There's nothing new here for regular readers, but if something's worth saying once or twice, it's worth saying three times...or as often as it takes!

THE TARGET MESSAGE

The message I have been trying to get across to casino gamblers is that house table games can be consistently beaten, and progressive betting is the only way to do it.

That’s not just my opinion—the gambling industry believes it too, which is why there are table and house limits, all of them in place solely to make effective progressive betting difficult, if not impossible.

The argument that I have with the so-called, self-appointed “experts” challenges their insistence that exactly the same method of progressive betting must be used in every game and in every circumstance.

That’s as dumb as saying that if you can’t drive off-road over rocks or snow and ice the same way as you drive on a wide open road in warm sunshine, then you shouldn’t drive at all (hence my analogy that the safest car in the world is a death trap if the steering, brakes and gas pedal are all disabled!).

We all have to deal with two harsh realities: a limit on the amount that we are willing or able to risk in a casino game, and restrictions on the amount the house is prepared to let us bet in order to recover our past losses.

When I started out on this project more than 30 years ago, I too believed that it might be possible to discover a single method that could mathematically overcome the long-term house advantage in casino games of chance.

Now, I know better, which is why I recommend a flexible application of progressive betting.

You may have seen that the Target Betting objective is to “win more when you win than you lose when you lose” and while that motto might seem to be stating the obvious, few gamblers seem to realize that since we’re all certain to lose more often than we win over the long haul, we have no winning option but to ensure that our average win is worth more than our average loss.

That objective cannot be achieved long-term without progressive betting.  Period.  Luck can make it happen in the short term, but over time, luck becomes totally irrelevant (as well as being unreliable!).

For example, let’s say you place 100 bets and encounter a house edge of 2.0% which results in you winning 49 bets and losing 51 bets.  If your average overall bet value was $100, you will have won $4,900 and lost $5,100 and in 100 bets, you will have lost $200 or 2.0% of total action of $10,000.

Now let’s say your average win value is $120 and your average loss value is $100, a 20% win/loss surplus which is consistently achieved with the Target method.

The picture changes: 49 wins @ $120 = $5,880 and 51 losses @ $100 = $5,100, giving you an overall win of $780/$10,980 = +7.1% against a -2.0% house edge that gave you (according to those “experts”) an expected LOSS of -2.0% x $10,980 = -$218.

I have often been accused of attempting to deny or change the house advantage, and of course that’s impossible.

But it’s only impossible when we’re talking about the overall number of losses vs. the overall number of wins.  The loss total (number of losses, if you like) will always exceed the win total (number of wins) over time, but that does not mean that the total amount of money lost must exceed the total amount of money won.

I do not recommend use of the standard Martingale, which is the best-known method of progressive betting (-1, -2, -4, -8, -16, -32, +64).  It is the simplest approach, but it is also the most dangerous—and an added problem is that casinos routinely interfere with its use because when it works, it can be very bad for the house’s bottom line.

In the sequence above, the average win was 64 units and the average loss was just over 10 units.  We don’t need a win/loss surplus to be that dramatic (600%!) to achieve steady profits long-term.  An average win value that exceeds our average loss value by 20-30% will do the job just fine.

It is relatively simple to create a random number generator simulation which will demonstrate conclusively that the conventional wisdom about the house advantage is just plain wrong.

What such a simulation will repeatedly confirm is that while the house has a slight mathematical or statistical edge in every bet, the house wins two bets in succession only about half as often as a house win is followed by a player win (-1, +1 from the player’s viewpoint) and three consecutive house wins occur about half as frequently as two house wins followed by a player win (-1, -1, +1 for the player).

The problem with the Martingale is that while, say, 10 successive house wins is an extremely rare phenomenon, it is a “black swan” event that does occur from time to time, however infinitesimal the odds, and when it does, it can be very expensive for the player.

So when talking about progressive betting, we should be thinking in terms of imposing our own limits on bet values and on the number of times we are willing to re-double our bet before applying damage control by either freezing or reducing the sum of money in play.

One rule must always be applied: When we win a bet after a losing sequence of any duration, we must follow that win with a bet that, if permissible, recovers all of our prior losses—our loss to date or LTD—plus an overall win target, or profit.

A Martingale makes a profit of just one unit after a losing streak, whether it’s an isolated loss (-1, +1) or a prolonged downturn (-1, -2, -4, -8, -16, -32, +64) and that’s not enough—unless you’re playing blackjack or betting the field at craps, which occasionally provide paybacks that are multiples of the original bet value.

I just set my “sim” to bet 5,000 rounds using a very conservative method of progressive betting that applied the following rules:

·         If the first bet in a new series or sequence of bets is a loser, double the bet

·         If the first bet in a new series is a winner, add 1 unit to the bet

·         After any isolated loss in a recovery series, double the bet

·         After a second or subsequent loss occurs in a recovery series, halve the bet

·         After a mid-series win, double the bet.  If the bet wins and all prior losses for the series are recovered, fall back to a minimum (1 unit) bet.  If the bet loses, double it once, then halve it if another loss occurs, and continue halving the bet until the minimum is reached.

·         The maximum permitted bet is 5,000 units

The opening few hands in my sim looked like this (the first column shows the bet value, the next the outcome, the third tallies the total win or loss for the current series, and right-hand column tracks streaks and indicates when a turnaround bet is called for or a recovery has been achieved):

1	-1	-1	-1
2	2	1	OK
1	-1	-1	-1
2	2	1	OK
1	1	1	+
2	-2	-2	-1
4	4	2	OK
1	1	1	+
2	2	2	+
3	-3	-3	-1
6	-6	-9	-2
3	-3	-12	-3
2	-2	-14	-4
1	1	-13	ta
2	2	-11	ta
4	4	-7	ta
8	8	1	OK
1	-1	-1	-1
2	2	1	OK
1	1	1	+
2	-2	-2	-1
4	4	2	OK
1	1	1	+
2	-2	-2	-1
4	-4	-6	-2
2	-2	-8	-3
1	1	-7	ta
2	2	-5	ta
4	-4	-9	-1
8	8	-1	ta
16	16	15	OK
1	-1	-1	-1
2	2	1	OK

In Target betting, a “recovery series” is a sequence of bets in which the player is in the hole and looking to win enough to achieve turnaround (“ta” in the example above).

Wherever you see “OK” above, prior losses have been recovered in the indicated series, and the bet reverts to the minimum so we can start all over again.

Here are the results for just one iteration of the simulation:

		Maximum bet permitted	5,000	units
		Actual maximum risked	5,000	11	max bets	0.22%
		Final outcome	20,073	12.64%
		Overall action	158,851
		Flat bet final outcome	-60
		House advantage	-1.20%
		Expected outcome	-1,906	units lost
	Won	2470	36	average	132%
	Lost	2530	-27

You can see that the house won more bets than we did, giving it an overall edge of 1.2% which is about right for blackjack or baccarat.

We won 20,073 units after placing 5,000 bets that were collectively worth a total of 158,851 units in action/handle/churn (all terms that describe the combined aggregate of winning and losing bets).

We had to “bet the max” 11 times in 5,000 rounds—once in every 454 bets, on average.  Overall, our average bet was worth 32 units.  But what matters the most is that although we lost more often than we won, progressive betting enable us to win more when we won than we lost when we lost to the tune of 36/27 = 132%.

The house edge of 1.20% indicated an expected loss (edge x action) of 1,906 units—but progressive betting in this sample gave us a “player’s edge” of 12.6%.

Of course, I am not suggesting that a win like this will happen every time, using this same set of rules, and all those “experts” out there will dismiss these data as being anecdotal, which is just a fancy way of saying that they are unique and therefore irrelevant to the big picture.

