Beating the house is like safe driving. You have to pay attention, be alert, and steer, brake or accelerate as conditions require.

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Runaway sims may be enough to satisfy mythematicians that the house edge in casino games is unbeatable, but they have very little to do with actual play.

Take camouflage, for example.

The double-up method of progressive betting (call it the Small Martingale, if you like) is unplayable because after a handful of redoubled bets at the same layout, you might as well pull out a klaxon horn and blast it in the pit boss's ear.

Double-up makes money, for sure. But it also makes waves. Big ones.

Consistent winning is, as far as the casinos are concerned, a crime akin to outright cheating, so if you want to play on undisturbed (and of course, you do) you have to dodge and weave a little from time to time.

The core of target betting is the rule that you must at all times know your loss to date (LTD) and be ready to cover it with an LTD+ bet when the right "trigger" comes along.

All the other rules, profitable as they may be, are essentially window dressing, in place to distract and befuddle the enemy.

That means that you can vary application of those rules as you see fit, tapping the "brake" or the "gas pedal" when you feel the moment is right (Cialis costs extra!).

All of the target betting spreadsheet models are required by the rules of fair testing to maintain the same set of parameters or protocols throughout. That means that like runaway sims, they do not tell the whole story, although unlike sims, they at least tell no lies.

Human beings playing with real money in real time against a real game quickly develop a sense of when things are going well and might continue to do so, and the reverse. And so, like a driver on a country road, they know when to speed up or slow down.

All the target betting models are based upon a minimum bet of $5 and a "house limit" of $25,000 and the method is backed by a bankroll of $1 million in make-believe moolah.

My models permit doubling the bet up to an added $100 in response to a push, and all the other target betting rules are there, including open and second loss responses, win progressions and the mid-series loss "do over" option (see the rules if this is all Greek to you!).

Missing from the mix are my recommended responses to a dealer natural (NB=PBx2) and a dealer 3+ (three cards or more) 21 (same as a push), both of them useful ways to improve profitability without adding too much extra risk.

It's worth noting that the "push rule" alone adds about $11,500 to the overall "win" from the current blackjack trial, which as I type this stands at 6,695 rounds and 1,130 recoveries unblemished by a single bust. You get a 10% increase in profits along with a 22% increase in action, which can be interpreted as potential added risk. Is it worth it? That's for a human player to decide, something a runaway sim cannot do.

Other real-life complications that are tricky to model in a simulation include "round-ups," meaning the conversion of a clumsy number into whatever units are currently in play, a variable value.

For example, when a $500 win leaves you with an LTD of $45, you would be more likely to push out a $100 chip than a $25 and 4 $5s, and a $15 LTD calls for a $25 bet. Sure, I can do that in my spreadsheet models, but why bother? (the money isn't real anyway!).

For years, I have had a habit of betting a limited spread at local "low roller" casinos where the table minimum is $5 and the max $200 or $300, accumulating several apparent "busts" to be played off when I can make a visit to Stateline or Reno, where the limits are higher.

The effect of this approach is that while very often a tight spread can be profitable, in the long run I am a loser at my neighborhood haunts. I don't broadcast the news that hanging series are always recovered down the road (literally and timewise!), because no one else needs to know that.

Among the most powerful advantages of target betting is that it tells the player when to stop winning.

Let's say that I take a half dozen incomplete NB/LTDs into a high-rent casino, each of them frozen at 200/500, meaning that I am $500 x 6 "in the hole" and the next bet required by the rules is $200, matching the wager I lost before suspending the series for later recovery.

I am not planning to bet at the $200 level indefinitely, but only until the dangling series have been recovered. If things go well, I will wrap up all six incompletes and then fall back to whatever minimum bet applies at my current location (probably $10-$25).

Without a betting strategy, I would be starting out with $200 bets, winning $3,000, then trying to decide whether it's time to quit while I am ahead, or keep on playing knowing that if I get 15 bets or less behind the house, I am going to be back in the red.

Target betting does not permit that risk. Once the suspended series have been recovered, a new contest begins back on the first rung of the ladder, with uncertainty and greed both erased from the picture.

