"High rollers who can afford $25,000 bets would never be willing to lower their standards (and mix with the riff-raff) by placing minimum bets."

_
(Updated 11:00am Monday, March 26)

The above summarizes an interesting—but in my view wholly specious!—argument that comes up periodically, most recently in an otherwise positive comment on another blog.

The other day, I was sent a link to a system-debunking blog run by a guy who calls himself "Imspirit (wishing I were just)" aka just plain Dave.

I have written here before about Dave's mystifying dismissal of Target without accurately applying the strategy's carefully calibrated rules, so there's no need for me to go there again.

The link was to a comment submitted by an apparent Target devotee, and since it's already been published online, it seems fair enough to reproduce it here:

Great site.
First of all, we appreciate your great effort and time to manage this wonderful gaming forum. I've been reading your site for more than a year now in addition to other insightful sites such as Bethsets (sic!) and the popular BTC.
From the outside looking in, and with all the remarkable constructive disagreement between you and Seth, I see two people who are highly intelligent trying to make sense (of) how to beat the game of Baccarat.
I wish we had Internet 30 years ago so people like me would have benefited from the information generated (by) your site and others.
Over the years, I'm one of the losers who won't (ever) be able to recoup (all my) losses nor do I intend to. I'm not as hard core as I was and (am now) just focusing on my business.
Unfortunate or not, the "Barney Lincoln" in me never wanes so (a) trip to the Casino is always in order two weekends every month.
The difference for the last ten months (is remarkable), because rather than losing every time, I (have) never lost a trip.
For what it's worth, the difference is the mind set, there is a game plan and the set bankroll.
This success rate happened after I used Target betting in combination with the "pattern placement betting" similar to the concept of NOR (although I haven't seen the NOR manual yet).
It's something Personally, I give credit to the Target, as volatile as it can be, because it gives one a formula to (use in) battle, and a fighting chance.
The difference is that I don't attack the shoe right off the bat like it intends to (he plays "Player" always). Meaning, I can avoid an unnecessary hole in the beginning which may take me a while to see some daylight, thereby saving (recovery) time.
The NOR bet placement is an added power due to it's optimum selection.The bet spread of 1-5000 is understandably way out of whack for most people.
High rollers wouldn't fall for $25 unit with their $125,000 bankroll, most players just don't have that much. So far (knock on wood), the 1st turnaround bet is clipping at 75% rate so I have used a small fraction of the bankroll.
If I run into nine straight "shoes from hell", that would wipe the whole bankroll and (I would deservedly) retire and do something else for entertainment.
I don't know Seth, and with all the negative accusations by extremely combative individuals, I feel the sincerity from him trying to enlighten people.
It used to be that it's almost a given that I will shell a few thousand here and there during(any) trip. Now, I was able to reverse it, and I expect to win every trip.I'm not breaking the bank by any means, but by saving losses and conversely going home with winnings is tantamount to a healthy psyche.
This is by no means an endorsement of these combined concept(s) nor do I intend to do it professionally.
The fact that the wife is happy after the trip is more than enough for me. I'd like to acknowledge Ellis, not so much of his system (of which I really don't have any knowledge), but his encouragement to all people who play the game of chance to try to be healthy with proper nutrition and exercise and alcohol while playing. I think it's the best advice for everyone.
Thanks for sharing your forum and I can't say enough about your objectivity and sense of fairness without any agenda whatsoever. Regards, M.Lee.

I hope that if he sees this, Mr. Lee will forgive me for an occasional edit and addition: His message needed a little clarification in parts, I felt.

As you can see, I have highlighted the sections of this well-meaning comment that I find most interesting, and underlined the statement with which I take greatest issue (aside from the praise for Dave's accuracy and lack of an agenda!).

I cannot say often enough that a wide betting spread is the one and only key to long-term defeat of casino games with a negative expectation—and high rollers are the players least likely to follow that advice because most of them couldn't care less whether they win or not.

Watch any high-stakes game and you will see bet ranges that match the puny 1-5 or 1-10 spreads applied by players with shoestring budgets.

The only difference is the number of zeroes on the chips, plus (perhaps) the fact that it is likely to take a whale a while longer to accept that he's sunk and can never recover.

Casinos court high rollers precisely because it is against players at the top and bottom ends of the spectrum that the house edge does the most damage, but the "top end" punters lose the most the fastest.

A high roller who wants to lose could do nothing better for the house than turn his nose up at bets below $25,000 and draw the line at wagers higher than, say, $250,000.

Years ago, I knew a guy who always bet the house limit on three hands of blackjack, taking over whichever table he selected and providing great entertainment for crowds of onlookers who thought he was nuts but rooted for him to win.

Standard deviation (the bane of all gamblers' lives) saw to it that at times, his sessions ended with spectacular wins, and he made dealers very happy with lavish tips and effusive gratitude.

The casino, for its part, piled on gifts and comps, all of which made him feel enormously appreciated, and every one of which he paid for ten times over.

Last time I saw him, he was leaving town after his excesses had drained his business of its not inconsequential profits—he was a middle-market art dealer—swallowed the proceeds of a second mortgage, and led his family to the brink of bankruptcy.

He has since served as a constant reminder to me and others who knew him that the moment you hit your maximum bet in a downturn, the odds are very much against a recovery.

The only antidote to that inconvenient reality is to make the gap between your lowest bet and your highest bet as wide as you can afford, and to consistently revert to a minimum bet (however demeaning it might seem in the eyes of those who don't know better!) after every recovery.

High rollers who sneer at "piddling" bets may get a bigger buzz from risking huge amounts, but their chances of coming out ahead in the long run are on the negative side of zero. That is a mathematical certainty.

Far better—the only way to win consistently, in fact—is a betting strategy that permits big bets whenever the bankroll is threatened, but one that grinds out profits in relatively small amounts for 99% of the time.

Since the entire range of bets cannot be placed at the same table, or the same game, or even at times, the same casino, progressive betting the Target way can be hard work, requiring endless repetition and a lot of meticulous record-keeping.

The very idea is anathema to most gamblers, because most gamblers hope (but rarely expect!) to win big money at very little risk, and to do it with minimal effort.

But whenever I describe Target, I am not doing it for the benefit of the average gambler.

Let's face it, the average gambler is a loser, and perfectly content to be that way, so long he can get a little bit ahead once in a while, to feed his hopeless dream that he will one day be a winner.

The Baccarat Plus iPhone app that I have featured here before starts you off with a $1,000 bankroll and allows bets from $5 to $100,000.


The win total shown above may be chump change to a high roller who looks at it as the proceeds of three consecutive $100,000 wins—big deal!—but I defy anyone to get $300,000 ahead against the iPhone app without using a disciplined variation of progressive betting.

Mr. Lee, whose message to Imspirit inspired this entry, will have learned that Target produces steady, reliable profits in the long run and can go a very long time between very large bets (the ones I sometimes refer to as brown trouser moments).

My critics scoff at those large bets, dismissing them as insane or unrealistic.

But the fact is that unless you are willing to defend your bankroll with whatever it takes to ride out a temporary downturn, there is only one consequence: losing.

In baccarat, unless you bet Banker all the way, it is certain that in the long run you will lose more bets than you win.

(And if you DO bet Banker all the way, you will quickly learn that the "5%" commission on successful bets will wipe out any advantage you may have gained from winning more bets than you lost!)

It is therefore essential to long-term success that you win more money when you win than you lose when you lose.

That can only be achieved if you ensure that more than half of all your bets are what I term recovery bets, meaning quite simply that their value exceeds that of all prior losses in the current series or sequence of bets.

With Target, about 75% of your bets will be recovery bets.

That's why the strategy works.

A Martingale requires that 100% of your losing bets must be recovery bets.

And that's why an unrestrained Martingale doesn't work: Eventually, you will have to place a recovery bet that no casino anywhere will allow.

(Analysis of the Martingale concept must in fairness include an evaluation of the capped Martingale, but that's been dealt with in previous posts to this blog!).

If, unlike Dave Imspirit, Mr. Lee is applying the Target rules strictly and accurately, he will have gained huge confidence from the fact that its discipline removes a great part of the uncertainty and hesitancy that plagues most gamblers.