But the experts can’t have it both ways.

It’s hard to argue that 5,000 rounds is “not a representative sample” because that many bets would take most players at least 50 hours to play out (far longer playing baccarat!) and that’s a lot of time by anyone’s standards.

The conventional wisdom is absolutely clear: Bet 5,000 rounds against a house advantage of 1.20% and you will lose at least 1.20% of your total action.

What the experts never tell you is that the relentlessly-repeated axiom that any amount bet against a negative expectation must have a negative result only applies if bet values are fixed or randomly selected.

And that’s really what this whole argument is all about.

If you bet the same amount every time, or if you vary your bets randomly according to hunches, whims, gut feelings or the careful study of runes and/or chicken entrails, and if you lose more often than you win, then at the end of the day you will have “made a contribution” to the casino’s bulging coffers.

Bet progressively using discipline, confidence and consistency (the Target method being the smartest way to go!) and when you go to the cashier’s cage, you will be making a withdrawal in cold hard cash instead of counting your losses.

As I said, accurate simulations that mathematically demonstrate the inherent weakness in the house edge at casino games of chance are easy to write and just as easy to validate.

But for some reason, all the vocal champions of the status quo choose to ignore the truth.

It may well be that the same simulation will show multiple losses over hundreds or thousands of iterations—I don’t deny that.

What I do say is that all simulations, mine included, ignore what I call the inertia factor by assuming two things:

1. A player must be willing to keep on betting through a prolonged losing streak without taking any defensive action by, for example, dropping back to minimum bets or walking away from an anomalous downturn, and
2. The house must be willing to permit bets from 1 to 5,000 units (or any other very large amount) at the same layout.

  

Neither of the above conditions exist in the real world, so any “proof” that the same betting strategy applied the same way for a bazillion rounds must eventually crash and burn is...worthless.

I have watched countless Martingale bettors escaping the notice of eagle-eyed pit personnel (at least for a while) by placing no more than two or three losing bets (-1, -2, -4) at any one layout before moving on to another table or a different game in search of the single win that will recover all their prior losses plus a profit.

I mentioned blackjack and craps as the best Martingale prospects because of 3-2 (these days, more likely 6-5) paybacks on naturals, “extra” profits from successful splits or double-downs, and the allure of 2x or 3x field payouts on 2 or 12 at craps.

The same potential benefits apply to Target betting, obviously, and the level of aggressiveness applied is entirely a matter of player choice.

I find it tiresome when yet another Target critic whines on about rule changes and “cheating” and the best I can do on that score is provide a link to a web page where I address the charge.

The crux is that there’s only one immutable rule, and that’s the one that kicks in when a win finally comes along in the middle of a recovery series.

Your chances of winning a second consecutive bet are no better or worse after a first mid-series win than they are at any other time—you don’t need to be a gambling “expert” to figure that out.

But it’s your job to see that IF that second or “twin” win occurs, you derive maximum benefit from it.

Table limits have nothing to do with Target’s prospects of long-term profits, but of course house limits do.

You’ll read anti-progression rants that point out that if you’re betting from a $5 start at a table with a $300 maximum, it will take “only” six successive losses before you hit the table limit and then what...?

The What? is easy: You either bet the table limit, then bet it again (or just enough to recover the balance of your prior losses)—or move to another layout with higher limits and bet what’s needed.

You can, if you wish, bet just once at each layout, switching from baccarat to blackjack to craps to roulette or whatever with each successive loss, and your win and loss prospects are mathematically unaffected.

You are only “in trouble” (and it’s not much trouble at that) if you are stuck in a casino where ALL the tables and games have a low house limit.

And even then, you can simply walk away with a losing series unresolved, and resume betting at the same level when you next have access to a casino that permits you to spread wider than at the tin-pot locale where you initially got into trouble.

The numbers—“The Math”—stay the same no matter what.

It’s true that the size of bets Target sometimes requires can be intimidating to someone who’s just starting out on a winning path.

But the strategy builds profits at a steady pace, making it possible to increase your minimum little by little as your burgeoning bankroll allows.

My rule after any winning session is to add half the session profit to my bankroll, putting the other half in my pocket to cover expenses plus wine, women and song or whatever else takes my fancy.

It’s why I haven’t had a losing year since 1989.  Tough days, weeks and even months, for sure—but never a losing year.

Seth Theobeau

Nevada

©1978-2013

 

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. _

What does gun control in America have to do with gambling? Every day that we allow psychos easy access to firearms and ammo, we're gambling with the lives of innocent people, that's what!

OK, so plenty of opportunists use the latest shooting outrage in the USA as an excuse to climb up on a soapbox, but what always amazes me is the number of times we're asked to swallow that twaddle that "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

We have become a nation so brain-washed by the NRA's cynical misinterpretation of the spirit and intent of the hallowed Second Amendment that a majority of Americans actually believe that sensible controls on access to killing machines will do more harm than good.

It doesn't help that most politicians are even more cowardly about the gun control issue than they are about raising taxes on their uber-rich sponsors, or that the idea of government interference in any aspect of American life, even if it will prevent the slaughter of our children, is seen by many of us as the root of all evil.

Radio's right wing-nuts blow their hardest when guns are an issue, doing their damnedest (and they deserve to be damned!) to stir up fear and hatred, and win back votes for an ideology that was irrelevant to modern life long before Bush Jr. made America an international laughing stock.

Here's the truth about gun control:

• No one who is sane and responsible and law-abiding will lose the guns they already own because of any new laws that have been or ever will be proposed in the USA.
• The root of the gun problem is the ease with which deranged and unstable people with evil intent can buy or otherwise obtain guns and ammunition, and the willingness of greedy gun-makers and gun dealers to sell their wares to anyone as long as the price is right.
• Anyone who now owns any gun should be required to register it with the local police, to provide the authorities with the names of everyone who has access to that gun, and to agree to keep the weapon out of the reach of anyone who is not officially listed and approved as a potential user of the registered firearm.
• Private sales or transfers of ownership of controlled weapons will be banned unless the seller or prior owner of a gun has cleared the transfer by filling out the necessary paperwork and the intended new owner has been background-checked and approved.
• Full background checks of new owners will be required before any sale of a firearm, and every gun will be readily traceable from the manufacturer or importer through the dealer to the purchaser.  Gun-makers or dealers who fail to follow this strict protocol will be heavily penalized and may have their license to make or sell firearms suspended or permanently revoked if they break the law.
• No controlled weapons will be permitted to change hands at gun shows: purchasers will have to apply for registration ahead of possession and wait up to 90 days for delivery, and no money will be exchanged until the transaction has been officially sanctioned. 
• All gun owners will be required to attest under penalty of perjury that they have a safe place to keep every weapon in their possession, and to agree to on-site inspections at the discretion of the relevant authority. 
• The loss or theft of any firearm should be immediately reported to the gun control authority, with the law stipulating that the registered owner of any weapon used in the commission of a crime will be charged as an accessory to that crime, and if convicted will face punitive fines and a jail sentence, as well as potential civil liabilities.
• Taxpayers will not bear any of the cost of enforcing new gun control laws: Every aspect will be funded by fees payable by gun owners for each step in the process, including applications for registration, transfers and inspections.

The NRA and other loony gun-nut organizations love to hide their irresponsible, murderous ideology behind the Constitution, claiming that it gives every citizen the right to not just own but carry a gun, regardless of any potential danger to others.

The Second Amendment says no such thing, despite the Supreme Court's cowardly willingness to pander to the paranoia of sociopaths.

