiots will
have to play a whole lot longer to lose the grocery money, the rent, and the
kids’ college funds.
Right before the axe fell, those machines were fattening
bookies’ profits by almost £2 billion a year, or about half what Nevada rakes
in from all the casinos and all the games
in the state.
The big difference is that Nevada attracts millions of
nationwide and international visitors each year, whereas the rake from
casino-style slots in the UK was from a relatively piddling 35,000 machines in 10,000
locations.
Meanwhile, I have been applying all I have learned from
casino house games to create a filtered betting strategy restricted to horse-race
favourites and second favourites only, and after almost five years of intensive
research, I figure I have the algorithm pretty much down pat.
So…back to my temporarily shelved obsession with beating
house table games that are mostly not nearly as bent as those awful FOBTs.
The good news and the bad news: Nothing has changed.
You’re still certain to lose more bets than you win in the
long term, which means that progressive betting is the only way to overcome the
mathematical house advantage.
Do the job right, and losing more often than you win
won’t stop you from winning more money than you lose.
Mythematicians (my affectionate term for self-elevated
experts who lie about the numbers that underpin every gambling game) are still
popping up online to advise punters against any non-random betting
strategy. Pit-bosses and dealers all
weigh in against its wisdom when they see it in play, and that’s all the proof
you need that progressive betting is the only way to go.
Progressive betting is usually taken to mean doubling and
redoubling until a win is finally achieved, “risking perhaps thousands to win a
handful of dollars.”
Target (or Turnaround, to use its original name) has never
promoted endless doubling, but it will often require very large bets to recoup
prior losses.
Exactly the same is true of the mathematical underpinning of
the house edge, except that the punter, not the dealer, decides bet values,
usually according to a personal pattern that seems rational and conservative
but is essentially random.
Against 99.99% of all punters, the casinos have the best
winning strategy of all: Let the suckers
pile up big wins once in a while, then wait for them to get greedy (or drunk on
“free” cocktails!) and lose it all and then some.
Playing strategically, whatever bet you make, that’s the amount you seek to win,
aiming to get back in the black with far fewer winning wagers than the number
of losses it took to get you into the red in the first place.
If have to bet $1,000 in order to grab back past losses and
show a turnaround profit of $200, you didn’t win $200, you won $1,000, and
anyone who says otherwise is either an idiot or a mythematician on the payroll
of a casino somewhere.
Of course the numbers have not changed since blog post #1 in
March, 2009.
For example, win 490 bets in 1,000—losing 510—and flat
betting will show a 2.0% loss from -20/1,000.
Random betting will almost always do the same.
But if on average, you win 20% more when you win than you
lose when you lose—say $12 vs. $10—you’ll see wins worth $5,880 and lost bets
costing $5,100 for a profit of $780 on total action of $10,980.
That’s a 7.1% “hold” versus an indicated or predicted loss
of 2.0% ($200 according to the EV, or expected value, which once the dealing’s
done, becomes the actual value=AV).
When I first described Turnaround online way back in the
nineties, I stressed the importance of betting
more when you win than you lose when you lose and was bombarded with
smart-ass rejoinders all adding up to the same thing: “We get it!
You want us to bet more when we know we’re going to win and less when we
know we’re going to lose.”
Funny, but very, very dumb.
A higher AWB (average winning bet) is readily achieved by
pulling back when things are going badly and might get worse, and responding
relatively aggressively when a single mid-recovery win signals a potential—but
never certain—positive trend.
By now I have countless millions of outcomes proving my
point, including models that pit Target against verifiable data sets made
available by a very successful Las Vegas shill who calls himself the Wizard of
Odds, and by Zumma Publishing.
But for simplicity, here’s a sequence in which bets are
frozen after two consecutive losses and doubled after any win: -10, -20, -20,
-20, -20, +20, +40, -80, -80, -80, -80, +80, +160, +240 = +130.
In that set, there were 9 losses averaging 46 and 5 wins
averaging 108. The house edge was -4/14 or
-28.6% and Target delivered a win of a bit more than one current unit (80) on
action of 950, a 13.7% hold against an AV that against the same action
indicated a loss of -28.6% = -272.
No one can hope to win if the opening bet remains the unit
of currency throughout a recovery sequence or series: here, three bets in a row set the
value of the unit, and we aim to win one current unit before we fall back to a
minimum bet.