It relieves the player of almost all decision-making. And if you don't have to make a decision, your chances of being wrong diminish considerably.

Mr. Lee spoils his endorsement of Target, as I see it, by referring to one of those "predictive" methods that both common sense and experience tell me must be absolute nonsense.

I don't dispute for a moment that there are trends and patterns in baccarat, just as there in any betting game.

But the notion that they can be identified other than after the fact is dangerous balderdash.

The popular trend-following method that comes closest to what Mr. Lee is talking about is avant derniere, which is applied in baccarat and roulette to profit from hops or chops (B-P-B-P-B-P) as well as from prolonged repeats of either of two options.

The idea is that you follow the win before last, so that P-B-P-P would call for a bet on Player, and P-B-B-P would indicate a Banker bet.

Exhaustive tests of avant derniere against millions of outcomes shows that in the long run, it is no more effective than random bet selection, so the same would certainly apply to so-called "predictive" or "trending" methods.

Target is not in any sense predictive: It is purely and simply reactive.

It tells you what to do after something has happened, in other words.

As for betting Player all the time in baccarat, regular readers of this blog will know my take on that!

Betting Player or Banker in baccarat or Red or Black or Odd or Even in roulette is like a two-hole game of Whack-a-mole.

The mole you have to whack to win can pop up in either hole at any time, and if you concentrate all your efforts on just one of those two holes, your reaction time and your accuracy will be much improved.

By switching your focus back and forth, you make success so much more elusive, running the risk of zigging when the "mole" zags and vice versa.

It also happens to be exactly what the house wants you to do.

As for the baccarat screen snap above, it is true to say that the win it shows "could have" been achieved by putting in a mind-numbing hundred hours or more in pursuit of a nine-bet run on Player that would take the $1,000 opening BR to $256,000.

I'm just guessing at the 100 hours, and I can confirm that I have indeed seen runs on Player or Banker that have lasted for 8, 9 and perhaps even 10 consecutive wins.

However, I defy anyone to play the Baccarat Pro iPhone app and parlay an opening $1,000 bet into a win of $300,000 or more!

The leader board data that comes with this nifty little game includes a win of more than $100,000,000—a staggering achievement that inspires a mix of envy and skepticism.

If that huge sum (and others in the same ballpark) was achieved honestly, I would love to know how, I admit.

Since the game will not permit a bet above $100,000 it follows that a $100 million win represents a minimum of 1,000 more wins than losses over time.

Hard to see how that could happen, since Player is mathematically proven to be at about a 1.35% disadvantage, and Banker's slight edge is blown away by the "Bank Tax."

It boggles the mind, and makes some manipulation of the app's software the more probable explanation.

Meanwhile, as someone who struggles to manipulate a toaster, never mind program code on a platform that does not permit edits or additions, I am content to wait for a reader out there to match or beat my win total against Baccarat Pro and then tell me how he or she did it!

As for the criticism that Target has no appeal for high rollers, I can only remind Mr. Lee that Target's great strength is that it tells you when to be a high roller, and when to play shoulder-to-shoulder with the little people.

Betting big all the time is as doomed as betting small all the time...it's just a lot more expensive.

And just like greed, delusions of grandeur can make a loser out of anyone, regardless of the size of his or her bankroll.

Update, Monday, March 26: I just passed a win of $360,000 playing thumbnail baccarat in a place I need not mention, and I realized that since my own max is $25,000 and I am beating an overall house edge of 1.50%, my comment above about the leaderboard win of $106,000,000 is a load of old cobblers!

Sorry about that.

My current mini-mini baccarat BR is the equivalent of almost 15 maximum bets, but that certainly does not translate into 15 more wins than losses (far from it: I'm about 200 bets behind at this point).

The only rational explanation for the $106 million win that I can come up with is that the player used a capped Martingale, with a limit of $100,000, plus profound confidence in the notion that any house spike is temporary and will eventually be offset or compensated for.

It's a dangerous game, but perhaps more likely than the alternative explanation that the big winner hacked into the app and awarded himself huge profits without having to spend time actually playing the game.

Who knows?

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._

Casinos and bookies don't have a divine right to kick your ass, and if you can use 'The Math' against them, it really is possible to win consistently.

_
Updated 10:30am Sunday, March 4:

From the Picture = 1,000 Words Department:











Any summary of past results can be dismissed by pedants as "anecdotal" -- and since I can't show you future outcomes or guarantee that betting smart will make you a long-term winner, gambling's doom-sayers will always insist on their right to predict the worst.

The top snap above shows that although Target Sports is in a slump right now (the 12th since July 24, 2010) it has consistently beaten the bookies' edge and delivered a hefty return on the initial buy-in.

The screen shots from iPhone/iPod gambling simulations can be dismissed as irrelevant, but I defy anyone to get results like these without progressive betting.

The apps could have been hacked and fiddled with, I suppose, but who the hell would bother?

It's much easier to simply apply the Target rules and watch those winning numbers grow!

The bottom line is that the moment any player reaches his or her maximum bet in a losing streak, it's game over.

And casinos and bookies everywhere do all they can to ensure that each player's maximum represents as high a percentage of his total resources as possible.

So if your cap -- whether it's self-imposed or the result of casino or book bet limits -- is, say, 10% of your total available bankroll, your chances of a long-term win are somewhere between piss-poor and hopeless.

I have been saying over and over again since the long-gone days of typewriters and biplanes that spread, spread and spread is (are?) the key to winning at gambling, and the summaries above are just a tiny part of the proof.

The ideal customer for casinos the world over is a guy who knows as little as possible about the odds he faces, and tackles a table game with $500 or less that he fully expects to lose.

He'll start out with a $5 bet, and whatever happens, won't spread wider than 1-5, making his maximum bet $25.

My little baccarat app tells the story very well:

Banker (a proposition I avoid because of the "5.0%" commission) won 4,047 bets; given an average overall bet value of $389, that means $1,495,000 net of commission; Banker LOST 3,944 bets at $389, or a total loss of $1,534,000; add the wins and the losses and you get a big red number...an overall loss of $34,000 in spite of more winning bets than losing ones.

I bet Player all the way and came out ahead $117,000 on total action of $3,430,000 -- not a huge win percentage or "hold" at 3.41% but a hell of a lot better than Banker's loss of 1.0% or so!

How was it done?

Not by cheating, I promise you.

The only way you can beat negative expectation in the long run is to bet in such a way that you consistently win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

Regular visitors to this page will have heard that before. Again and again.

But it's always worth repeating...

I learned just recently that Australian casinos probably have the tightest table limits anywhere in the world, presumably imposed by misguided regulators who felt they were saving gamblers from their irresponsible selves.

Those regulators apparently didn't do the math.

If they had, they would have figured out that tight spreads work entirely in the house's favor.

That's the reason Kerry Packer, the late, lamented Australian "whale" beloved by Las Vegas, came to Nevada to gamble -- his wild and crazy ways weren't permitted in casinos down under, including the ones he owned.

Mr. Packer was a legendary loser in spite of the long string of zeroes in his bets (6 x $250,000 at blackjack, for example) because he wagered a very tight spread and was totally at the mercy of the house edge.

He won sometimes, for sure, and those wins were widely publicized in the Las Vegas newspapers. His even bigger losses were never talked about because that's just, well...rude.

Let's go back to my $25 max punter with $500 in his pocket, and surmise that he doesn't hit his personal cap until he's $125 in the hole and starting to feel desparate.

He's now five bets behind with enough chips to cover 15 more bets at his max.

He doesn't play blackjack very well, so he's facing a house edge of at least 2.0%, making his chances of catching up and getting just a little ahead worse than lousy.

If he cuts back his bets while waiting for a winning streak, he'll probably never make any headway. But if he keeps on betting his personal max, he will probably lose everything.

Once upon a time in Nevada, the good news for losers was that at least the rooms and the all-you-can eat buffets were cheap.

Not so these days.

There's no good news for the punter with a tight spread and a limited bankroll.

He might get lucky for a while, but that won't last.

It all comes down to another cliche: If you can't afford to win, you really shouldn't gamble.

What I find most curious about high rollers -- the only people with the resources to consistently beat the house -- is that most of them are not much interested in winning.