The Second Amendment acknowledges the need for security and the maintenance of law and order in our society, and the "militia" it refers to could be defined as the U.S. Military on the federal level or local police ands the National Guard at state level.

That's not to say that law-abiding citizens should not be allowed to own guns, and even use them as hunters or in other sports.

Where we have to draw the line is on the safe side of firearms that are in effect weapons of mass destruction.

That means no assault weapons, no military guns of any kind, no exploding bullets, no multi-bullet clips -- and above all, no right to own or sell a gun without full accountability at all times.

Guns don't kill people?

Could the deranged shooter at Newtown or Aurora or any one of countless other American scenes of carnage have claimed as many victims with hunting rifles rather than weapons callously designed to blow away as many "targets" as possible as quickly as possible?  Of course not.

Would so many people be killed in robberies every day in the USA if guns were not almost as easy to buy on our streets as a loaf of bread or a carton of milk.  No.

Why don't I stick to gambling and mind my own business?  Because that's what Americans have been doing for generations: minding their own business and pretending that gun laws that protect criminals and the criminally insane are not a threat to the rest of us every hour of every day.

And gun control is not about government interference in citizens' lives or the loss of privacy or "inalienable rights."  It's about common sense, along with acceptance that the government is us and not some enemy entity intent on enslaving us.

Too many of us think of the government as "them" because we refuse to play any role in the election (and rejection!) of the politicians who represent us or the officials who work for us.

We can keep government in check if we pay attention, instead of shrugging off our responsibilities by whining that our one little vote in 120 or so million doesn't count.

We all matter individually, and we matter even more as a community with common interests and a shared obligation to look out for each other -- and our children.

Tighter gun controls won't prevent every future murder, and as always in America, as fast as new laws are enacted, people with murder on their minds will find ways to get around them.

But at least we will at last have stopped treating guns as if they were toys, or symbols of freedom and independence and proof of manliness.

They are none of those things.

They are intended to kill.

And if we can recognize that ugly truth and act together like a nation of grown-ups, we will be giving the children whose lives we save good reason to look up to us.

It can happen.

Wanna bet...?

_ An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bodog, spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this. _

When you choose, you lose! Greed and ignorance are a punter's worst enemies, we all know, but too many choices can be deadly, too.

(Click here for Wednesday-Sunday Target GG updates)

Let's face it, the more choices we have to make, the more likely we are to screw up, which is why I have long been an advocate of choosing from as few options as possible, and sticking with just one of two or more alternatives whenever practicable.

It's not a popular point of view.

And if I'm against hopping from Player to Banker at baccarat or from Red to Black at roulette or thinking too much at any casino table game, then my advice must rule out the pro-sports schedule, with dozens of games every day, and horse-racing, which can have up to 16 contenders in a single contest.  Right?

Not so.

The key to success in a casino is to back a single option, and then apply the Target Betting rules with unwavering confidence and consistency.

It's the same with sports betting and at the races, except that instead of following a single series from first loss to inevitable turnaround, you create multiple series or lines, and apply the Target algorithm separately to each one of them.

You can't bet every game or back every nag in a race, so you whittle down the field using filters or parameters that, like the Target rules themselves, never vary.

Forget past performance and weather conditions, players and jockeys and all of the factors that the experts claim can be predictive, and stick with plain and simple numbers.


When I started my (almost!) two-year transparent sports betting trial, some readers were insulted by the very idea that random bet selection could be far more effective in the long run than expert analysis of all the factors that can have bearing on the outcome of a game.

But my primary commitment will always be to the proven notion that when applied with discipline and consistency in accordance with the right rules set, progressive betting can overcome negative expectation.  Better yet, it will create a long-term player edge that is every bit as reliable as the house advantage in any game we care to tackle.

The conventional wisdom is that "the math" is against me.

But I have demonstrated over and over again that in fact the numbers are on my side, and anyone with an open mind and the means to apply fair and accurate tests to the Target concept will inevitably back me up on that.

I don't claim to have invented progressive betting (it has been around as long as gambling, probably) but my adaptation of it is entirely my own.

As many of you know, I started out analyzing blackjack, then created models that proved the power of progressive betting against baccarat, craps, roulette and any game that doesn't amount to suicidal nonsense (the wheel of fortune and keno, for example).

The bad news that emerged was that the Target method requires a very wide betting spread, and a bankroll that is beyond the reach of more than 99% of all the world's gamblers.

The good news is that most gamblers expect to lose and won't help themselves do otherwise, leaving the field wide open for a betting strategy that in the long run beats most other investment opportunities in terms of rate of return and reliability.

I have used Apple shares in the past as a benchmark for a comparison between Target betting on pro sports or horse-racing and a "non-gambler" investing in the stock market, and now is a good time to revisit the example.

In mid-September, Apple's shares reached a record high of $705 a pop; on Friday last (Dec 7) they dropped $14 to $533.

For the Vanguard Group, which is one of Apple's heftiest institutional investors with 41 million shares, the current slump amounts to a $7 billion -- yes, billion! -- hit.

Does that make Vanguard a foolish, irresponsible investor with a total disregard for the numbers?  Hell, no!  Apple is generally perceived to be a long-term sure thing, with a share price north of $750 probable once market volatility subsides and the world's coolest gadget maker launches its new take on TV technology in 2013.

It might seem facile to compare horse-race betting with stock market investment, but in the eight months since I first started a serious study of Target and the gee-gees, the betting strategy is ahead by a six-figure sum after at one point suffering a loss of...well, a helluvalot.

It would be infinitely more facile to suggest, as some do, that given a sufficiently enormous bankroll, any betting proposition with a negative expectation can eventually be made profitable for a well-heeled player.

The millionaires and billionaires who built Las Vegas, Macau and countless pale imitations include many who lost vast sums making the same dumb assumption that a losing streak can be turned around if you throw enough money at it.

Big money is essential to long-term success at gambling, just as it is in stock market investment.  But it guarantees a profit only when its muscle is allied with a disciplined, workable plan.

The enemy of success is, you could say, out-thinking the challenge.

A year or two back, the world's first publicly-traded sports investment fund was launched in Europe with great fanfare and around $5 million behind it, trumpeting the idea that sophisticated computer analysis of every available betting proposition would guarantee huge returns.

Well, pffffffffffffftttt...!  The fund went out of business, as did a US-based project called InvestaPick, which made one bet a day from each of three independent funds or bankrolls.

The European fiasco blamed "a long run of bad luck" and confirmed that all the expert analysis in the world won't help you if you keep on making the wrong choices.

Too much thinking wiped out both ventures, although InvestaPick kept reinventing itself by rewriting history, posting past results with new betting rules applied whenever the red ink got too deep for comfort.

In my transparent sports trial, I ended up almost $200,000 ahead by July, 2012, after posting my picks online ahead of game times every day, followed by results each night or the following morning.

In the summer of 2011, I dug myself into a six-figure hole by deciding that the biggest bets should be applied to games that offered each day's shortest odds.

In doing so, I broke my own rule that random selection is the safest way to go, better by far than human intellect.

And once I abandoned my foolish heresy (with every bet publicly posted ahead of the game, as usual) the numbers took over and Target climbed back into rich green returns.

Both sports and horse-race betting have an enormous advantage over casino table games in that game and race results are readily verifiable and no one can cheat...including me.

I have kept quiet about the progress of "Target GG" because I needed to build up a substantial results database tailored to my peculiar needs, and with just my fingers to do the typing, it has been a long and drawn-out process with a lot more time and toil in store.

The data have to be accurate, obviously, but far more important is that every relevant fragment of information must be entered into a succession of worksheets that are interactive, and able to provide instant answers to any what if? question that an inquiring mind might come up with.

