Taking dumb chances is never a good idea. But sometimes, calculated risks should be welcomed, not avoided.

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There is probably a Google Analytics report out there somewhere that says blogging activity drops right off in the summertime.

I haven't posted a peep for almost a month, with endless sunny days beckoning me out of doors here in rural northern Nevada, but thankfully that has not stopped feedback from coming in.

I was happiest to hear from Daniel Rainsong, whose betting method was soundly trashed by the online shill who plies his trade as the Wizard of Odds.

The Wiz used one of those runaway sims favored by academic mathematicians everywhere to "disprove" Mr. Rainsong's ideas, pocketing a $4,000 bet in the process.

Apparently, Mr. Rainsong expected a fair shake and coughed up the cash like a gentleman, happy that the forfeit was covered at least 20 times over by his winnings from online and conventional (meaning regulated!) casinos.

All I can say about the Rainsong "procedure" (as he describes it) is that it has two things in common with target betting: it is a progression, and a clever one at that.

Readers who would like to know more about it can contact me via one of the links on this page, and I will pass on their requests.

I was also pleased to hear criticism of my suggestion that target betting can at times be profitable at long-odds games such as craps field, roulette and 3-card poker, the consensus being that anyone who blunders into one of those sucker traps deserves to get skinned.

True enough.

Constructive criticism is useful when it provides an opportunity to refute misunderstandings that only a masochist who has read every post to this blog could avoid!

In everything I have ever written on the subject, I have always qualified my embrace of games with a high house edge by saying that whenever bets start to look like serious money, it's time to beat a retreat to safer havens such as blackjack and baccarat.

I learned a long time ago that even in a game with a crippling HA such as the 5.26% that applies across the board in roulette, target betting can exploit the ping-pong effect that can be observed in the win-loss pattern almost as often as at blackjack.

But the greatest advantage of flexibility is that it helps throw casino bloodhounds off the scent.

When a pit prodnose sees someone winning at blackjack more than he "should" his first assumption is that card-counting is the problem, and when bets don't drop dramatically in response to a shuffle, dumb luck gets the blame, at least for a while.

Pit staff are first taught, and then learn from observation and experience, that no one can win forever at house games, and when counting and a hot streak are both ruled out, cheating is for them the last remaining explanation.

Occasional winners are more than welcome in a casino...they are essential to the business, because they're the lure for losers.

Regular winners are as popular among pit personnel as flagrant cheats, which some of them probably turn out to be.

As the known value of negative expectation at different games increases, so does the likelihood that the undramatic undulation of the win-loss pattern will pitch a fit and lurch egregiously in the house's favor.

But even the 2-1 vertical numbers columns at roulette offer opportunity for a target player, within reason, the trick being to halve and round up the current LTD when the time comes to update the NB value.

My guess is that an unbreakable accord between Israel and its neighbors is a whole lot more likely than progressive betting being embraced by supporters of the conventional gambling wisdom, and that is just fine by me.

And we will also disagree in perpetuity about the relevance or fairness of a testing method that assumes that all gamblers are suicidal idiots.

I have been lectured over and over again about the inability of even the smartest player to avoid absolute subjugation by the house edge at games of chance.

The message is that even if you can stay out of fatal trouble for a million bets or more, the house will always beat you in the end.

All samples of bets, however large, are anecdotal and therefore irrelevant if they show a player winning against a clear long-term house advantage.

Conversely, any sample of any size that depicts a gambler getting his clock cleaned is proof that the house edge cannot be beaten.

I do not suggest that a player who takes a break before a potentially fatal negative trend can destroy him will never get into serious trouble.

What I do say is that prolonged negative trends are a relative rarity and that a cautious response to early warning signs will avoid a significant percentage of them.

Remember that target betting generally requires just two consecutive wins to achieve turnaround (or "get out of the hole") and in many situations, just a single win will do the trick.

It is possible to encounter a win-loss pattern that defies probability and excludes paired wins or any player wins at all for an extended period. But that is not a common occurrence.

If you play like a mindless robot and take whatever comes at you without applying any form of damage control, you will lose sooner or later, even if you faithfully apply the rules of target betting as I have laid them out.

Many gamblers believe that stepping away from a punishing game and resuming play at another time in another place is futile, and they are encouraged in that self-destructive belief by the Wizard of Odds and his casino industry sponsors.

A target player knows better.

Occasional tough times are inevitable and they cannot always be avoided.

But if you are going to put your good money at risk in a game in which the odds are against you, you at the very least need enough sense to come in out of the rain.