Simplistic, perhaps, but confirmed countless thousands of
times in models that cannot cheat the way that anti-strategists do repeatedly
to bolster their mantra that you can’t win in the end.
Mostly, they are paid to challenge possible threats to the
house advantage and will do whatever it takes, their credo being that long-term
winning is just another form of cheating and dirty, underhanded “analysis” of
any viable betting strategy is fair play in defence of (the casinos’) greater
good.
I’m used to being vilified—and sometimes even threatened—by
critics with a hidden agenda, but even I was taken aback by a crook who
pretended to be a protector of gullible punters and posted a
“de-bunking”
of Target/Turnaround after throwing out every single published rule of the
strategy.
It took him weeks to reveal the mangled, deliberately doomed
algorithm he had used in his “research” and when I pointed out all his errors,
he announced that he was “not interested” in applying the strategy’s rules to a
fair analysis.
Oh, well…
I have said from the start that my ideas are of very limited
value to a small-time gambler with a shoestring budget.
No one can expect to beat the house and its stupendous
fiscal firepower by placing penny-ante bets and praying hard.
On the other hand, players with millions at their disposal
won’t be able to “buy the pot” in the long run, unless they follow a
disciplined strategy that keeps their greed and self-destructive urges under
control and requires a very wide spread in bet values.
That disqualifies most so-called “whales” because for them,
the thrill of the game lies in risking huge sums and knowing that however much
they lose, there’s plenty more money ready to be thrown away another day, pain
free.
When I lived in Nevada, I’d occasionally stand a polite
distance away and watch overfunded thrill seekers blunder away thousands and
then tell everyone that they’d had a great time going (briefly) broke.
I’d watch the wins and losses and put my mental arithmetic
to the test, making “air bets” on each round and always winning while actual
chips once owned by ignorant players migrated mercilessly into the dealer’s
tray. It was always frustrating, but reassuring!
I’ll say it again: big money alone cannot guarantee big
wins. Big money and a proven betting
strategy is something else again.
And readers who don’t have millions to back their bets can
very successfully use my ideas to limit their losses while providing them with
far more winning sessions than they will see if they fly by the seat of their
pants instead of betting strategically.
Turnaround/Target has evolved—by which I mean improved!—over
the years, but is still in essence a waiting strategy, a method that seeks to
minimise risk and respond effectively to potential opportunities.
It is absolutely accurate to maintain that in a game with
say, a 1.5% house edge, every bet faces exactly the same inherent, mathematical
disadvantage, regardless of how many consecutive losses or wins may have
preceded it.
But the most cursory assessment of a meaningful data set (I
suggest 1,000 bets or more) will show streaks for and against the player that
if analysed will confirm an overall bias for the house which prevails in spite
of dips and spikes along the way that pretty much even out.
The strategy was first developed for blackjack, and that
remains my number one house game of choice, because bonuses for naturals (even
at today’s skimpy 6-5 instead of the traditional 3-2) and a player edge for
doubles and splits that often exceeds 20.0%, combine to make it the least
dangerous option on the casino floor.
Given precision play—adherence to the basic strategy that
every player should have down pat before venturing near a table—the house
advantage is negligible, compared to 1.35% for baccarat, 5.26% for double-zero
roulette and 5.6% for field bets at craps.
Blackjack is also more exciting than any other house game,
in my experience, and unlike 3-card poker, Let-it-Ride and other sucker bets,
lets you feel that you control your destiny to some extent as long as you stick
with the programme.
Today’s streamlined version of Turnaround/Target is about as
simple and straightforward as a viable strategy can get, with all of the
attention-dodging feints built in the earlier editions long gone.
Years ago, I came to realise that suspicious casino pit
prowlers are only interested in wild bet swings with a whiff of a Martingale,
and the best way to avoid attention is to take a walk to another game or layout
if the next bet might send up a flare.
It makes no difference at all to Target’s long-term
prospects, which remain excellent after all these years.
Strangely, most of the readers who have written to me about
the blog are baccarat aficionados whose loyalty to their dangerous game is
admirable, even if they invariably challenge my advice to never put money on
Banker.
It is a fact that Banker wins more hands than Player in the
long run, about 2.0% more, which in 10,000 rounds gives B 5,100 wins vs. P’s
4,900.
A no-brainer, right?
Wrong! Banker bets come in at 95%
net because of the standard house gouge (aka commission) which always skims
5.0% off all those B vaunted wins, and the numbers above then look a lot
different: B 4,845 paid vs. P 4,900.