It came as a big surprise to me that horse-racing databases that already exist are entirely focused on arcane details that are virtually meaningless to anyone but thoroughbred trainers, owners and riders, skipping the morning line and post-time odds, for example.

I really don't care that a given entry has won five of his last seven outings, for example, or that his times are improving and that he's at his most competitive in a field of seven or more.

What matters to me is the payback when my horse is first or second past the post, recognizing that unlike in sports betting, where the odds applicable when you bought your winning ticket are what you get when you cash it in, the numbers on the tote board often keep changing even after the gate goes up. 

As always, past results have to play second fiddle to present and future outcomes, because we all need confidence that a method that has been historically profitable won't suddenly crash and burn.

With that in mind, I intend to keep past results and the details of my methodology to myself, at least for the time being, and revive the concept of transparency on these pages.

Right now, I'm betting on at most three or four of the 20 or so tracks that are running races every day in the USA and Canada, backing up to five entries in every race.

Bet #1 is linked with bet #1 at the same track in the previous race, bet #2 with #2 and so on, but beyond that, there is no relationship between the five bets on any race.

My current open tracks are Aqueduct NY (AQU) and Gulfstream Park FL (GP), with Betfair Hollywood Park CA (BHP) tacked on to results from Santa Anita CA (SA) 30 miles or so across Los Angeles County.

Target GG struggled for the first couple of weeks after Aqueduct opened on November 2, but it's well ahead now, as it is at Gulfstream Park after a few rough days when the five-month winter meeting began on December 1.

Meanwhile, I'm in deep red ink at Hollywood Park, having wiped out the profits from 24 betting days at Santa Anita.

I am every bit as confident as Vanguard is in Apple that the current losing streak at BHP will come to an end long before all my profits to date are wiped out and I have to start raiding my initial bankroll all over again.

What I'm doing here is let the tote pick my horses for me, which is the equivalent of the "Ask the Audience" option in TV's "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"  I do, I do, and since I know about as much about thoroughbreds as I do about pro sports teams, I am happy to be guided by the popular vote.

You will find regular Target GG updates on the Sethbets website, although given the relatively vast number of bets each day and the fact that odds keep changing up to and beyond post-time, I won't be able to put up my selections ahead of time as I did with the long transparent pro sports trial.

There's still no room for cheating, though: I bet the first, second and third favorites to win in every race, and when the field is large enough, additional money goes on the fourth and fifth favorites.

In the past few months, I have looked at a variety of exotic bets and rejected them all.  There's a reason bookies and the tote encourage them!  I am a plain and simple bettor, never venturing beyond place bets for relative outsiders, and win bets on the "top three" in any race.

The database I have put together so far endorses the experts' expectation that favorites will win a third of all races.

It also supports advice I was given by a top racing official more years ago than I care to count:  "Bet the second favorite to win, my boy, and you'll stay out of serious trouble."

The favorite noses past the #2 more often than not...but odds on the second favorite routinely make up the difference.  If all you take away from this blog is that ancient piece of advice, you will not have wasted your time here!

Each day's update will include a link to the official results page (thanks a million, Equibase!), which includes the odds that prevailed at the off.

Get ready to see some very large numbers, in both red and black ink.

The reality is that no one can hope to win against any betting proposition unless they have the resources to bet a very wide spread.  Mine is from $25 to $25,000 and will widen as time goes by.

Think of Billy Walters, the Las Vegas punter who's too big to be called a whale (which is in any case a term used to describe losers who blow hard and then go under, and Walters has been on top of the bookies for decades!).

Mr. Walters doesn't win all the time, any more than I do.  In a very flattering "60 Minutes" segment a while back, he conceded that he routinely has losing days, weeks and months, but so far has never suffered a losing year.

Winning is all about hanging in there, and sticking with the same strategy, no matter what.

The Target GG rules for horse-race betting provide for filters or parameters that disqualify some races because of ultra-low odds or too few entries, but for now I am betting far more often than I believe is optimum.

For a few more weeks, I'm willing to endure the extra stress and effort that comes from jumping into pretty much every race at the tracks I have selected.  As I said earlier, the fewer choices I have to make, the more successful I'm likely to be.

I'd say Wish me luck! but luck's not what I need.  The numbers have everything taken care of, and as always, I'm counting on them.


_ 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. _

Is cynical, self-serving disinformation ever acceptable...or is it only OK in an election year? Seems like telling the truth is the old-fashioned way to go these days!

_
I ask the question only because every once in a while, I get a reminder that the people who profit by defending the status quo in gambling will do pretty much anything to keep punters in the dark.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about, sent to me by a reader who wanted to know why I'd waste my time butting heads with the powers that be in the world of betting (by which I mean casinos, bookies, and the legions of shills who make a living preaching that it's fun to lose).

I have commented on this prime piece of house-sponsored hogwash before, but it's worth revisiting because new readers are discovering this blog around the clock, day after day, and many of them actually believe that casinos have no interest in controlling how players bet.

And that's really the point: On the face of it, casinos don't decide when or if we bet, or how much, and they don't tell us when to quit (unless, of course, we're winning too much).

But in reality, casino operators have a complete grasp of player psychology, making the most of it to herd us like sheep, not cats.

And while everyone running table games knows that they can be beaten by progressive betting, they also know that most players ruin their own chances of winning in the long run by getting into games with woefully inadequate bankrolls, and betting a suicidally tight spread.

It's behavior the house does its darnedest to encourage.

A dangerously tight spread, the math tells us, is anything less than 1 to 100, meaning that a player starting out with a $10 minimum bet will have enough fire power to bet as much as $1,000 when necessary.

Since even a doomed spread of 1:100 is beyond both the inclination and the means of more than 99% of casino gamblers, it's possible to conclude that the spread argument is pretty much irrelevant to anyone likely to read this blog.

The casinos know better.

So while they don't control individual players or their individual bets, they use psychology to corral their customers in ways that do, in fact, influence how and how much they bet.

Too many players whose bankroll is threatened by a prolonged losing streak tend to sit tight at the same table, hoping that their luck will change before their money runs out. And they will keep on betting at the top end of their range, ensuring that they will crash and burn sooner rather than later.

The myth the casinos work hard to perpetuate is that the wider your betting spread, the greater your risk.

It's dangerous nonsense.  I'll show you some compelling data on that in a moment.

And because most people never bother to look at the numbers or apply mathematics or logic to their play - gambling is supposed to be fun, right? - they simply don't get that as wide as possible a variation in bet values is the ONLY way to win in the long run.

A 1-10 betting spread is rare among weekend punters (1 to 5 is closer to the norm) so the 1: 100 spread I mentioned above happens about as often as hurricanes in Hampshire.

Table limits discourage wide spreads not for the protection or "security" of high rollers but to greatly reduce the likelihood that a well-funded player in trouble will be able to bet his way out of the hole without switching to a layout that takes bigger chips.

It's just plain common sense: The quicker you hit your maximum bet value, whether it's a voluntary cap or one imposed by the house, the more vulnerable you are to the hazards of negative expectation.

You can even lose money in spite of winning more often than you lost!

That's because most players respond cautiously to winning streaks and reserve their biggest bets for hard times, then can't decide whether to chase a winning streak with continued large bets or drop back to small amounts if they are lucky enough to get even again.

Any time a player has to make a snap decision, he's more likely to make a wrong one than a right one - and that's one of the many reasons why a disciplined betting strategy is the only smart option in a casino.

Target, for example, tells you when to press and when to fall back, and that alone will turn a long-time loser into a consistent winner.

Losing streaks won't scare you to death, once a few weeks of practice have given you the confidence you need - and better yet, you'll stop wasting winning streaks.