For them, gambling is about the excitement of extreme risk and the thrill of instant gain, but because losing (as they all do in the end) doesn't hurt them one bit, you'd think bungee-jumping would be a better choice!

They have too much money for even an eight-figure loss at the tables to do permanent damage, whereas a rich man can go splat against the hard ground with the same effect as a pauper. He'll just get a fancier funeral.

Betting a very wide spread per the Target rules is not something the late Kerry Packer would have been interested in, for example, because it would have required the world's most famous whale to bet like a minnow much of the time.

And Mr. Packer was much more about image, in gambling and his business, than he was about substance.

Of the two iPhone game simulations illustrated above, Baccarat Pro has the most to tell us because it permits bets from $5 to $100,000 -- a 1 to 20,000 spread which is even wider than the 1 to 5,000 recommended for Target and matches the highest max available in the USA without special dispensation.

You can be sure of this: No casino that has seen a player betting $5 a hand would ever permit the same gambler to wager a hundred grand all at once.

He would have blown his cover as a progressive bettor, and casinos know as well as you and I do that progressive betting is the only way to beat the house edge long-term.

I have not had to bet $100,000 against Baccarat Pro to maintain my victory over negative expectation, but I will admit to an occasional $20,000 brown-trouser moment.

Does it make sense to risk $20,000 to protect a $125,000 bankroll?

It does when you consider the alternative.

By the time you're forced to place a monster bet per the Target rules, you must already be in a deep, deep hole.

So if you choose not to fight to get back on top (keeping in mind that by now the house edge must be unsustainably ahead of negative expectation), you will have no choice but to make the loss permanent.

Big bets are rare. They are also ultimately unavoidable -- and also essential to long-term reversal of the house advantage in any game of chance.

What you cannot do is expect to bet the whole Target range in the same casino against the same game.

The only practical option is to be constantly ready for a sudden reversal, and to respond to it with coolness and absolute discipline.

I long ago lost count of the number of times critics have responded to Target with comments like "no one who's just won a $25,000 bet would want to drop back to a $5 table" or "betting that way would drive any gambler crazy."

If that's true, then there is only one conclusion: No one out there really wants to win.

The Target Sports experiment is in a scary place right now, for example.

Yesterday's potential turnaround bet went in the toilet, requiring a $25,000 wager today to defend a bankroll that in the past week or so has been slashed from a high of $195,000 to a still healthy but much smaller $168,000.

Should I eat the $27,000 loss and start building the BR again, or should I press on with a winner-take-all mentality?

The way I see it, the 19-month sports betting trial would have flopped more than a year ago without a few maximum bets along the way, and I'm in this thing for the long haul.

The sports version of the Target rules sets a cap on how many maximum losses I will suffer in any one negative run, but it requires me to put $25,000 in play whenever the trigger demands it.

We have now had 12 major slumps in 19 months, and obviously, none of the first 11 proved fatal.

Only time will tell whether I should have acted like Kerry Packer and sucked up the loss, or if the right move was to press on with fingers and toes crossed.

Watch this space!

Meanwhile...a baccarat update:



A math pedant will be absolutely unequivocal in his evaluation of the baccarat stats above.

He (or she, although I have yet to come across a female mythematician) will multiply 9,463 bets by the average bet value of $390.29 to get total action, draw a line under the bit that says there were 1.3% more losses than wins, and predict an overall loss of -1.3% x $3,683,314 = -$48,013.

A win of $140,000 (+3.8% vs. a 1.30% house edge) is simply not believable, you will be told.

Oh well...

You can see from the average bet value that I'm not betting $5 all the time -- or $25,000 either.

What I am doing is backing Player only, and very strictly applying the rules of Target whenever my BR is threatened.

I don't bet the Tie in baccarat, not ever, not nohow, but I do react to a tie by doubling the bet after any tie, and doubling it twice after a "money tie" (meaning that a potential winning hand worth 7, 8 or 9 was thwarted).

There's no mathematical reason for this, no expectation that a Player win is more likely after a tie (it certainly isn't!) but just a firm intent to wring maximum profits out of the process.

As for the failure of pedantry to correctly predict the final outcome of the session, I should concede that had I been betting randomly the way 999 out of 1,000 gamblers do (even those who don't realize it) the end result might very well have penciled out at -1.3% of the total action.

That did not happen because Target is designed to recover losses in fewer bets than it took to get into the red, and to keep doing that over and over again.

If, on average, you can recoup in two bets the chips that were lost in three bets, the house advantage (more bets lost than won, on the player's side) becomes an irrelevance.

A win of $140,000 against 9,500 rounds of baccarat comes out at better than $1,000 a shoe given that a little over 80 cards are dealt per shoe and the Baccarat Pro stats above therefore represent about 120 shoes.

Not a high-roller performance, perhaps, but definitely better than a long-term loss.

Earlier, I meant to add an illustration of the importance of a very wide spread:


The above short summary serves as a reminder that tight spreads simply can't win.

It's from about 6,000 rounds played against Bovada's online baccarat practice game, and the middle column indicates action, meaning the combined value of all bets.

Note that the widest (and winning-est) spread required less overall action and therefore less overall risk than all the other spreads tested other than 1-10.

And 1-10 was a sad and hopeless loser.

I'll say it again: Spread as wide as you can afford, or be ready to lose.

It's the arithmetic.

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._

January 2012 is yet another "green" month for Target Sports, and to date we've turned $5,000 into $185,000. Beat that, Wall Street!

_


Please see note at bottom!

January is shaping up to be another profitable month for Target Sports (it's just a matter of whether or not the win for the first month of 2012 is over or under $6,000!).

We had a bump or two along the way, but the pattern of wins and losses has settled down into a relative walk in the park since I gave up on trying to match each day's big bets with the shortest odds available.

Month after month, the message from the numbers is that random selection rules!

Every time I try to out-think the process, I get into trouble, so from now on I'm sticking with letting the dogs lie where they may.

For a while I ditched +100 as the lowest acceptable qualifying marker (aka even money) and bumped the floor up to +105, based on my discovery that even-money bets had cost us more than $40,000 since this transparent pretty much daily trial began more than 18 months ago.

Then I looked a little closer, and realized that the damage was done while I was listening to dissenting voices and straying from the original random concept.

All this began almost three - or is it four? - years ago when a globe-trotting gambler whom I refer to from time to time as "Peter Punter" began blasting me with e-mails suggesting that sports betting was a far better milieu for Target than casino table games.

His reasoning was that handicappers (known as cappers) all over the Internet are claiming win rates of 65% to 85% vs. a theoretical win rate of just over 49% for anyone betting money at blackjack or baccarat.

The fatal flaw in his reasoning was, of course, odds.

Cappers can claim those seemingly impressive win rates because most of the time they play it very, very safe and tout favorites.

And if your (say) 75% WR consisted of picks averaging odds of -200 (1/2 in the odds system I was brought up with), what looks good in a boastful headline on the web site is less than stellar down on the bottom line.

My initial advice to Pete was that he ignore cappers altogether and focus solely on underdogs, selecting them randomly and applying some modification of the Target rules to detemine daily bet values.

He ignored me, and over a period of a few weeks, lost his shirt.

The first open trial I set up (selections posted and e-mailed well in advance of game times) picked just seven dogs a day, and limited the bet spread from 1 to 100 ($5 to $500).

I accepted propositions at pretty much any odds, reasoning that although bets at +150 and higher (that's 2-3 in English) would win less often, their high paybacks would make up for their relative scarcity.

Wrong!

The one good thing (and it was a very good thing) that came out of that first trial was that it enabled me to accumulate a lot of valuable and insightful statistics.

In the current Target Sports trial, we have defied negative expectation by turning an overall bookies' edge of a tad under 10.0% into a win that represents 8.0% of our total action.

Along the way, I received all sorts of advice from sports and math experts, including a finger-wagging lecture that the 10% bookies' edge I could expect consisted of the rake on both sides of every proposition, and would not necessarily be reflected in a comparison between the number of losses vs. the number of wins.

Bollocks!

Bookies expect to win 55 out of every 100 bets, and that's exactly the way it has turned out with the 5,067 bets we have put in play as of January 30, 2012.