You are sure to lose more bets than you win, in the long run, so you have no choice but to bet in such a way that you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

Perennial losers (a term that describes more than 99% of all punters) think that what I just described is an impossible dream.

It is not impossible. It is essential.

And even the most corrupt "mathematical" methods devised in the service of the gambling industry cannot prove otherwise.

One of the distractions I have been enjoying since my last post is an iPod touch, a present from our youngest son, and among the apps I downloaded was a blackjack game that can be played at speed with just one thumb.

There are many better uses for the ultimate iPod, I realize, but naturally this was one I could not resist.

The game starts you out with a $1,000 credit and automatically allows a "marker" for $500 every time you go broke.

Most important, the permitted spread is from $5 to $5,000, which is better than most virtual blackjack games.

As I type this, I am almost $40,000 ahead after a total of maybe five hours of play in three weeks.

The free app has a stats utility that tells me that I won 622 bets, lost 714 bets, and pushed 109 times, indicating an overall house edge of -92/1445 = (6.37%).

So...this is not a game honest enough to survive in a real casino (since when was single-deck blackjack tougher to beat than roulette or pai-gow poker?).

The app does not track action, but it is clear that I did not lose 6.37% of whatever the "churn" number might have been, in spite of negative expectation.

Target betting commonly delivers a win equal to 5.0% (or more) of the final handle, so my $40,000 in profits suggests an average bet of around $550 and an indicated LOSS of $50,000. Oops...but at least we know where I went right!

In response to an earlier post, a regular reader recently chided me for, he said, confusing actual value (AV) with the house advantage (HA) or negative expectation (NE), which he argues never varies.

Technically, he may be right, but if in a <1.0% game such as single-deck blackjack, the dealer wins more bets than expected, the house clearly enjoys a greater advantage than if (in the sample mentioned here) it had won 14 more bets than I did in 1445 rounds, rather than 92.

The same old friend bemoans the fact that target betting offers no (to use his term) bankroll protection and takes too many risks when the going gets tough and the "hole" is already too deep for comfort.

In fact, the reverse is true.

First of all, an adequate bankroll is the best protection a player can have assuming his disciplined adherence to a viable betting strategy.

Protecting the protection is the equivalent of refusing to use sophisticated weaponry in a firefight because the ammunition is too expensive.

The only alternative is certain death. But look at the money you save!

Obviously, no one wants to push their entire bankroll into the fray willy nilly, but significant threats are shown by the conventions of mathematics to be very rare indeed.

Cutting the method off at the knees right at the moment when its forceful approach is most needed is, to put it bluntly, suicide.

Target betting certainly seems at first blush to be riskier than most betting methods and far outside the comfort zone of the majority of gamblers.

But its ballsy concerted assault on the house edge rapidly generates a mounting stockpile of fresh ammunition that proves that attack is the best form of defense.

And because of that, the size of the bets required becomes a diminishing concern.

But we knew that already, didn't we?

Gambling has countless cliches that can be heard any night in any casino, covering speculation and accumulation in a wide variety of words and phrases that describe every player's dream of going home a winner.

The one that says it best, in my opinion, is Scared money never wins.

In other words, If you can't afford to win, you shouldn't bet.


As the caption confirms, the above results from the iPod blackjack app don't prove that target betting will always win. But they do illustrate what is possible, and given the consistent success of the betting method, probable. I have not checked the fairness and accuracy of the app, but the stats shown above suggest that it falls far short of Ken Smith's clever little Blackjack Strategy Trainer. Given its head, target betting will flip the house edge into a far greater player edge. But weakening it by imposing unrealistic bet limits, thereby requiring longer winning streaks to enable turnaround, is worse than counter-productive: it is suicide. I know from years of careful analysis of data from a wide variety of sources that a spread of less than 1,000 to 1 is not viable in the long term. The iPod app allows a $5,000 maximum bet, and that is its only practical advantage over BST. It is encouraging to see that in spite of a consistent AV far greater than expected, the house was unable to sustain streaks long enough to defeat target betting. What is important is that a disciplined betting strategy requires the house to be far "luckier" than negative expectation predicts, putting it on the defensive, in effect. That's a good thing!

The iPod touch is a brilliant piece of technology, and I am looking forward to seeing Apple's rumored expansion of the interface to tablet size. This little do-hickey cost about $300, and ballooning it from 2x4 to 10x12 or whatever will probably put the resulting tablet computer in the $1,000 neighborhood. Bring it on, Steve!