Winning streaks are, for a fact, less frequent than losing ones, and Target will show you how to win back your prior losses and make a modest profit time and time again by getting out of the hole in fewer bets than it took you to get into trouble in the first place.

You will consistently win more when you win than you lose when you lose, in other words.

Like a politician on the stump in an election year, the Buzzard of Bovada - author of the timeless twaddle excerpted above - makes sure that there's a kernel of truth in his nutty response about table limits.

It is demonstrably true that as long as a player bets randomly or wagers fixed amounts, then the individual and aggregate value of those bets has no long-term effect whatsoever on the house advantage.

So a "whale" who bets $250,000 a hand at blackjack at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas (see past references to the late Kerry Packer) is no more of a threat to casino profits than someone who bets $10 on every hand or spin of the wheel or whatever.

The big difference is that when the whale flounders, the house will make more money than it would on a thousand or so weekend punters, and that's why when wealthy winners win big, there's a flurry of publicity but when they lose, there is respectful (and grateful) silence.

The temporary wins amount to short-term loans to customers who don't need the money, but getting the word out will hopefully tempt a few more high-rollers away from the competition.

Most regular players long ago learned the value of what's widely known as money management, although many of them are amazingly unaware that "MM" is progressive betting wearing a very thin disguise.

Large casinos with the amenities and resources to attract whales do, as the Buzzard confirms, offer games with a bewildering range of table limits, from maybe $10 to $1,000 through $25 to $3,000 and $100 to $10,000 all the way up to hallowed layouts where bets up to $100,000 are accepted without a qualm and higher limits can be approved.

But if the Buzzard's claim that the house edge is unaffected by bet values were true, tin-pot truck-stop casinos in my home state of Nevada would happily allow their customers to bet whatever they wanted.

They don't because, just like the Buzzard, they know that progressive betting can cause them major headaches and even put them out of business.

So in my immediate neighborhood, $5 to $300 is about as rich as table games get, and $5 to $100 is more common.

Bigger casinos with much higher limits are 20 minutes to an hour away, so whenever I hit the green ceiling at one of my locals, all it takes to win back my losses is a set of wheels and some extra time.

Once again: It's all about the math.

And the math is the reason why Bovada, sole sponsor of the Buzzard's eloquently deceptive website, not only applies tight table limits, but uses software that responds decisively and defensively if an online customer has the gall to get caught using progressive betting.

Bovada is not alone in that: It's just one of many crooked operations that may or may not give you a fair shake if you bet like the sheep you're supposed to be, but will bring the hammer down if you're a consistent winner.

Online casinos are especially vulnerable to progressive betting, because they can't do as their bricks-and-mortar competitors routinely do and walk a progressive bettor to the nearest exit.

But like their land-based cousins, online game operators consider progressive betting to be cheating.  And if cheating a cheater is what it takes to thwart a serious threat to their bottom line, they will do it without a second thought.

Years ago, the Buzzard offered a $25,000 prize to anyone who could come up with a betting method that consistently beat a billion or so computer-generated outcomes, and he still boasts online about his defeat of a system-peddler lyrically named Daniel Rainsong.

The $25,000 challenge is no longer offered, a victim perhaps of a computer age in which proving that progressive betting is a long-term winner is a whole lot easier than it used to be.

When I first started talking about progressive betting online more than 15 years ago, people who share the Buzzard's dedication to promoting the invincibility of the house advantage would create breathtakingly complex simulations that would "prove" that no casino game can ever be beaten in the long run.

The irony is that today, anyone with a decent laptop can download computer-generated data offered online by the Buzzard himself, and use that data to expose the fallacy of the claim that a house edge protected by the math can't be beaten by the math.

Take, for example, the 80,000 or so outcomes contained in 1,000 8-deck "shoes" of baccarat posted by the Wizard of Odds.

The summary above confirms that betting Player only through every hand of every one of those 1,000 shoes would run up against a 1.23% house edge (about right for baccarat) and that someone backing Banker all the way would be at 1.07% disadvantage.

Let's be clear: Betting fixed amounts or betting random values would without a doubt result in a long-term loss.  That's what I'm talking about when I say that the house is protected by the math.

But you can see that a "capped" Martingale played against those same outcomes flips the Player-only outcome from -1.23% of total action to PLUS 2.88% - hardly enough to excite the whales of this world, but proof that progressive betting with a wide spread can in truth undo the house advantage.

The rules applied here were more aggressive than the basic Target algorithm, and I will get to that in a moment.

First, let's take a look at what "woulda" happened if we had created a simulation that acted defensively in a way that a human player does, walking away from any shoe that showed a persistent bias far in excess of standard negative expectation for baccarat (about 1.35%).

We're not doing anything complicated here. We're simply saying that we will stop betting against any shoe in which house gets more than five bets ahead, starting from the first hand (meaning that a five-bet losing streak will only trigger a bail-out if we were even with the house or a little behind before it began).

What we see - no tricks, no lies, no bullshit - is an 85% drop in total action, offset by a proportionately smaller reduction in the total Player win which bumps the player advantage from +2.88% to +7.44%.

Now, I have no quarrel whatsoever with any reader who responds to all this with the complaint that he or she can't possibly afford a 1 to 5,000 spread and that progressive betting is therefore a waste of time.

I'm not here to offer anyone a cheap and easy, risk-free way to consistently win at casino games of chance (or sports betting or horse-race punting, come to that).

The reason for that is that there's no such thing, and anyone who claims otherwise is a liar and (if he's trying to sell you a low-risk betting strategy) a thief to boot.

I have been saying for years that anyone who can't afford to win shouldn't play at all - unless, of course, he or she agrees with the Buzz that losing is fun, fun, fun.

And my only motivation (since unlike the Buzzard of Bovada, I'm not selling anything here) is to demonstrate once and for all that negative expectation can be beaten with disciplined, consistent play...and a ton of money.

Here are the numbers for Buzz's six-deck data set:

Once again, we see that damage control - something the Buzzard and his fellow shills dismiss as an irrelevancy - really is a factor even in simulated game conditions.

I have always found it absolutely preposterous that strategy opponents rely on data sets that are nothing like real play to "prove" that the house advantage can't be beaten.

Regular readers will know that I routinely mock what I call the "inertia factor" - the idea that a real player betting in real time with real money would sit through losing streaks so far removed from negative expectation or any standard deviation that he would lose the farm (and the one next door) before being forced to quit.

So what about the Target rules?

Well, in recent months I have seen people claiming to be unbiased evaluators trying to demolish my strategy by deliberately changing the rules, then going online with elaborate data that strangely does not include an explanation of why the published algorithm was ignored.

I like to think I'm not paranoid, but at times I wonder about the motivation of anyone who would commit transparent fraud in order to prove a point.

Then again, I'm so obsessed with accuracy myself that perhaps I tend to forget how many crooks there are out there!

Let's revisit the simplest version of the Target rules, which are very little changed since 1997, except that they have been simplified and sharpened as much as you'd expect over a span of 15 years.

(I sometimes come under fire from people who say, 'See! You changed the rules! You're cheating!' and I wonder how they feel about evolution, or even the simple process of getting smarter as you get older!).

First, Target accepts the obvious, which is that over time, we're going to lose more often than we win. That's what negative expectation means: more losses than wins and therefore, if you bet flat or randomly, more money lost than won.

It then becomes necessary for us to ensure that whenever we win a bet, we win more money on average than we lose when we lose.

A simple Martingale illustrates the point: -1, -2, -4, +8, -1, -2, -4, -8, +16 gives us two wins averaging 12 units and seven losses averaging just over 7 units.