The exact bookies' edge at this point is 9.7%.

We have risked a total of $2.32 million since July 24, 2010, so our $185,570 win to date in hard cash, not fancy percentages, is, as I said, eight percent of our total action.

I count that as a resounding success, and I challenge any of those own-trumpet-blowing cappers to match it!

That's not to say we didn't have some scary moments. Last summer, when I was hindering random selection with the application of what seemed like common sense, caution very nearly cost us our (by then) six-figure bankroll.

We started out with random selection, then got greedy: That's the bottom line.

It's also correct (but not fair) to say that if we'd hit a $100,000 slump from the outset, then Target Sports would never have got off the ground.

As it is, we never used up our initial $5,000 buy-in, which had $20,000 in reserve.

Target's one irreversible failure has been the "5-a-day" trial which I spun off from the primary experiment just before its first anniversary last July.

I try to pay respectful attention to the views of others, and quite frequently, I would hear suggestions that 20 bets a day is just too many.

I'm not relying on hindsight when I say here and now that I never agreed with that - my contention (which is firmly on record!) was that we might be better off expanding the trial to as many as 50 bets a day, if at any time there were enough +100 to +140 qualifiers.

The only thing that stopped me from doing that was the logistical nightmare of expanding my Target Sports template to accommodate all those added bets.

It took me weeks of fussin' and cussin' to set up a model that rolled bets over from one day to the next and indicated all the things that matter, line-by-line and bet-by-bet.

More bets mean more days when multiple small wins help soften the blow somewhat when one or two big bets go south, and I surmised that the opposite would be true of a short list.

And that was how it turned out.

It all went well for about six months, and then stats and probability caught up with us.

The cost was about $8,500, which technically should be trimmed from the primary trials profits.

But I don't want to do that because the losing project was a separate experiment, even though the five bets picked out were always the first five selections on any day's big list.

Perhaps when winnings from the long list top $210,000 I'll make the necessary adjustment.

Then again, perhaps I won't.

After all, I don't factor my casino winnings into the bottom line for Target Sports, even though the profits are attributable to the same betting strategy.

The monthly wins chart above has been going out most days for weeks with a max exposure figure of -$217,000 for October, 2011, an error that was belied by all the other data in the summary. Somehow, my Target Sports model added up a succession of much smaller numbers month by month to get that awful grand total, and the idiot who wrote the workbook (me) didn't spot the screaming error until today. My apologies to any subscribers who may have felt pain because of the mistake.

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._

Apple's Steve Jobs believed his way was the only way and made enemies by refusing to compromise. I sympathize: Sometimes there's no middle ground!

_
I just finished reading the Isaacson biography of the late and often great Steve Jobs, and the impression I got was of a guy who couldn't understand why everyone else on the planet didn't think the way he did.

He was wrong from time to time - he didn't think it was a smart idea to allow outside apps for the iPhone, for example! - but he was right a lot more often than he wasn't, and the battles he won have changed a lot of lives.

Now, I'm no Steve Jobs, but after wading through thousands of posts to online bulletin boards dedicated to gambling, I'm stunned by how stubbornly wrong smart people can be about simple arithmetic, and can appreciate his aversion to compromise.

Setting aside for a moment the sad fact that most boards are diminished and degraded by foul-fingered bickering authored by a small minority, it's amazing how much time contributors are willing to spend discussing betting strategies that can't be supported by common sense, let alone mathematical analysis.

In the month I spent posting to Baccarat Forums, I was routinely blasted for defending a strategy that recommends a betting spread as high as 1 to 5,000.

The rationale for rejecting Target seemed to be that a betting plan that is out of the reach of more than 99% of all gamblers is at best undeserving of consideration, and at worst a criminal attempt to coerce idiots to hand over all their money to the casinos.

Target is, of course, a disciplined but relatively modest take on progressive betting, a concept that has been around for about as long as wagering itself.

What I find surprising is that so many presumably sensible players are willing to keep believing that there is any long-term alternative to progressive betting, and to spend countless hours discussing short-term maneuvers that can only work if they get lucky.

I haven't posted here for quite a while because I have been working instead on a baccarat article that started out as a piece for this blog, then kept growing and growing like a beanstalk on steroids.

It's still a work in progress, but I have posted it to my website, and readers who consider themselves experts on baccarat are welcome to read it and get mad at me whenever I repeat the plain truth that the game can only be beaten by progressive betting.

As with every other game with a long-term negative expectation, baccarat will in the end chew chunks out of a gambler's bankroll that approximate the percentage value of the house edge, meaning that for every $100 wagered back and forth, at least $1.35 will find a permanent home in the casino's coffers.

That's the theory, anyway. In truth, most players will lose much more than 1.35% of their total action by betting erratically, emotionally and stupidly.

Tight betting spreads and unrealistic stop-loss limits are popular among many players looking to limit their exposure, and all they do in the long run is absolutely guarantee that the house will win in the end.

The obsession at BF is with finding a way to make the "right" choice between Banker and Player as a betting proposition, and absolutely no one is willing to accept the simple truth that unless you know for certain which of those two options is going to win the next round, your selection will ultimately prove irrelevant.

Baccarat is a two-hole version of whack-a-mole, in essence, and the more you hop from one target to the other, the happier - and richer - the house will be.

My big mistake during my month on BF was to dig in my heels and advise baccarat players to stick with Player to avoid the 5% commission on winning bets on Banker.

I was right to point out that although Banker invariably wins more often than Player over the course of several hundred rounds, the commission gouge serves to turn a rare positive into a certain negative.

But if critical bets on Banker are increased to cover the win target plus the "bank tax" the damage done by commission can be at least neutralized, and often can boost the profit from winning more bets than you lose.

All I want to say this time out is that no one other than an infallible psychic has anything to gain from switching from Banker to Player and back again.

And since all psychics are frauds, even someone claiming powers that don't exist will do better to stick with one selection all the way.

That's not to suggest that backing away from a tough shoe is not a good idea. I always tell players that it's not brave or tough to keep betting through a long losing streak - it's downright foolish.

Prolonged, persistent losing streaks are anomalies - aberrations that casinos rely on to reduce sane, sober and sensible punters to putty.

Someone once wrote that gamblers are not battling bad luck or long odds when they try to overcome the house edge, they're playing against themselves - another awful truth that most players refuse to deal with.

I have long preached that choice in gambling is a bad thing, and Target's continued success in sports betting provides dramatic proof of that!

As many of you know, the Target real-time, real money sports betting trial began in late July of 2010, and most days since, I have posted a list of bets well ahead of game times, followed by good news or bad when all the playing's done.

In 2011, the Target trial racked up winnings of $100,000 and is now just shy of $180,000 in profits since Day One.

I added a five-a-day "spin-off" in July of 2011, a more modest application of the same objectives, and right now, that trial is well over $8,000 ahead.

The idea has always been to focus on underdogs at odds between +100 and +140 (even money to 1.4 to 1) and to apply a selection process that is in effect totally random.

In other words, no choices!

So far, it's mostly worked like a dream - the only rough water that almost sank the entire enterprise came soon after I was persuaded that since random selection was doing so well, maybe "smart" betting would do even better.

I learned the hard way what I'd known for years and had for a time forgotten: In gambling, happenstance will almost always make better choices than I do - and just like you, I'm not stupid.

My message has always been that if you can't afford to win, you shouldn't play.

It's not popular advice. Many baccarat players posting to BF insist they have been winning for years without progressive betting, by learning how to spot trends almost before they begin and then ride them to riches.

That makes them them infallible psychics - rare birds indeed! Liars, too.

I'm just a dumb punter who never knows if his next bet is going to win or lose.

What I do know is that if I bet smartly and consistently, I will be able to exploit winning streaks to the maximum and control damage from losing streaks.

I also know that I'm not likely to come out a winner if I take $500 to a $10 table and count on blind luck.

Target has several powerful points in its favor.

It tells you when to press your bets for the fastest recovery possible, but just as importantly, it signals when to stop chasing a winning streak and fall back to a minimum bet.

Random bettors will almost always keep pushing their luck way past the point where they have already made a tidy profit and need to slow down and stop putting their winnings at risk.