Oops.
To belabour the point, the Wizard’s 2,000 shoes of baccarat plus
Zumma’s 1,000 shoes give Banker 104,234 wins and Player 101,355 wins for a
total Banker edge over Player of 2.84%.
So yes, Banker wins more often than Player.
But wait: Apply the “5 percent” gouge and the value of those
Banker wins drops to 99,022 units, given flat bets of 1u per round (crass
stupidity, but this is arithmetic, not an actual game) and Player’s 101,355
winners look a whole lot better—2.36% better, in fact.
So much for the claimed advantage of a Banker bet. Winning more often is not a whole of
use if in the end you will win less money! Anyone want to argue with that?
Of course, no one is crazy enough to bet the same amount
every time against 3,000 shoes of baccarat, or even one.
Against a betting strategy that relies on waiting until a
mid-recovery win comes along, then boosting the bet value in pursuit of a
prolonged positive trend, the gouge damage is much worse (still 5.0% off all
wins, with each loss at 100%, but much more painful, whatever you might hear
from all the fools who say, “But it’s only five percent!”).
I know from experience (I was banned from the blackjack
tables for years at one casino and had to make do with baccarat) that long
Banker runs are a nightmare for Player-only punters, so I grudgingly recommend
the wobble or WBL (win before last) bet
selection method, which at least catches extended streaks either way.
One important additional weapon: a 10.0% boost to turnaround
bets whenever Wobble calls for a pile of chips on Banker. That will at least offset the gouge, and
applies only when a win will mean recovery if it comes to pass. Otherwise, track net values, not gross Banker
wins, when reckoning the end-of-series (EOS) target value.
For those among you who baccarat boosters who always bet
banker and object to being called foolish, here are a few little things to
ponder:
When I first posted this update, I included a slew of snaps from worksheets that hammered home the horrible truth that betting Banker at baccarat is not as smart as the casinos would have you believe.
Then I decided that life would be simplified for my readers if I ran tests with Target/Turnaround "betting" Player on every round for 3,000 verifiable shoes, then doing the same backing Banker for each of 227,000 rounds or so.
The results are summarised above.
As expected, my patient progression won a tidy sum with all those Player bets ($4.5 million) and did just a little bit better backing Banker (up $4.7 million).
Then came Bertie Banker's commission bill: $2.44 million, or more than half his winnings!
And that meant that Peter Punter putting all his money on Player did
twice as well in spite of losing more bets than he won.
And "only five percent" turned out to be more than 50%.
No fakery, crookery or mythematics here...just arithmetic once again proving what educated players have always known: Do what the house tells you to do (or listen to shills), and you'll lose your shirt and trousers too...and deserve it.
To get the summary above, I broke the WOO six- and eight-deck shoes and the Zumma 1,000 shoes into 200-shoe blocks to save my trusty laptop from a heart attack, and Banker's net did not top Player's commission-free profit
once in 15 contests.
The summary file is another document I'm happy to share
(Excel 15x200 shoes) with a friendly request from non-professionals without mythematical agendas!
It's interesting (to me) that Mike Shackleford, the Oz behind the
WOO curtain, has never used his breath-taking resources to supply as many
sim-generated blackjack outcomes as he has baccarat rounds offered up to "prove"
that you can’t win.
One thing I can tell you for sure is that the results you
will get from superfast sims will always be inferior to the profits you can
expect from real-time play. Duhhhhh... Let me put that another way: real-time games are usually easier to beat than simulated ones.
A big problem with sims is that they offer no scope for a
sensible pause and a switch to a different layout or game when the going gets
really tough.
Who in his right mind would sit still to take a further pounding after, say, six consecutive losses, one win, then five losses and one win, then eight more losses in a row? Not me, or you either, probably. But Target had to suffer countless beatings against these baccarat data sets far worse than any that human flesh could endure, and it still managed to come out ahead, over and over again.
In the WOO 6-deck sets, with Target in play throughout,
close to 90 percent of all series or sequences end within ten bets or fewer,
with the most serious threats to the bankroll dragging on for 171 bets in shoes
1-500, and 52 bets in shoes 501-1,000.
In both sets, 60 percent of all series were done and dusted
(with a profit, obviously) in fewer than six bets.
What might have happened, do you think, if our robot player
had opted for pastures new and hopefully greener every time he got more than
ten punts into the red?
Short skirmishes are the norm in any table game because the
house edge makes those games essentially a 50-50 proposition.