A Martingale is one effective way to apply progressive betting - or would be if casinos didn't routinely identify its use and interfere with it as much as possible.

Target is an uncomplicated approach to progressive betting that is not quite as blatant as a Martingale.

The first step is to respond to an opening loss in a new series or sequence of bets by increasing the bet value next time, hoping that the most common pattern for both sides in a game of chance - win, loss, win, loss - work in our favor.

I recommend that NB (next bet) should be as close as possible to PB (previous bet) x5, but let's dial that down to x2, then freeze the bet: -1, -2, -2, -2, -2, +2.

At the +2 above, we're -7 in the hole, and Target seeks to recover that loss plus at least one unit, first with an 8u bet and then, if that fails, a 16u bet: -1, -2, -2, -2, -2, +2, -8, +16.

In Target language, the +2 in the example is a "mid-series win" and that's always our signal to get aggressive, however cautious we may have chosen to be after losing the first bet.

(You'll find more info about how far you can go with Target rules variations on the Sethbets website).

Assuming a win at +16 above, we see six losing bets and two winners, which indicates a 50% house edge. Never mind, we won anyway, with wins averaging +8u and losses at just under -3u apiece.

(These are big files, sometimes hard to read in the blog platform, so I'll gladly sent more legible versions to anyone who e-mails me)

What we see above is an application of the simplest Target rules set, along with "skips" applied whenever we start to get into serious trouble.

This time, though, we're not skipping entire shoes: We're assuming Big Table play that permits us to sit out one or more rounds any time we choose, avoiding long losing streaks but getting back in the game in response to a mid-skip Player win.

And let me stress that these skips are entirely automated, tied to a consistent trigger (-2 rather than -5, because in essence we're switching rather than skipping) and not to bet values.

There's one sneaky little wrinkle in the summary above involving an aggressive response to ties.

I prefer blackjack to baccarat, and pushes or ties have always irritated me because they're such a waste of time (and I cringe whenever I hear another player or a dealer say 'A push is as good as a win,' which happens way too often).

So...I'll usually double my bet after a tie, and double it twice after a "money tie" (7, 8 or 9 in baccarat, 19 or above in blackjack).

It's not about math so much as doing what works.

Here's Buzz's 6-deck sample without tie boosts:

And here's how the same set looks x2 after any old tie and x4 after a money tie:

The most important thing to watch out for in all these summaries is the screaming red-and-white EXPECTED OUTCOME number to the right of overall Target's win value.

The house edge in this set was 1.68% and the Buzzard of Bovada will tell you that only by cheating could you achieve a positive outcome, or even a negative one that was slightly less than -1.68% of your total action.

But keep in mind that Buzz and his buddies are paid to lie to you, and they do it very well indeed.

Could you afford to bet the way Target did against this data set?

Probably not.

But after a few wins like this, occasional tail-spins and prolonged recoveries (courtesy of "standard deviation") become a diminishing threat.

The 8-deck Buzz set was tough sledding for Target - but the strategy came out ahead with an average bet that, at less than $2,000, was a tiny fraction of what many high rollers push into play with batting an eye.

Big difference: the high rollers lose. Not every time, but always in the long run. It's the arithmetic!

Note that the house edge for this sample was a rather suspicious 2.57%, or about double the accepted negative expectation for baccarat.

Here's how Target did bumping the bet after a tie:

No doubt Buzz will come flapping down out of his dead tree, squawking that I cheated, I cheated, I cheated.

Cheating didn't happen at my end, and won't ever happen.

And let's face it, as a shill for a crooked online casino, that's his job.

So, what about betting these Buzzard baccarat sets (1,000 shoes apiece!) with a spread far tighter than 1 to 5,000?

Here's the compelling data I promised earlier:

The screen shots here should pretty much explain themselves to the smart people who read this blog - but I'll risk offending you by pointing out that the average bet value, and therefore the average overall risk, is LESS at a 1 to 5,000 betting spread than it is at 1 to 500, and only fractionally more than at 1 to 100.

Mathematically, that makes perfect sense, because Target and most other variations on the proven concept of progressive betting push bet values high until recovery, then drop them way back to the minimum until another threat comes along.

At lower spreads, you hit the maximum - say $1,000 at 1 to 100 from a $10 minimum - and sit there forever, because you can NEVER recover your losses.

That's what the house wants you to do, because flat betting cannot do other than succumb to negative expectation in the long run, and that's a fact.

Too rich for your blood?

Well, as I have said here many times, I'm sorry about that.

You have to win more when you win than you lose when you lose in order to offset the fact that in the long run, you will always lose more often than you win.

And once again, I want to respectfully remind you that If you can't afford to win, perhaps you shouldn't play?

Just a friendly suggestion...

To put the whole question of deliberate casino-sponsored disinformation into context (and hopefully to counter claims that I'm paranoid!), I'd like to offer a little extra insight.  Just suppose that you're a casino operator or a bookmaker, and you know from experience that there are players who treat your bottom line like a personal cash machine, risking relatively small amounts, and walking away with profits day after day.  You know exactly how they do what they do, and you're basically powerless to stop them, preferring to eat the losses rather than to make a fuss and draw attention to a method that might spread like wildfire, bringing in punters with big money behind them who could do you even more serious harm. Your greatest enemy isn't the gambler, who's almost always a self-destructive, under-funded dreamer who gets ahead of the game just enough to keep him hooked, and always falls behind again.  Your nemesis is the bettor who is looking for a reliable alternative to conventional investments such as stocks and bonds or real estate.  He's not greedy, and in the wake of the latest worldwide recession, he's not risk-averse either.  He's patient, disciplined, well-heeled and always on top of the numbers, confident that short-term losses will inevitably turn around in time, and reward him with a profit that's puny by most gambling standards, but far exceeds anything on offer from any bank or stock market.  In fact, as a casino operator or a bookie, you're his bank.  And you're none too happy about the fact that his withdrawals far exceed his deposits, and the difference is coming out of your pocket.  So what do you do when someone goes public with detailed information about a betting strategy that you know has been costing you money pretty much every day that you've been in business?  Do you ignore the threat and hope it will simply go away?  Or do you go on the attack?  Think about it!     

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bovada (formerly Bodog, now with a new name that makes about as much sense as the old one!), spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this.
_

If you were to bet the farm on Apple's iPhone 5 and its game-changing Siri TV and iCar apps, would you be gambling, or investing your assets wisely?

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It's a fair question, because one of the complaints I hear most often is that by discussing the viability of progressive betting against long-term negative expectation, I am repeatedly encouraging smart people to do something very, very dumb.

The default argument is that in stocks and bonds, and to a lesser extent in forex and commodities, the big picture promises profit as a reward for patience and foresight, whereas in gambling, the only overall winners are the folks who run casinos and/or make book.

So let's single out the world's most profitable commercial enterprise and indulge in a little harmless but hopefully relevant conjecture.

Apple's shares hit an all-time high of $626.73 on April 9 this year on the strength of the release of the iPad upgrade and booming sales of the iPhone 4S, which treated eager buyers around the world to a buggy beta version of the company's still evolving voice-command technology.

Since the spike, the world's most sought-after shares (widely expected to top $900 in a year or so) have slipped back to $564.29, knocking a $22,000-plus dent in a cautious investment of $200,000.

No cause for alarm, you might say, and I think you'd be right.

After all, the iPhone 5 is just a few months away, and not far behind that will come the real Apple TV, which will turn your living room entertainment center into a warm and friendly companion almost as responsive as the "holodeck" controller in science fiction tales of yore.