The biggest losers were very often big winners at one point - but when their luck turned (as it always must), they refused to recognize it, keep some of their gains, and rein in their bets.

In my opinion, based on far more real-play experience than most gamblers can claim, having to constantly decide how much to bet and when is way too stressful.

Target makes those decisions for me, using a formula developed from analyzing millions of bets (most of them derived from simulations, naturally, since I'm still a young man!).

Some say strategies take the fun out of gambling. I say winning is more fun than losing, and losing is what most people are doomed to do.

Don't believe it when someone tells you that gambling games are unpredictable.

In the short term, it's true. In the long run, very little changes: patterns repeat themselves and probability rules.

Target relies to a great degree on "twins" - two consecutive wins in a recovery series in which the house may have managed to get several bets ahead (-1, -1, -1, -1, -1, +1, +5).

But 70% or more of all turnarounds will be achieved with just ONE win, thanks to carefully controlled doubledowns.

Betting on a whim is foolish.

Even a fool will win once in a while, of course.

Mostly, he will keep on losing.

And luckily for casinos, fools have very short memories.

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._

There's a perfectly logical explanation for numbers that prove that running away when the going gets tough is a better idea than sticking around.

_
(For updated information about Target's ongoing sports betting experiment, please go to the Sethbets website, or click here for an introduction to progressive betting, and here [20] and here [5] for current picks). You can also find a guide to the most basic Target strategy applied to more than 80,000 verifiable baccarat outcomes by visiting Google Docs.

I just posted a new page at Sethbets devoted entirely to the "flight plan" concept as applied to the 1,600 Zumma baccarat "real" shoes and the 2,000 Wizard of Bodog simulated shoes, with eye-popping charts that make it easy to see that flight is right, and no might about it.

Here's my conclusion after reviewing all the data:

"To anyone who responds to the charts and numbers on this page with a suggestion that I somehow fiddled or fudged the data to support my long-stated belief that the house edge is not invincible, there's not a whole lot I can say!
My time in the quirky, largely deluded world of Baccarat Forums taught me that the most vocal "contributors" are also the ones least likely to give a fair-minded hearing to anyone else's ideas, especially if they see a direct conflict with their own hallowed beliefs.
All of my worksheets are available for inspection and verification, except for those which contain algorithms that are my unique intellectual property (in which case, all output will be provided, but formulas will have been redacted, as the CIA likes to put it).
There can be no practical or material benefits from producing fraudulent data, and the only reason I mention that option at all is that on BF, the loudest voices were those with evident problems grasping the simplest principles of arithmetic. Good manners eluded them too, but that's really their problem, no one else's.
The Zumma helped/hurt and skip percentages (see above) were 60% and 32%.
Matching numbers from the WOB 8-deck 1,000 - to your left - were 64% and 32%, and for the WoB 6-deck sample (above) we get 60% and 25%.
Why does skipping, fleeing, dodging, evading or avoiding a losing streak that might get worse before it gets better greatly reduce the overall house edge?
The overall reduction for the samples on this page is from an average of 1.27% to an average of 0.24%, a drop in the overall HA of more than 80%.
I think that logic supports the results from this limited trial, and that the logic used to support the opposite view is therefore proven false.
The "flight plan" only kicks in when a worsening HA is probable but not certain (if we knew for sure, we'd be psychic and would find a quicker way to make money!).
Positive trends are NOT avoided, and since it is statistically certain that overall, the number of positive trends will exactly match the number of negative ones, if we only run away from negative ones but at the same time do not skip more than half of all possible bets, we will (logically) drive down the overall house edge. QED!"

Based upon what I have seen so far, I'm willing to predict that if I were to adjust the trigger sensitivity from -5 (meaning that the house gets five bets ahead in the current shoe or session) to a smaller value that resulted in half of all bets being skipped instead of less than 30%, the beneficial effects of the move would pretty much evaporate.

I'm relying on logic again: Right now, we've seen the effects of playing 70% of all dealt rounds and can conclude from the consistent 60-40 "helped" ratio that we have avoided slightly more negative trends than positive ones.

In the remaining 70% of all rounds, the number of negative and positive patterns will be about equal, while in the 30% we skipped, we have confirmation that there were more negatives than positives.

Add all that together, and you end up with significant downward pressure on the overall house edge by a value that's tiny in itself, but dramatic as a percentage of the overall negative expectation for the game of baccarat.

I don't have the means to produce tens or hundreds of thousands of simulated or real shoes in order to extend this test.

But there are plenty of people out there who do, and perhaps they will stumble on the flight plan concept and see fit to evaluate it fairly and accurately with their superior resources!

That's a naive hope, perhaps, since the great majority of people with those skills and resources seem to devote them exclusively to "proving" that the house edge is unbeatable in the long run.

But hope springs eternal, especially in gamblers...

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._

Forget "exit strategy" and its Bush-wars connotation: My new rules modification is a "flight plan" and, by golly, it really works!

_
Continuing yesterday's topic about mathematical corroboration of the wisdom of running away from a persistent downturn, I am happy to report that new (to me) data supplied by the Wizard of Bodog backs the idea almost 100%.

Because I'm more of a blackjack person than a baccarat fan, although I play the Royal Fool's Game more often than I do roulette or craps, I didn't find out until yesterday that the Wiz's shoemaker simulator has cobbled together an additional 1,000 shoes for our delectation and delight.

The first lot were from an 8-deck simulation which supported Target's viability with or without the application of the "five behind" rule.

(For first-timers here, "five behind" refers to my suggestion that you should walk away from a shoe or session if the house gets five bets ahead of you - which does not necessarily mean an automatic bail-out after five losses in a row!)

The new baccarat data from the WoB is for six-deck shoes, which suits me just fine, even if it does mean shorter games (about 69,000 rounds in 1,000 shoes vs. almost 84,000 in the first data set).

The die-hard baccarat aficionados over at BF obsess about cuts and burns and penetration and other factors which in my experience have zero long-term effect on the odds.

My view is that if I were to take all the verifiable data from the Zumma sets (1,600 shoes) and the WoB sims (now 2,000 shoes) and process them through a Target template horizontally instead of vertically, or even diagonally, it would make little or no difference to the long-term success of the progressive strategy.

But we have to accept that all casino games are just variations of a process that's set up to part us from our money while convincing us that we have at least some chance of going home with more cash than we brought with us.

Some people prefer tomato soup, some like chicken noodle and others hanker after beef broth, but basically the different flavors are all just soup, hot and wet and tricked out to make us happy.

My (newly-named) Flight Plan modification is more of a recommendation than a new Target rule, and has less to do with damage control than damage evasion.

Against the 8-deck Wizard of Bodog data set, flight at five behind cut the overall house edge (defined in baccarat as Player's disadvantage vs. Banker) from 1.31% to 0.19%.

In two large blocks of shoes, it actually wiped out the house edge entirely and replaced it with a "player's edge."


In the 6-deck WoB data set I found yesterday (although it's probably been out there for years!) the skip algorithm cut the overall house edge from 1.07% to 0.03%.

If applied to actual play, the plan would be that once the house got five bets ahead in any one shoe, you'd stop betting and either go off and find another table to resume play at the cut-off level, or lean back and take a nap until the next shuffle.

Baccarat simulations (or large data sets comprising actual shoes) are uniquely suited to exploring the effectiveness of the "skip" approach because there's a verifiable beginning and end to each game.

No one is allowed to log blackjack rounds between shuffles, pai-gow poker is such a rip-off that it's not worth looking at from any angle, and games such as roulette and craps that are wholly numbers-based are continuous, and so offer no natural breaks.

The two Zumma sets (600 and 1,000) also supported the viability of the skip concept, with house edge reductions from 1.36% to 0.55% in the Z600 and from 1.45% to 0.37% in the Z1000.

All of this in spite of the fact that the conventional wisdom states unequivocally that whatever you try to do to escape the house edge must in the long run prove fruitless.

The idea, endorsed by experts, is that you will jump from the frying pan into the fire as often as you manage to postpone the inevitable by running away.

And, worse yet, you are sure to miss as many winning opportunities as losing ones by refusing to man up and take your medicine, sucker.