This is a process you can see repeated over and over again if you scroll down any one of the current set of target betting models.

The average EOS for target betting comes in less than six bets at blackjack, which generally has faster turnarounds than baccarat because of naturals and winning splits or double-downs that happen to coincide with a potential turnaround bet.

In the current batch (#15) there are at this point 1,130 x EOS in 6,695 rounds, making for a 5.9-round average. But only one third of all series drag out to more than 6 bets from opening bet to recovery. That indicates that after resuming play at the suspended betting level, the odds are better than 2-1 in your favor that EOS will come in six bets or less.

Confidence and cold cash are both essential to a target betting player's long term success, but a little luck now and then does not hurt. What is important is that you always know when to quit, something that very few gamblers can claim.

There is a temptation to try for a fatter bottom line by dispensing with the "low roller" phase and starting each new series with a $100 minimum bet.

Don't do it!

Assuming a $5 minimum and an available house limit is $25,000, a $100 opener would slash your spread from 1-5000 to 1-250, and that significant "tightening" will eventually choke you. A 1-1,000 spread is about as tight as you should figure to go, if you want to keep winning without an excess of "brown-trouser moments." It's just arithmetic.

Here are more BST numbers...

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
Important data missing from the summary because of the error I described cover the comparative overall result for target betting and a limited 1-200 spread, as follows:-

bst090330c: AV/HA -9 = -6.08%, TB won $2,000 = 13.66% of $14,640 action, 157 rounds net incl 3-2 naturals, avg bet $99, bets of $1,000+ = 2

BST TL $5-$1,000: LOSS of ($9,000) = -5.73% of $157,000 action, avg bet $1,061, bets of $1,000+ = 148

It's the same old, same old...a loss forced by a tight spread, with far more high bets required and a result closely in line with negative expectation (-5.73% vs. -6.08%) and a very different story for target betting, which delivered a tidy win with a far smaller average bet value and just two bets of $1,000-plus.

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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The million-dollar question: Is damage control just another gambler's fallacy, or can ruin be avoided intuitively?

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Human intuition or decision making is the critical element that the You Can't Win brigade omits from the runaway simulations they use to "prove" that the house advantage at games of chance is ultimately unbeatable.

They also eliminate cards, dice, wheels, tables, money, dealers and real time, and then pretend that a high-speed computer simulation based on a random number generator (RNG) is "exactly the same as a real game."

Once upon a time, I was able to ask who would be gullible enough to bet actual cash against a game that used RNG output to simulate blackjack, baccarat or roulette, and I was confident that the answer was clear.

Then the casinos came out with giant flat-screen TVs featuring curvaceously UN-flat, life-sized "dealers" and slots for suckers to push their money into. And by golly, some people do play these so-called games, lured perhaps by cleavage that they can drool over without getting their faces slapped.

The mythematical defense of sims is that at some point, a fatal negative pattern of losses and wins will occur in real play that is exactly like output from a RNG, and vice versa, and ruin will be unavoidable.

It is, as I have said before, like arguing that a car that crashes with no driver at the wheel and with the gas pedal and brakes disabled is inherently unsafe.

Sorry, guys, but gambling is a human activity and the human element really does matter.

Simulations are useful only because they run at very high speeds, saving a huge amount of real-time research, and can give some indication of how a new game (or a method of betting) will perform.

But when the Wizard of Odds and other experts sponsored by the gambling industry claim that casinos rely on simulations to evaluate new games or rule changes to old ones, they are being deliberately disingenuous.

Sims have a role to play, but is always a preliminary one.

Casinos know very well that the only tests that really matter have to be conducted out on the floor, and nothing new ever gets the green light until it has been exhaustively evaluated under real-play conditions.

I have gone to great trouble over the years to amass as many blocks of outcomes from actual play as I can, and target betting has so far recorded only one million-dollar crash-and-burn in more than 500,000 rounds of baccarat and blackjack (more than five years of play for a full time gambler, if such an animal still exists).

The pattern that caused target betting to crash and burn looked like this...


If you were to see a "deadman's drop" like this in real play, one that went on to give the house a 33.33% edge in 114 bets in which 34 more wagers went south than didn't, you would not wait for rock bottom.