Bet flat or bet randomly (as most players do) and the 1.35%
house edge at baccarat will get you in the end.
Bet strategically, and the screen cuts you see above
illustrate that the house edge can be trounced again and again.
And just in case you’re unconvinced by the baccarat banker
comparisons above, you fill find the equivalent data from Wizard Shackleford’s
much larger 8-deck data set at the end of this post.
Of course, sims can’t tell us what WILL happen, only what
CAN happen.
Because I have a life to live away from my computer, it has
taken me years to accumulate barely 150,000 rounds recorded against honest
games of blackjack.
Long ago, I published screenshots of my win against an iPod
game of 21, and they showed me well over a million bucks ahead of sim that I
could not manipulate in any way.
More recently, I found a terrific game that I had to tweak
in the beginning in order to build a bankroll equal to the challenge of beating
a house advantage that is a fifth or less of the edge that makes baccarat so
hard for flat or random bettors to make long-term headway against.
Here’s where I left the game last time:
I spent some time a while back revisiting Oscar’s Grind,
probably the best-known progressive betting method other than redoubling and
the only one casinos will endorse when pressed for advice. What does that tell you?
Legend says Oscar was a craps nut who wrote tens of
thousands of roll results in a pile of notebooks filled with stubby-pencil
scribbles, and he made a decent living freezing his bet after any loss and
adding one unit after every win (-1, -1, -1, -1, +1, +2, -3, -3, -3, +3, +4, +4
and out with a 1u profit against an AV of -2/12=17%).
A mythematician who styled himself “The Bishop” calculated
Oscar’s win-rate at 99.98%, wisely adding that “that 0.02% will kill you.”
I don’t know where that impressive win rate came from
outside of Bishop Snyder’s imagination, but I can tell you that my models programmed
with an OG algorithm have never been able to match it! (See below)
The problem is that one loss is too soon to freeze and one
unit is too little to pump the NB, which perhaps explains why no one will step
in and offer friendly advice from the pit if you put the method to work at a
craps table or anywhere else.
Redoubling or the Martingale is quite another story. Try that with gusto and you’ll have a new
best friend at your side in an instant, advising you that you are putting your
bankroll at terrible risk, so please stop now.
Much the same can happen with Turnaround/Target, and your
response should be similar: any hassle from house staff should be met with a
smile and a thank-you just before you walk away to place the appropriate next
bet somewhere new.
In all the years I spent in Nevada, I’d often see
hit-and-run Martingale punters, doubling up three times at the most against any
one game, and strolling on before any heat could come down on them.
The mythematicians who love to use me for target practice
(pun intended) routinely deny such h-&-r players exist anywhere, but I have
seen them and talked to them and long admired their patience and pluck.
Pit critters have seen them too, which is why these days in
Nevada, few casinos permit players to stroll up to a table and start betting
mid-shoe.
The rule is that you have to
wait until the next shuffle, a pain in the arse inflicted solely to hamper
double-uppers in search of a nice bonus from a double-down or a natural.
Not that the casinos reveal their agenda. They lie like rugs to protect their edge and
a strategy that can recover past losses plus a profit in just one win is a
serious threat.
You will also hear that table limits—$10 to $500, $25 to
$1,000, $100 to $5,000 and so on—are for the players’ sake, when in fact the
idea is to discourage very wide bet spreads that can alter the arithmetic in a
strategy bettor’s favour.
Experienced winners simply take an over-limit bet to a
matching layout when necessary, knowing that doing so will not affect their
long-term prospects one iota.
Doubles and splits, by the way, have better than a 20.0%
player edge against a fair game of blackjack, so it’s smart to learn the basic
strategy inside out and apply it with precision and consistently, regardless of
the size of the bet.
Try the basic strategy for blackjack against the game linked
above and record every round and you’ll be delighted with what doubles can do
for you, even without a disciplined betting strategy. Use both, and you’ll be hooked for life, and
a little bit wealthier too once you find a casino that won’t back you off for
being too canny.
As for dear old Oscar, he’d have been so much better off if
he’d frozen after a second loss, and doubled his bet after a win instead of
upping it by a measly one unit.
Unit values need to change throughout a recovery series to
match the current depth of the hole you are in, also known as the loss-to-date
or LTD.
For example, if you open with a $10 bet and lose it, make
the next bet $25 and calculate your LTD in $25 units until the bet hits $75,
when you should adjust to $100 units (8 down, 3 out in $25 units becomes 3
down, one out in $100 units).