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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To answer questions about Oscar's Grind, it's better than flying by the seat of your pants, but target betting is better still.

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I get questions about Oscar's Grind from time to time, usually from people who want to suggest that there is a more than coincidental similarity between Oscar's variation on the money management theme and my own.

The two methods are as alike as an apple and an orange (both grew on a tree, both are spherical and have pips, both taste good and...that's about it).

I have always enjoyed the story of the origins of the Grind, which legend has it was created by a crusty old geezer who played just craps and used a stubby pencil to record the result of each roll in a battered notebook. Too many adjectives!

I'm more inclined to believe that like card counting, Oscar's creation is encouraged by the casinos because most people mess it up, and when they do, they lose more money than they probably would otherwise.

The idea as I recall it from Tom Ainslie's book How to Win in a Casino is to freeze the bet after a loss, add one unit after any mid-series win, and revert to a minimum bet after recovering prior losses for the series, plus one unit.

If the next bet in a series would exceed 20 units, it's Game Over and back to a minimum wager, and that's the part that makes me suspect that "Oscar" was actually a casino employee with evil intent!

A 1-20 spread has zero chance of winning in the long term, with or without following the OG rules. That's an absolute factual fact. With the loss limit removed, "Oscar" does marginally better than a random bettor on a winning streak and can stay ahead for a good long while with a decent bankroll.

Against the BST blackjack data set, for example, OG earned about 5.0% of target betting's win to date while racking up more than 50% of my method's overall action. That translates to a greater risk with a far lesser reward.

Mr. Ainslie's description of Oscar's Grind makes no provision for a win progression, which seems to me strangely short-sighted unless there is an ulterior professional motive. Incorporating +1u after an opening win, continuing until a loss, then freezing the bet per the standard rules and playing on until the loss is recovered +1u, pumps OG's win by more than 30% while increasing the action by less than 10%. Why not do it?

OG is a progressive betting method, of course, so it wins more often than not. It's just not a very good progressive betting method!

A simple Martingale does much better, my version of a Martingale is more effective than the original, and target betting knocks them all into the proverbial cocked hat (one of these days, I must look that one up!).

Now seems as good a time as any to revisit the topic of which games to tackle with target betting.

Blackjack is by far the preferred option because of its low net house edge and the extra profit opportunities offered by double-downs and splits and 3-2 payoffs for naturals (never play at a layout offering 6-5, unless you are stuck at the last blackjack layout on earth).

Field betting at craps is a great place to start a series and take a break from blackjack, because of the x2 payoffs for 2 and 12 that are still x2 and x3 in some casinos. The negative odds are more than 5x blackjack's with x2x2, so you should never let the bets get too high before bailing out for a safer game.

Baccarat is the #2 option, but you should never, ever bet on Banker. That so-called "5 percent" commission is one of the great lies of gambling because it can easily swallow all your winnings and leave you in the hole in spite of your best efforts. I'll be posting more about that one of these days, with the help of the baccarat data sets from Lee Jones and Lorenzo Rodriguez (all 300,000+ of 'em!).

Roulette is a wonderfully streaky game best played (in my opinion) with the "wobble" method of picking black or red, odd or even, or whatever - never "inside" bets. Wobble is from WBL which in turn means Win Before Last, or as the French have it, avant derniere (or is it the other way around? I can never be sure!).

The big problem with roulette, of course, is its 5.26% house edge. So, again, kick off a new series (or several) at roulette if you must, but always back off before the NB gets out of hand, and take your LTD/NB numbers to a more player-friendly game.

Just don't rely on old Oscar, may he RIP. Mr. Ainslie claims to have paid for several gambling trips to the Bahamas with that method. Guess he's just a lucky cuss...?

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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You may be playing blackjack, baccarat, craps or roulette. But for the house, disinformation is the name of the game.

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The way the "gambling experience" is packaged in America's casinos today, the image is that betting (and losing) is a fun form of recreation made even more pleasurable by luxury suites, five-star restaurants, and non-gambling activities suitable for all the family.

It's not to be taken seriously, for sure. Lose only what you can afford, play and bet the way the casino expects you to, and you will be treated as a responsible adult who is in control of all that happens on an exciting, rejuvenating getaway to (wherever).

Of course, you are not really in control at all. Step out of line by just an inch or two, and you are on your way to becoming an entry in the industry's famous Black Book as a player who has the gall, the unbridled temerity, to try to win.

I am not talking about the Nevada Black Book, which like the black box always sought after a plane crash, is not black at all (see the link above) but the database each casino maintains and fills with personal information and facial recognition parameters about people who are bad for business.