You know for sure that if you were sitting at a baccarat or blackjack table and the shoe turned that vicious that fast, you would decide it was time to take a break long before your bankroll was in serious jeopardy.

As it happens, this spectacular nosedive followed eight consecutive wins that raked in $1,090 in profits before the ninth bet, for $500, lost.

For years, my rule for blackjack has been to keep redoubling during an opening win progression until the bet hits $200, add $100 each time if the winning streak continues, and accept a loss of $500 or more as EOS, happy to end the series with $590+ in extra chips, and fall back to a minimum opening bet at a different layout.

Blackjack is the perfect game for target betting because "natural" pay-offs that exceed the value of the original bet (adding 50% or I'm not playing!) and well-timed splits and double-downs make it much more profitable than baccarat.

To make up the difference, I set the win progression cut-off much higher at $1,000 vs. baccarat, and that made the rules set vulnerable in just this one instance out of more than 60,000 successful recoveries.

The first baccarat trial, bust-free after 37,062 recoveries, delivered a virtual profit of $1.97 million and retired the original $1 million buy-in. The second baccarat series had one bust in 18,446 series and earned a little more than $110,000 (better than a break-even but not by much!). The current blackjack trials stand at a funny-money win to date of $1.75 million and counting. That's a total win of almost $4 million for five years' work, chickenfeed for a CEO but a big improvement on negative expectation.

It would be easy for me to change the baccarat results to eliminate the "bust" then claim that target betting was unbeaten against hundreds of thousands of real-play rounds.

But that would be cheating, and I don't believe in that (not because I am a saint, but because it is simply not necessary!).

For the record, changing the win progression rule to match my blackjack strategy would have turned a baccarat crash-n-burn into a win equal to 5.0% of the action for that same data set.

House-trained academics have a notion that systems promoters always have an excuse when their method crashes in ruins, and eliminate the problem simply by changing the rules.

So target betting's single loss of its bankroll stands in my book, reducing my method's win rate from 100% to -1/69,272 recovered series = 99.9985564%.

I generally claim a 99.992% win rate for my betting method, equal to favorable odds of 12,500 to 1. If I am in a cautious mood, I fall all the way down to 5,000 to 1 in a player's favor, figuring that even that has to be preferable to negative odds of 495 to 505 if you're a little lucky and play blackjack well.

And then there's the obvious wisdom of not claiming a 100% win rate, but instead encouraging the casinos and their tame experts to go public over and over again with "proof" that target betting cannot beat a runaway sim and is therefore worthless.

Let's face it, if gambling industry brainiacs can show for certain that the strategy is worthless, then they have no legal argument for banning its use in their casinos.

As for the ability of a thinking human being to recognize potential danger before it becomes deadly and take steps to avoid it, "simsters" know well that evasive, self-protecting tactics are difficult (meaning inconvenient) to model.

I have done it with what I call an interactive sim, which relies on the famously unreliable Windows RNG to spew out losses and wins with a randomness that may be questionable, but is at least out of my control beyond my insertion of a clear house edge of 1.4%.

In real play, several factors are likely to prompt a player to quit a series before recovery, then resume betting at the appropriate level elsewhere. A sim can't imitate boredom, hunger, fatigue or a need to pee, among other human responses, but table limits play a key role and they can be factored in.

The way it works is that the sim starts and ends series after series as a "live" player would, but the spreadsheet platform enables a human to scroll down, identify a spread limit trigger, and respond to it.

The job is done by "freezing" all of the outcomes or rounds up to that point, then refreshing the RNG to simulate play continuing at a different layout.

This is done whenever a spread limit trigger arises, and my assumption is first that at a $5 table, a $100 bet is as high as a real player would be able to go without attracting unwanted attention. After that, the rule is a spread of 1-5: lose a $500 bet after starting out with a minimum wager at a $100 table, and move on, then a $2,500 bet, and so on.

Series very rarely drag on for long (the average EOS comes in less than six bets) so this is not nearly as complicated or tedious a procedure as it sounds.