“Down and out” is key here, an easy way to track your LTD
and make sure your bets keep a recovery within easy reach.
“Down” refers to the combined value or prior losses in the
current series, and “out” is the amount on the table in front of you.
Linking your bet values to your loss to date, knowing precisely where you stand and what you need to do to get ahead again, is critical to a viable betting strategy, more important than luck or the depth of your pockets.
OG can easily hit an LTD of -100 units in a prolonged battle,
and adding just 1u after any win will delay recovery for a very long time, and
quite possibly put it off forever.
Turnaround/Target relates the unit value to the win target,
and ideally your next bet (NB) should not be less than a fifth of your
LTD. You’ll get the hang of it!
As I said before, casinos view steady winners as cheats,
which as far as I know has only ever been true of the notorious but nameless
world-class poker player who got a little too greedy and bankrolled a scam that
came down to reading marked cards at baccarat tables.
He won a bundle in London and Atlantic City, but was caught
green-handed, so to speak, and could not collect.
He’s lucky he didn’t wind up in the pokey (pun again
intended!) and my guess is that other poker players on the world circuit are a
lot more wary of him these days.
So to wrap up what will probably be my swan song, discipline
and consistency are key not just to Turnaround/Target in a casino but to
horse-race betting too.
It’s wise to work hard and learn a lot of lessons before
risking real money at any game, and always keep this in mind: Of course you can win in the long run, but
it won’t always be a walk in the park.
I do want to thank everyone who has been supportive and
engaged with this blog over this past decade plus, and also the unbelievers who
blasted me for daring to challenge the conventional wisdom, because their
pig-headedness provided added motivation.
It is a fact, as I said at the beginning of this post and
many times before, that a flat or random punter will always fall prey to the
house advantage in any game, maybe not this time, but soon.
On the other hand, when strategic betting is in play, it
belies the ancient mantra that “Any amount bet against a negative expectation
will have a negative result.”
There's always going to be someone who will say that results from
any sample of data, however large and however impeccable and verifiable, is merely "anecdotal" and proves nothing, and there is really no answer to that.
Not being a baccarat enthusiast, I stopped at 3,000 shoes or about 230,000 rounds because I felt my point had been made. All the shoes in each set are numbered, so I suppose I'd be up for a closer look at a randomly-selected sample if the effort was generously funded.
But it won't happen because gamblers as a breed set high risk above all else, treating winning as a short-term accident that must be quickly rectified or the universe might tilt out of whack.
I remember a great conversation with a craps player at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, a guy who clearly wasn't stupid and who was well-heeled enough to be cool with a table minimum of $50. For craps!
He asked me about my method of linking bets in a recovery sequence with a specific win target, and I explained how important it is to win more when you win than...etc. It all made sense, he said, and he'd give it a go right now, happy that the strategy was so simple.
I then watched him lose more than $2,000 in less than ten minutes, with hardly any of his bets matching Target's softly-softly approach to recovering prior losses.
"So what happened?" I asked as we walked away from the table. "I forgot what you told me," he said.
And that's really what gambling is all about for the vast majority of players: Go with your gut, and get ready to lose all your lolly and love it.
I have a million models that prove that Target--call it a patient progression if you like, but progressive betting is what it's about--really works. But very few people can be bothered to look at gambling that closely. It isn't any fun, they're saying, and I get that.
Ask
me nicely, with an explanation of who you are and what you plan to do with
corroborating data that has taken me half a lifetime to pull together, and I’ll
send you the above baccarat summary file in full.
The bet-by-bet files showing the detailed results of all
227,000 rounds are not on offer…I figure that over the years I have spent at
least 50,000 hours on the Target project since it began in 1978. Value that effort at even a piddling £50 an hour
and you can put a theoretical price on obsession!
And of course, there will always be readers who conclude
that my numbers are faked to make all my work seem worthwhile.
Mythematicians as a clique prefer to think I'm a crook than to accept that they have their heads up their backsides (although casino risk assessors the world over are well aware that house games can be consistently beaten and have developed multiple tricks to make winning even harder than the house edge does unaided).
It is true enough that there can be only two explanations
for my results: Either I’m lying (or deluded), or the ancient axiom that you can’t win in
the end against negative expectation is one of the great cons of all time.
What do you think? Do tell...
Seth Theobeau,
25-January 2020
_
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.
_