Most of them are cheats and swindlers, but many are card counters and other players who are honest sticklers for good conduct and fair play but have learned enough about table games to be able to beat the odds time and time again.

The disinformation campaign sponsored by the casino business maintains that the house advantage is as powerful as the law of gravity, exerting a gentle but firm pull on all the chips in play until eventually they come home to the dealer's tray.

The message is that you can't beat house games in the end, but trying is so much fun and perhaps once in a great while you will get lucky, take home more money than you started with, then bring it back to lose it the way the natural order of things has ordained.

Mythematicians will tell you that of all the silly methods devised to upset gambling's laws, progressive betting is the silliest.

What is truly silly is that most people believe it to be true.

In fact, progressive betting is the only way to win consistently, and the casinos have known that since the dawn of betting.

"Consistently" is the key word here. It is possible to win, and it happens to thousands of people every day. But you have to get lucky to do it, assuming you don't have a plan. And as everyone knows, luck never lasts.

Mythemaniacs reserve their most acid scorn for a method known as double-up or the Small Martingale: double your bet after every loss until a win recovers all prior losses plus one unit, then start over.

The method works most of the time, thriving on the simple fact that losing is a progressive process, and so doubling after a loss keeps precise pace with it until a single win interrupts the losing streak.

This blog contains charts and screen shots relating to hundreds of thousands of real-play outcomes along with confirmation that target betting beats them all.

Ironically, so does double-up!

But the big problem with the Martingale is not that it does not work, or that it demands bets that are too high. The problem is that casinos won't let anyone play it.

If you doubt it, try it.

You will win a few series, and then the house's Martingale Machine will move into action.

While drunks and other fools lose money all around you without a comforting word from anyone on the casino's pit roster, you will be singled out for especially solicitous attention.

You will be politely advised that doubling up is a really bad idea, sure to eventually rob you of your bankroll.

Do you seriously imagine that the casino staff is concerned for the safety of your bankroll? It's the house's they are worried about!

Other players are quite likely to reinforce the message. After all, how smart can it be to bet hundreds or thousands of dollars just to win $5, or the value of your opening bet?

Actually, when you place a big fat bet several rounds into a losing streak, you are not aiming to win $5. Your objective is to recover all the bets you lost, plus a profit.

The size of the surplus doesn't matter. What counts is that in a single bet, you are "out of the hole" and ready for another contest against the seemingly all-powerful but actually very vulnerable house edge.

Ah, say the experts, you will be in big trouble soon enough because eventually you will lose so many bets in a row that you will bump up against the table limit. After that, a win will not cover all your past losses and you, silly fool, will be stuck in the hole forever...and it serves you right.

As it happens, x2 bettors are at work in busy casinos all the time. They avoid attention by betting, at most, three losing wagers at any one layout before moving on in search of that inevitable single win.

And if they do fall foul of any one table's bet limit, no problem - they take their money to a layout where their next wager is allowed, knowing that moving can have no negative impact on their chances of eventual success.

They especially like blackjack and field bets at craps, because there's an outside chance that the win they need will turn out to be a natural, or a multiple pay-off for dice roll of 2 or 12. That's when the gravy really flows!

More and more, casinos are combating Martingalers by barring entry to blackjack tables between shuffles: a nuisance, but not a fatal blow.

The campaign to keep as many punters as possible in ignorance of the true math of gambling is critical to the casino industry's bottom line.

The house makes a lot less money (usually none at all) from players who know the numbers and play them with precision. Those people are a threat to the whole house of cards, and should be thought of as cheats.

In Nevada, a casino can "86" a player for any reason it sees fit. In New Jersey, winning is not an allowable reason for revoking betting privileges. In the hundreds of casinos in between, there is little or no regulation, but you can be sure that if you make a habit of winning "too often" you will feel some serious heat wherever you are.

That's why it is important for a strategy player to maintain a low profile, be at all times courteous and friendly to pit personnel and other punters, and learn how to camouflage what he is doing.

Here's a summary of target betting's performance against 201,000 baccarat outcomes.

It mirrors its wins against tens of thousands of rounds played against Ken Smith's BST blackjack application.

More detail will follow, but you should know that I did not generate these outcomes or have any control over them. The data set was provided by Lee Jones, a baccarat systems promoter who assured me they were extracted from two bet-by-bet books of "real shoes" compiled by Zumma Publishing.

All that matters is that I did not alter or massage the data in any way.

(Click on the image to enlarge 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.
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