"Show me live tennis," you'll say to the skinny 55-inch gizmo on the wall, and presto, you'll be watching grunting athletes whacking a little ball back and forth with intent to kill.

"Let's try that in 3D" might be your next request, and the picture will change faster than you can fumble for those infernal glasses that will continue to be your best 3D viewing option until Apple comes out with something cooler.

"Skip the commercials!" will prompt your intellygent (sorry about that) window on the world to instantly switch to another channel where the tennis you crave hasn't yet been interrupted.

When the sales pitches end on the other network, Siri will ask you politely if you want to switch back, or stay where you are until more commercials spoil your enjoyment of your favorite spectator sport.

Siri's on-the-road cousin will (so rumor has it) kick in-car entertainment up several notches, enabling drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road while vocally controlling everything from their phone and sound system to the heating and air conditioning and turn signals.

All this sounds great for Apple investors, and the odds are that April's $636 record high will soon be forgotten as the company's shares blast through new $100 markers -- $700, $800, $900 to infinity and beyooooond! -- like a rocket en route to Mars.

Beats gambling, right? I mean, nothing can stop the company that Steve Jobs turned from a floundering has-been into the most successful money-making machine since...well, since money was invented.

Maybe. Or maybe not.

I've been neglecting this blog and the Sethbets web site this past couple of months because I have been looking very closely at the wisdom of applying Target's progressive betting principles to horse-race betting.

And this comes after a three-year experiment that has resoundingly confirmed that Target applied to randomly selected pro sports bets is every bit as successful as stock market gambling, and given recent history, probably not as hazardous.

(I have been writing for years about Target and casino table games, so I will skip over that this time).

I have been an uneducated devotee of racing for as long as I can remember, but until recently assumed that there are far too many contenders in any race to make its outcome predictable within parameters that would make any betting strategy viable.

Also, I could not overlook the fact that punters far smarter than I am have been trying to beat the Sport of Kings for at least 350 years.

If anyone has come up with a solution, he or she has kept awfully quiet about it judging from the truckloads of torn-up betting slips that litter every track in the world after the last race.

And then again, 999 out of a thousand "experts" believe the casino-sponsored saw that any amount bet against a negative expectation must have a negative result in spite of how easy it is to prove otherwise.

Here's where I'm at against what seems to me to be a fair and accurate simulation of 6-deck baccarat.  I won't disclose how many hours I have devoted to this game, or speculate on how much better my time would have been spent if instead I'd read Socrates on the can.  But I will admit that the win to date averages out at about $10,000 an hour!  Doesn't prove anything, but it does suggest that an overall house edge of more than 1.25% doesn't always translate into a player loss.  The trick is to win more when you win than you lose when you lose, and the only way to do that consistently is to bet progressively. My win to date is a tiny fraction of the $106,000,000 that tops the leader board for this iPhone game, and I have no idea how the front-runner achieved that.  I do know I'm not going to try to beat him or her (my right thumb won't be able to stand much more of this!).

Long, long ago in a land far away, I spent an afternoon with a high-placed racing expert whose most memorable tip was "bet the second favorite to place" and in the years since, I have had modest success with that unexciting rule of thumb.

It's a dull, safe approach that doesn't fit in with the average punter's dream of picking a long-shot winner and going home with at least ten times the amount of dosh he took to the races.

And that's really the problem with gambling, isn't it?

Gamblers are not interested in modest gains: Their adrenalin can only get a bleep-or-bust rush from taking big risks in pursuit of even bigger rewards.

Very few of them would consider a $1,000 gain on a $10,000 bankroll to be an adequate return after a half dozen hours in a casino. But the same punters would be downright delirious if they bought ten grand's worth of stock after the opening bell and saw it appreciate 10% by the close of business that day.

Some people are just funny about money, I guess.

My latest foray into horse-race betting was prompted by a flurry of e-mails from the U.S., the U.K. and Australia from readers who bombarded me with stats such as the 33% win rate for favorites and the fact that all over the world, more than 80% of races are won by "Top 5" horses.

That means that in fields of six to 15, the winner is almost certain to be ranked among the five lowest starting prices (although anyone who hopes to find a winner among 15 sets of thundering hooves had better know how to handle disappointment!).

My Target Sports transparent trial, in which each day's picks are posted ahead of game times and the results are put up next day at the latest, has been wobbling back and forth lately, largely because of my neglect.

But in spite of a slowdown in the action since I got bitten anew by the horse-racing bug, we have seen an initial $25,000 investment grow to more than $175,000.

Along the way, after about a year of play, the bankroll plummeted by more than $100,000 before statistical expectation prevailed the way it always does, and the chart line resumed its standard, steady upward climb.

The irony is that the slump came soon after I decided that perhaps very large bets on randomly-selected long-shots were not a good idea, and started pairing each day's fattest wagers with picks at the shortest odds.

It was a very bad idea, proving perhaps that whenever a bettor has to make decisions, he's more likely to get into trouble (which is why constantly hopping from Banker to Player at baccarat, from red to black at roulette or whatever will almost always help you lose more money, faster, the way the house intended).

Second-guessing my random sports picks was a dumb move, so when I began looking into horse-race betting the Target Way, I resolved to stick strictly with the numbers.

Principal among those numbers is the reality of the "over-round book" which ensures even someone crazy enough to back every runner in a race will be out of pocket when it's all over.

The first logistical challenge I faced was that while race results are readily available all over the internet, they don't come in a format that I could easily use.

Target has relied on spreadsheets since I started using SuperCalc on a pathetically underpowered computer (the best I could afford at the time!) more than 30 years ago, and I was not about to give up the best analysis tool I know.

So, I dug out results for Santa Anita, Calif. and Aqueduct in New York from the start of the 2012 meetings at both tracks, and began keying in the data and developing a format that would enable me to get answers to my countless questions without having to keep going back to the source.

It was time-consuming and frustrating, but with three months of detailed results now available to me, I'm starting to see at least a theoretical reward for all that effort.

Along the way, one of my Australian correspondents sent me results from more that 3,300 races down under between August and November last year. Mercifully, they came in a spreadsheet!

One of the first things I wanted to look at was a concept known as dutching, which usually excludes the favorite in any race and groups three or more promising contenders together in such a way that if one of them wins, the bets on the losers will be covered, plus a decent profit.

I found a useful calculator online and learned that the ideal "dutched" bet (I still don't know where the term comes from, except that it's not Holland) offers a prospect of winning that's just above 50%.

One Australian punter who helped with my racing lessons proposed a method that bets the favorite to WIN and dutches the second and third favorites, avoiding races in which the starting price on the fave is less than, say, 2-1.

I created conditionals to test that idea, but quickly found myself drawn to the more compelling notion of mimicking the Target Sports approach and setting up five separate lines backing favorites 1 through 5 to win.

I didn't much like the idea of constantly betting against myself, but concluded that the Target progressive algorithm I had developed for up to 20 simultaneous sports bets a day would be able to even out the bumps and give me a reasonable shot at a long-term profit.

I also set up models to bet just the favorite at Santa Anita from December 26 through April 22 and, separately, Aqueduct from January 1 through April 29.

It quickly became obvious that however juicy a 33% favorites win rate might sound, there are an awful lot of long and expensive gaps between hits. And a lot of the time, the odds offered on favorites (I found one at 0.05-1!) are so short that bets directly linked to the SP (starting price) are totally unrealistic.

Given a win target of $1,000 your bet at 0.05-1 would need to be $20,000 and that's insane!  No one in real life would bet that way, but because I started out accepting all odds, I had no choice.

The solution to too-short odds and prolonged droughts was a combination of filters or screens that suspended bets after a given number of consecutive losses, and also skipped wagers on favorites at an SP below a predetermined value.