Hogwash, of course - but hogwash is about all you get to hear or read when it comes to gambling!

Here's the Zumma summary again:


Charts, of course, are the most dramatic way of illustrating the benefits of taking a hike instead of sticking it out through a downturn, and I'll be posting a bunch of them on the Sethbets site as soon as I can.

In the meantime, here's just one example, from the "new" WoB data set:


Not all the WoB-based charts are as dramatic as the one above, but in not one case in all of the Zumma and WoB blocks was flight shown to be a worse idea than sticking around for a beating.

I get a particular kick out of the feedback from the Wizard of Bodog data, because Mike Shackleford (aka Shillford) is a casino man through and through and would no doubt do all he could to find a fatal flaw in my arithmetic if promoting online gambling didn't occupy all his time.

There is, of course, nothing I can say to people who claim without even looking at my data that I am fiddling or fudging my numbers to support a baseless argument.

Most of those skeptics can barely string a comprehensible English sentence together, never mind manage an open-minded evaluation of someone else's ideas - that's a lesson I learned from my highly instructive month on Baccarat Forums!

I have been saying for years that a Target player should never stick around for a thrashing when a prolonged downturn threatens his bankroll, or hesitate to suspend play for any other reason that might take his fancy.

I always knew that was good advice. Now I have proof!

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._

After a month of daily abuse on a baccarat forum (Hey, I can take it!), the only rational conclusion is that most players want to lose!

_
I think I have probably rambled on enough about my experience on the Baccarat Forums website, but please bear with me for just a little longer, because I believe the way baccarat players see their game has something to tell all of us.

There is an absolute rejection of any kind of sustained progressive betting because it's crazy or too risky or unplayable, but a devotion to brainless ideas about streaks and trends and pattern prediction that defies belief.

Only one contributor to the forum saw fit to look into the mathematics of Target betting, and he chose to ignore all the rules but one, placing a theoretical bet that exceeded 100,000 units and then pronouncing the strategy (and along with it any and all variations on progressive betting) an "utter failure."

He then passed on the one-rule application to a friend who doesn't subscribe to BF but who runs a site of his own that minutely examines every measurable aspect of the game of baccarat using math and simulation skills that are truly impressive.

After failing to demonstrate that Target fails against the 1,600 "real" baccarat shoes put out by Zumma Publishing in two ancient books that seem to have attained almost scriptural status plus 1,000 more shoes placed on line by the Wizard of Bodog, he then created 10,000 shoes of his own.

When even his corrupted, partial application of the Target rules beat that sample (10,000 shoes being about a decade of play for the average baccarat punter) he added a zero to his sample size, then another, before claiming a crash-and-burn for my strategy against ONE MILLION shoes.

Knowing that the rules of Target actually do affect the end result against any large sample of outcomes (or even a small one, come to that!), I asked my rather prickly evaluator to let me see his line-by-line bets against the Zumma and Wizard sets, because those at least have been around for years and can be readily verified.

It took almost a month before he finally posted his output against the Wizard 1,000 set , which his pal on the baccarat forum claimed had blown Target to bits.

First to come out of the file (still available online here by clicking on the smaller of the two DOWNLOAD buttons) was confirmation that even with the recommended rules only partially applied, Target beat the Wizard shoes to the tune of 2.2% of its total action.

The file (and its author) claimed that a 1 to 10,000 spread limit had been applied - double Target's standard 1 to 5,000 - but close examination of the data confirmed dozens of bets in a total of 83,640 that had far exceeded the claimed limit.

I was left wondering why someone who can spend hours microscopically examining the effects of removing, say, all the 9s from an 8-deck baccarat shoe, could put his name on such a sloppy piece of work.

When I asked about that, I was dismissed as a paranoid lunatic with criminal tendencies and was told in no uncertain terms that Imspirit (in spite of the pretentious Wishing I were just motto in the title of his blog!) had no interest in correcting his mistakes or engaging in any further dialogue with me.

It turned out that my casual evaluator had put none of his considerable skills to work testing the ideas of a guy to whom he gives repeated plugs in his blog, a fellow who offers for sale (at $200 a pop) four strategies that claim to beat either baccarat or blackjack.

Hmmmm...

Of course, bet selection methods that rely on intuition and gut "readings" of shoes after only a few cards have been dealt are obviously impossible to evaluate mathematically without a few hundred thousand actual outcomes. And Imspirit understandably prefers simulations that spit out a lifetime's worth of rounds of baccarat in less than 10 seconds.

Similarly, math is powerless when it comes to reading minds or determining whether or not there is life after death.

I mention all this because most of the chatter on the baccarat forum I visited hinges on deciding between bets on Banker or Player based either on the most recent outcome (FLD or follow last decision) or the one before that (WBL for win before last, or avant dernier in Monte Carlo).

Some contributors to the forum happily admit to using progressive betting - but to such a limited degree that it is demonstrably more dangerous than flat or fixed betting, and quite possibly riskier than flying by the seat of their pants.

I created numerous Sethbets web pages to show that over and over again, a 1 to 5,000 spread requires less action, and therefore less risk, than a 1-50 spread - and that frequently, it is even "safer" than spreading 1 to 10.

No takers on any of that info, according to my site hit counters . I needed the information for the book I'm working on, so no harm done and no time wasted - but I admit I am surprised that nobody was willing to suspend their knee-jerk disbelief for even the few minutes it took to click up and glance at the data.

Progressive betting in any form requires guts and confidence and, at times, a ton of cold hard cash - I have been saying that for years, often resorting to the credo, "If you can't afford to win, don't play."

But the kind of hocus-pocus that these guys on BF have devoted (in some cases) years of their life to discussing and endorsing day after day is much more dangerous and irresponsible than anything I have ever recommended.

On the one hand, they point to Target's failure against a million shoes as proof that progressive betting doesn't work.

Then they go right back to twittering about oddball chops and hops and jumps and trends and patterns and "predictiveness" that together belong in the same grab-bag as runes and chicken entrails.

The only prediction I'm willing to make when it comes to gambling is that if you don't bet progressively in response to a persistent downturn, you will lose, at best, a big chunk of your bankroll - and if you put any faith in patterns lasting longer than a round or two, you will likely lose ALL of it.

I did discover that walking away from a session or shoe if the dealer gets, say, five bets ahead of you will probably (but not certainly!) save you some grief down the road, but even that is hard to quantify.

I tried it by feeding "skipped" rounds into my Target models - all rounds in each shoe, that is, but with no money at risk when the bail-out limit was reached - and the results were very encouraging.

But the problem was that Target breaks shoes up into individual recovery series, and because it's routine for a series to end successfully in spite of more bets lost than won, a five-bet house advantage since a given shoe began does not necessarily line up with a serious threat to the bankroll.

For example, the first five series in a new shoe might each have turned around with four bets lost and three won, indicating five more losers than winners since the first round from the shoe was dealt, but Target would be feeling no pain at all.

Imspirit (a name even stranger than Seth Theobeau!) had a bad experience with a proponent of progressive betting before I came along, I should add before I close, and that may have disqualified him from a fair assessment of any betting strategy.

It might also explain his extraordinary claim that I have some criminal agenda in warning would-be punters that without progressive betting, they might as well empty their wallets into a big pot at the casino entrance and turn around for home.

He describes some of what happened on his blog, and the story underscores my constant warning that anyone who can't afford to fight fire with fire, meaning money vs. money in a gambling context, should never place a 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._

Don't even think about going into battle if you don't believe you can win the war! It's a lesson nations never learn, but all gamblers should.

_
(For updated information about Target's ongoing sports betting experiment, please go to the Sethbets website, or click here for an introduction to progressive betting, and here [20] and here [5] for current picks). You can also find a guide to the most basic Target strategy applied to more than 80,000 verifiable baccarat outcomes by visiting Google Docs.

October was beginning to look like it was destined to become only the fourth "red" month since we started this transparent sports betting trial way back at the end of July, 2010.

But a one-goal win by the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday (the 29th!) pulled us smartly out of the hole, just as it was meant to, and we're now back on top and looking back at well over 4,000 bets and more than $2 million in total action.

What matters most is that against a persistent "bookies' edge" of 10%, we have managed to win (meaning hold on to!) 8% of that enormous seven-figure churn.