I won't detail my methodology here, but I will offer some bottom lines that I find very encouraging.

I should also say at the outset that this remains a work in progress: I chose to model bets on the favorite to win, along with the 5-line all wins concept on faves 1 through 5, and I don't doubt that better approaches will suggest themselves as time goes by.

What matters right now is that both methods are ahead of the bookies after thousands of races and more bets than the average punter makes in a year (or they would be if I had been venturing real money).

Betting just favorites at Santa Anita, $100,000 invested on the day after Christmas last year to fund bets starting at $100 would have grown to $129,886 by April 22, with an unrecovered target of $19,110 rolling over to opening day at Hollywood Park (more about that another day). The win amounted to 12.34% of total action from 301 bets, and represented a 66% return on actual exposure of about $45,000.

At Aqueduct, the same methodology would have required far greater exposure ($144,823!) but would by now have delivered a win of $133,320 equal to 16.5% of total action on 255 qualifying bets. The end-of-meeting rollover was a little more than $18,000.

Against the 3,318 Australian races I mentioned earlier, exposure would have been almost $87,000 at one point, but the overall win would have been $145,900 or 14.26% of action on a total of 2,469 qualifying wagers. Rollover was a piddly $155.

Of course these are all numbers that far exceed the average weekend punter's bankroll. But that's hardly a big surprise. I have been saying for years what anyone who gambles must eventually learn: It takes money to make money.

Bummer...

The question is, I guess, does applying an odds minimum and skipping bets after a certain number of losses upset the whole idea of random selection?

I would say not, since we remain uninterested in a horse's past form, its pedigree and its jockey, as well as which way the wind's blowing and whether the going is good or bloody awful.

Numbers for the five-line theoretical trials against the same results (from Santa Anita and Aqueduct, that is, because the Oz data seems to me to be too good to be true), are as follows:

Santa Anita exposure $37,155 for final win of $23,050 (7.33% of total action of $314,570 from 1,145 bets), 62% return on risk.

Aqueduct demanded an exposure of $131,620 and delivered a win to date of $32,776 (5.8% of action of $565,100 from 1,547 bets), 25% return on risk.

None of the above proves a damn thing. As I always say, the data show what's possible, not necessarily what's probable.

I ditched the Australian data for a full five-line test because the odds on all horses across the board were 40% higher than their USA equivalents, and that makes me a little nervous.

And as I understand it, punters have it really tough down under (no bets higher than $250, accounts closed by bookies if a customer "wins too much") in spite of those seemingly more generous odds.

A preliminary run-through of the Oz data showed a 5-line win of more than $400,000 on 3,617 qualifying bets averaging $84 apiece, and that just isn't credible to me.

In every one of these model iterations, the potential draw-down has been high, and in one case it went well into six figures before straightening up and flying right.

Aha!  Say those who look down their noses at gambling while shoveling their life savings into the stock market: You could lose your entire bankroll in a day or two at the races (or the sports book or the casino) but no one ever holds onto a dwindling stock long enough to lose every penny they put into it.

I guess that since the people I know who lost millions on Wall Street in the past half decade still have millions left, there's a grain of truth in that.

But plenty of victims of the latest Great Recession saw their retirement portfolio cut in half or worse, and they have no reason to hope that they will recover all their losses any time soon.

In contrast, stats demonstrate that as with Target Sports since the summer of 2010, randomly-selected underdog picks will win a profitable percentage of their games over time, and in horse racing, favorites will slip out of dominance only temporarily.

In other words, as long as you have a big bankroll behind you and the confidence to stick with the strategy, recovery in sports betting is absolutely inevitable.

In the world of high finance and on Wall Street in particular, nothing is inevitable other than the certainty that while investors may fall through thin ice in a bear cycle, the fat cats who preside over the markets will stay warm and dry...and keep on getting fatter.

So what does all this have to do with Apple?

Merely that if things go bad in Cupertino, as some bearish prognosticators say they might, the $900 price predicted for sometime next year could evaporate with the morning dew.

Let's face it, Apple has a lot of competition that's gaining ground all the time, and any day now, one of the Chinese companies building its magical products could go rogue and start ripping off its precious patents left and right.

Google and Apple have some very big guns trained on one another, and although Apple's $300m CEO Tim Cook seems reassuringly less paranoid and aggressive than his mentor, all-out war between the two companies sometimes seems inevitable.

If it happens, share values of the two giants of the digital age could head south like ducks in winter.

And then there's Samsung, looming over both of them and hell bent on increasing its share of the smart phone, smart TV and smarter still computer markets.

What was Apple thinking of when it shipped its secrets overseas to countries that don't give a toss about patents and property rights?

Greed was behind it, obviously.

And in the long run, greed works no better in business than it does in gambling, or any other field of human endeavor.

My point is that with greed kept in check, betting on sports or horses can be at least as reliably profitable as taking long-term positions in the stock market.

In either case, jumping out of the fray because of a short-term burn then jumping back in with lessons unlearned is almost always disastrous.

Casinos and bookies count on us to be underfunded and unprepared, and Wall Street and its acolytes encourage us to keep sloshing our money around, because our indecision and lack of commitment guarantees more profit for them.

A sample from iDutch.co.uk, the best of many dutching calculators offered on the Net.  I haven't yet given dutching a fair shake in my models, but I plan to.  I do know that the Ubetido method (bet the favorite to win, and dutch the second and third favorites to win as a hedge) was an expensive failure, at least during three months apiece at Santa Anita and Aqueduct, betting eight to nine races a day.  I didn't apply any restrictions or limit bets in any way, and I don't think that's entirely fair (I believe Ubetido spurns favorites at less than 2-1, for example, skipping as many as three in every four races).

Numbers for most of the 2012 meeting at Aqueduct NY (more data to come).  This was where betting favorites progressively almost fell on its face, and I admit I don't have a $150,000 bankroll I'm willing to put at risk.  But what's interesting is that the strategy did manage to recover its losses.  Lose a hundred and fifty grand on Wall Street, and it could take you months to recover -- years the way things have been going lately.  Target 1F was out of the red in two or three days.

Target Sports as it stands today - patiently waiting for that last big turnaround...  The slump last summer was entirely my fault.  After proposing that random selection was a far more effective way to win steadily than relying on intuition or expertise, I out-smarted myself by guessing that the day's biggest bets would stand a better chance if I paired them with picks at the shortest odds.  Wrong!  As in any game, human decisions are prone to human error.  So now I'm back to making no decisions, other than limiting my bets to picks priced between +100 (even money) and +140 (1.4-1).  We're wobbling right now, but I'm willing to keep on betting that eventual turnaround is as inevitable as tomorrow's sunrise.  Even if it doesn't happen until the day after tomorrow (turnaround, that is!).

Target did pretty well at Santa Anita this year, using the Aqueduct betting algorithm.  The game continues at Hollywood Park, the L.A. County track that always takes over when gorgeous Santa Anita goes dark.  Watch this space: the rollover will be speedily recovered, and then the ride will continue, I guarantee.  I was going to call it a roller-coaster ride, but that's not accurate, since we always end up higher than where we started!

The same rules set did nicely down under, except that Oz odds are just too good to be true.  I'm nervous about the fact that overall odds were at least 40% higher than the numbers seen in the USA.  I'm also told that Australian bookies offer fixed odds, which as far as I know are not available here.  I haven't posted the 5-line results based on the down under data because, again, the news was just too darn good, especially when a hedge against last-minute shortening of the odds (between ticket in hand and the off, in other words) was factored in.  The draw-down was far less than the one you see above, but I feel I can't trust data that I don't fully understand.

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._