The odds we have overcome are far greater than the house edge in casino table games, where roulette's 5.26% is about as punishing a HA as you're likely to encounter.

Blackjack is about a -1.0% proposition and baccarat is somewhere between -1.24% and -1.35% but I always believed that sports was an ideal proving ground for the Target method.

What's funny is that progressive betting as a concept is about as new-fangled as gambling itself. I can imagine cavemen rolling actual bones, and one of them thinking, "If I double my bet each time I lose, when I win I'll be back where I started."

The simple Martingale (-1, -2, -4, -8, -16, -32, +64) has great appeal from a speed and efficiency standpoint, but I believe that in the long run, it pushes bets way too high and can only prevail if there are no house limits in effect.

That's not how it is in the real world, so Target, with its bells and whistles now greatly streamlined, is simply a practical compromise.

Instead of one win we're looking for two ("twins"!), and that makes it a very easy strategy to learn.

In sports, I do play a "Marty" for a limited number of losses (I stole the nickname from a contributor to Baccarat Forums!) but the only two situations in which doubling the bet is critical, I believe, are after an opening loss, and after a first turnaround attempt in a recovery series goes down the tubes.

Sports is a bit more of a challenge than other games of chance because of the double-digit negative expectation percentage, so it's not quite as safe to assume that a "house" win is likely to be followed by a house loss, or vice versa.

Still and all, the principles are not much different, and the greatest advantage of sports betting is that it's safe to do it online.

"Virtual casinos" can and do cheat when it comes to blackjack, baccarat and so on, but sports results are a matter of widespread public record, and stacking the deck is an impossibility.

So far, I'm very impressed with the efficiency of web-based sports books and the speed of their payouts.

The one thing to be leery of is the sign-up bonuses they offer: a 5x churn isn't unusual, and that means that if you accept a $300 bonus for a $1,500 buy-in, you won't be able to cash out one cent (not even a part of your original stake) until you have generated $9,000 in action.

The whole progressive betting advantage boils down to the Target mantra, winning more when you win than you lose when you lose.

Right now, the 20-line (almost) daily game chart stands at an average win of $640 and an average loss of $454.

That's a 41% W/L surplus, which alone accounts for us being almost $170,000 ahead after 15 months. That's $11,330 a month!

The 5-line parallel trial hasn't been running as long, but there we're looking at a 12.0% "bookies' edge" and a 51.0% W/L surplus.

Bookies the world over should be trembling in their boots, you might think.

But of course they're not.

For every steady winner there are at least a dozen reliable losers, and our success (even when we step up the action and move into the big leagues) is just a very small part of the cost of doing business for them.

So, what does our sports betting success have to do with the headline on this entry?

Good question, and the answer lies with the three weeks I have spent exploring the Baccarat Forums and learning a little more than I need to know about the philosophy of the average (losing) gambler.

Like most of these bulletin boards, BF tends to be monopolized by a noisy few, and I became one of those, putting up an average of almost five posts a day as I sought to get across the perfectly logical - and provable - point that ultimately, only progressive betting can beat the game.

Two BF members in particular, whom I will refer to here as Bitter and Twisted to avoid heaping even more embarrassment on top of the damage they do to themselves with each new post, took exception to the very idea of Target.

They both claimed they couldn't get a handle on the idea that when you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, you end up with an average win value that exceeds your average loss value by a percentage substantially greater than the actual house edge.

(It's usual to refer to the house edge for a given recorded set of outcomes as the AV or actual value, and to use HA to describe the known house advantage for the game as a whole).

When I said - and proved - that in over 200,000 rounds of verifiable outcomes, all of them accessible online, Target delivered an AWB that beat the ALB by a minimum of 10%, what kept coming back was: "Tell me where there's a casino that pays 1.10:1 on winning Player bets!"

It was like being back in a schoolyard with a couple of bullies too dense to see sense and more intent on inflicting damage on others than on learning something that might just be helpful to them.

As I have said before, when you see irrational, spiteful behavior like that, you have to wonder what motivates it!

Both Bitter and Twisted have been posting on multiple gambling discussion groups for years, spending most of their time hurling insults at others while posing as baccarat savants, so the other topic of wonder is the quality of their sad little lives.

Most of the posts to BF have to do with how to make the right choice between baccarat's two main options, Banker and Player, and woe betide anyone who dares suggest that in the long run it really doesn't make any difference.

My position has always been that it's best to stick with Player only, primarily because there's no "5%" commission on winning bets.

The other factor has to do with the hazard of two options piled on top of the need to place the right bet - the right amount - at the right time.

Having to deal with Which? as well as How much? doubles the danger that you're going to zig when the shoe or deck zags and vice versa - clearly it makes much more sense to pick a contender and stick with it through thick and thin.

I went to a lot of trouble to demonstrate that although the primary criticism of Target (or any form of progressive betting) is that it's "too risky," it in fact often requires less overall risk than betting methods that seem on the face of it to be more conservative or cautious.

Bitter and Twisted would have none of it, and their constant abusive and infantile responses in a setting which is supposed to encourage discussion and mutual support drowned out everyone else, and probably drove countless potential contributors away.

My biggest disappointment, I have to say, was with a guy who wisely finds better things to do with his time than log in to BF, but whose math skills make him the go-to guru for strategy analysis.

As I have said here before, he took just one of Target's rules - the LTD+ response to a mid-recovery win - and used that to "prove" that my progressive betting variation "failed" against more than a million shoes of baccarat.

I wouldn't take that much to heart but for the fact that "Imspirit" went further and said that Target was beaten by the Zumma baccarat sets and by the WOO 1,000, all of which were in truth soundly thrashed by the method, with detailed online proof provided.

Imspirit argues, in essence, that whatever the rules applied, progressive betting can never work in the long run, so why bother to test the method accurately?

He has one hilarious howler in his report about the tests, a chart that claims to show that both Banker and Player came out ahead in 1 million shoes with no house limits applied, and that Banker did substantially better than Player using the one and only Target rule he selected.


It doesn't take a million-shoe trial to demonstrate what preposterous nonsense this is (although it was greeted with wild applause by the dummies on BF who fall for the house line that Banker is always the better bet at baccarat).

It cheers me no end, though, because it confirms that in spite of all the flash and pizazz that makes Imspirit's blog a whole lot prettier than this one, the poor guy has his head wedged firmly up his bum!

When ALL of the Target rules were accurately applied, Player routinely topped Banker's win against the same outcomes for endless thousands of rounds - although both sides did very nicely, because that's what progressive betting does, folks.

I dedicated a recent Sethbets page to demonstrating for Bitter's benefit that the so-called 5% commission will routinely hand Player more profit than Banker against the same sample of outcomes.

But I learned that in those circles (the rarefied forums where folks talk gambling every day but hardly ever actually do it, for the most part) anyone who challenges the conventional wisdom in any way quickly becomes a pariah.

Here's a math-based assessment of Imspirit's crazy chart above:


As for Imspirit, it's intriguing to discover that while taking a hard-line (but wholly uncorroborated) stance against progressive betting in any form, beating Target to a pulp with a million shoes without showing any actual bets, he's in fact in thrall to methods of play that have zero basis in mathematics!

His impressive blog devotes page after page to tables and charts that would have boggled Einstein's mind, assessing, for example, the effect of the removal of certain cards from a baccarat shoe.

Truth is that unless all that hocus-pocus can tell us what's coming out of the shoe or deck before we place a bet, it ain't worth a hill of beans.

Target, like any progressive betting method, doesn't pretend to predict: it reacts.

We can never know ahead of the deal or spin or roll that we'll see the two wins in a row we hope for when a recovery opportunity arises. But we can always be certain that IF it happens (and it happens a lot!) we'll have the right bet on the table at the right time.

The point I was making at the top of this essay is that there is no way to win without risk. Gambling is in its very essence a risky business. And the less you are willing to risk, the more likely you are to lose.

That's a mathematical fact. Cuts and burns and trends and biases, patterns and predictability, neutrals and opposites are not quantifiable or measurable, much as we'd like them to be.

There's just one thing Imspirit and I just might be able to agree on: intuition.

And since his mindless sims specifically banish intuition, along with every other human aspect of gambling, I have to wonder why he bothers.

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 tell the truth to some defenders of the conventional wisdom, and back it up with meticulous, accurate math, they can get very nasty indeed!

_
(For updated information about Target's ongoing sports betting experiment, please go to the Sethbets website, or click here for an introduction to progressive betting, and here [20] and here [5] for current picks). You can also find a guide to the most basic Target strategy applied to more than 80,000 verifiable baccarat outcomes by visiting Google Docs.

They say a soft answer turneth away wrath.

Well, that might have worked in Biblical times, but in this Internet age, telling the truth and proving it doesn't impress people who seem to have a vested interest in peddling the myth that there's no way to beat the house edge in the end.

Here's my Baccarat Forums response to an angry, intemperate and abusive chap who repeatedly refuses to look at the mathematical corroboration I provide every day while offering not one shred of his own:

Why progressive betting is the ONLY long-term winning strategy.

This new thread is concerned primarily with honesty, transparency and accurate math.

But I have to say up front that it is partially in response to one of the more abusive contributors to this curious cacophony who recently wrote: “I have given away thousands of systems to hundreds of people.”

That’s a boast that confirms that its author has spent many years cynically and deliberately distracting, misleading and misinforming gamblers all over the world, and aims to keep right on doing it.

I have in the past three weeks provided dozens of links to meticulously-checked proofs that my version of progressive betting (I call it Target, in case you’re new here) has prevailed against tens of thousands of shoes of baccarat contained in verifiable data sets that are in the public domain.

The guy who has “given away thousands of systems” knows, just as every casino operator knows, that progressive betting is the only real and credible long-term threat to the effects of the house advantage.

I stress the word effects because in any casino game of chance, the house advantage will always be there. It’s how it is neutralized and then reversed that is the “secret” behind progressive betting generally and Target particularly.

Target, of course, has not been kept secret. And neither has the proof that it works.

Unfortunately, a few people who post to this forum have made it their business to bombard the rest of us with drivel designed to hide the clear and honest truth that there is a way to win consistently in a casino.

Another quote from the source of thousands of systems (all of them worthless if they don’t have progressive betting at their core): “...your system is quite PRACTICAL! 5 000 units to win 1 unit, now THAT is wise advice!”

Those words echo what you’ll hear from a dealer or other pit critter if you attempt to apply progressive betting in any casino anywhere.

You will be singled out for kindhearted, concerned counsel about the harm you’re likely to be doing yourself, while all around you drunks and other idiots flush their money away without a compassionate word from casino personnel.

The reason for that is simple: You, along with the drunks and fools, are certain in the long run to lose more bets than you win, and if you bet fixed amounts or randomly, you are also certain to lose more money than you win.

But if you are consistently able to win back in one or two bets what you lost in three or four, you will not only neutralize the effect of the house edge – you will reverse it.

The proud systems donor keeps asking me for proof, proof, proof.

Every post I put up on BF includes links to detailed proof, proof, proof (including 83,640 lines of bets against 1,000 baccarat shoes that are available online for anyone to cross-check).

But Systems Giveaway Guy (SGG) ignores the proof time after time – as perhaps he should, because it makes nonsense of his every argument.

Meanwhile, the only “proof” he has offered is 70 or so lines of bets with a 49% house advantage against which he maliciously misapplied the rules of Target, at one point placing a wager of more than 100,000 units.

Given the harsh reality of all games of chance – the fact that over time, you will lose more bets than you win – know this: you will only make a long-term profit if you consistently bet in such a way that you win more money when you win than you lose when you lose.

That’s not an opinion, or even a revolutionary idea. It’s a cold, hard, mathematical truth.

Another cold, hard, mathematical truth is that from time, you will be required to place some very large bets in defense of your bankroll. Unpalatable, yes. Avoidable, no.

My posts have provided clear and irrefutable mathematical proof that time and time again, if you bet a 1 to 5,000 spread, you will in fact put less money in play (and therefore significantly reduce your overall exposure) than if you spread 1 to 50.

In some of the models I have posted (all of which use verifiable data sets from either Zumma Publishing or Bodog’s principal promoter, the Wizard of Odds) spreading 1 to 5,000 is actually less “dangerous” than a 1 to TEN spread.

I have also put up multiple summaries of play against verifiable outcomes that show that Target bets at low levels more than 95% of the time, and that the average recovery is achieved in six bets or less, often when the house has won four bets against Target’s two.

But SGG won’t acknowledge any truth that conflicts with his mission to mislead and mess up as many gamblers as he possibly can on as many gambling discussion groups as he can pollute.

SGG spreads his relentless disinformation all over the Internet. I have some of his other “handles” and have not checked his activities elsewhere. But it is a safe bet that his abusive, intemperate mischief is not confined to Baccarat Forums.

Back to facts: Nothing you can do can change the sad truth that when the dealing’s done, you will have lost more bets than you won. You can bob and weave and chase patterns and trends, you can randomly raise and lower your bets all you want, and over time, the house will have your hide.

If you don't bet progressively according to a consistent, disciplined plan, you will lose your money however smart and experienced you might believe yourself to be.

SGG is obsessed with the question of whether or not Banker wins more bets than Player in baccarat, and of course it does. I have never denied that.

But does betting Banker with Target – not all of the time, but just some of the time - win more money than betting Player all of the time with Target? Absolutely not.

Even flat betting Banker all the time will end in a loss, as SGG well knows, because the 5% commission on Banker wins is in place solely to offset any benefit derived from winning more often than you lose.

Again, not an opinion, but a demonstrable fact in support of which I have provided ample proof.

But SGG won’t see it, because it doesn’t suit whatever muddled and malicious agenda he brings to BF.

Another SGG quote: “Actually asshole, honesty is my middle name.”

Honesty requires us all to tell the truth, to examine facts presented in good faith, and to make an unbiased evaluation of an idea based on verifiable information rather than on bias or prejudice.

Sorry, SGG, you’re out of the running.

Lastly, the totally irrelevant question of my “true identity” – tossed into this discussion, along with all the other nonsense, to distract members and visitors from the only issue that matters (beating the house is generally accepted as the goal we all share).

Everyone posting to this board uses a handle that conceals his or her real name, not out of fear or shame or to be deceptive, but because we all value (and have a right to) our privacy.

SGG and Egalite both use that form of concealment, and do the same with their e-mail addresses, again as many of us do in defense of our privacy.

I am absolutely unashamed of the honest and fact-based contributions I have made in recent years to the ongoing quest to consistently beat casino games of chance.
But I also recognize that many people with whom I do business consider gambling to be the pursuit of fools, in spite of the fact that many of them risk (and have recently lost!) millions on the stock market.

So, I chose to exercise my right to my privacy, while making certain that every claim I make here, in my blog or elsewhere, is supported by verifiable data.

Because SGG and Egalite are more concerned with making mischief than making a useful contribution to this and other discussion groups, they chose to “out” me as Ian Harmer, creator of a long-established progressive betting method known as Turnaround.

Their motive matters more to me than any damage that might be done to me by their petty malice.

I can prove – and have proved – my fact-based ideas to more people than SGG has harmed and confused with his worthless “systems” and I will continue to state the truth and prove it on this forum for as long as I choose to do so.

One truth is that, unlike SGG and Egalite, I have allowed my approach to the house-beating challenge that concerns us all to evolve and improve over the years.

Turnaround was a worthy step on the way to Target, one that also up-ended the house edge consistently and profitably. But it was way too cluttered and complicated.

As computers evolved too, I was able to confirm against countless real and simulated bets that all that really threatens the house advantage in games of chance is the correct betting response to paired – or “twin” – wins.

Obviously, when the first win comes along in mid-recovery, you can’t know for sure that another win will immediately follow it. But the one-two combo happens so often, so reliably, that if all a player does is exploit that frequent occurrence, he will turn the house edge on its ear.

Casinos know that, and so do the people who try to commandeer this forum and twist it into the verbal equivalent of an infantile food fight.

All I can ask readers to do is to look at the facts and make an honest and unbiased judgment to the best of their ability. And in spite of it all, I have great faith in that ability!


Keep winning!

Seth T.

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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._