The point is that flesh-and-blood players do not suffer the kind of downturns that the robot at the heart of a runaway sim is required to ignore in order for the routine to "prove" that no betting method can ever beat the house advantage. It is simply not human nature to take a relentless beating when real money is at stake without taking appropriate evasive action.

Runaway sims are dishonest. But in some ways, that's not a bad thing for a cool, calm and disciplined player who knows how to beat the odds and win consistently.

Here's the latest BST blackjack data (playing the $500 win progression rule!).

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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The latest BST session should have turned out very badly. It didn't. Maybe next time?

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The conventional wisdom holds that because the house advantage at casino table games is immutable and invincible, any attempt to beat it must ultimately prove fruitless.

The message from the experts is that you can't win, so trying is a waste of time.

They tell me to "just do the math," and my problem is that the more math I do (applying far more strict standards of fairness and accuracy than most mathematicians I have encountered) the shakier and more vulnerable the house advantage proves to be.

In this post, fewer words, more pictures. Here they are (and as always, clicking on any image will make it larger and fully legible)...


I'm not a big fan of double-up or Martingale betting, not because it doesn't work (in spite of what house-trained mythematicians will tell you, it really does) but because it is quickly spotted by pit personnel who will then do whatever it takes to stop it. The chart above shows that against the current BST outcomes, the traditional Martingale and my more aggressive version of it both overcame the house edge without exceeding the house limit I imposed (a house limit being the highest permitted table limit). The summary above also reminds us that target betting is a far better way to go.

The data below cover the current batch of BST trials (#15) and have a lot to tell us about the inherent weakness of the house advantage, as long as it is not bolstered by tight spread limits. Casinos do all they can to prevent players from "betting wide" but gamblers are themselves the strictest enforcers of this damaging rule. Very few weekend punters spread wider than 1-5, and those that do (mostly high rollers) do it randomly. Bad idea!



Of all the claims I have made for my methods, the one that attracts the most flack is the target betting axiom that "if you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win won't hurt you." Yeah, I get it, they tell me, "You bet more when you know you are going to win and less when you know you are going to lose." Funny stuff! And very un-smart. You don't need a crystal ball to achieve this important objective, but you do need a strict set of rules and the discipline to apply them consistently.



In the latest BST contest, as in most of them, target betting could not succeed against a $5-$1,000 spread limit. And as always, I am not in the least surprised. Don't tell me that the bets that target betting requires are too high or that the risks my methods impose are beyond the reach of the average part-time punter. Tight spreads are far more dangerous than a controlled progression, as you can see (AGAIN) from the latest BST numbers. And this whole thing is not about making "recreational gamblers" rich on a shoestring budget: it's about proving that as well as not deserving to win as much as they do, casinos do not have to win as much as they do. The Math repeatedly proves that point.


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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.
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You will never be able to predict the outcome of the next bet, but target betting makes sure you always bet the right amount at the right time.

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"Negative" is a word that frequently crops up in discussions about gambling and how to win, and the axiom is that negative expectation must eventually have negative results.

It's nonsense.

The truth is that the house advantage at casino games of chance can be the player's good friend, because the baseline percentage value can never be large enough to make winning impossible.

Casinos would be happy to offer games with a house advantage far greater than blackjack's +/- 1.0% or even roulette's 5.26%, and sometimes it seems not a day goes by without some new "side bet" appearing on table layouts to tempt easy money from players who can't or won't do the math.

The gambling industry knows, however, that winners play a critical role in their business. Why? Because games that could not be beaten would very quickly run out of suckers.

Casinos rely on the fact that most players are unconcerned about odds: they just want to be able to win once in a while, so they won't feel foolish. The only way that can happen is if the house edge is kept in check (usually less than 1.5% at mega-money games such as baccarat and blackjack).

Because of the random nature of all games, the house edge will sometimes tip far above the known expectation of 1.0% or whatever, a negative trend that will occur only a little more frequently than an opposite pattern.

Especially interesting to me is the fact that most players will bet more during a losing streak than they will against a winning one, making it almost impossible for them to "get out of the hole" when a prolonged negative trend is finally over.

It stands to sense (and simple arithmetic) that flat or random betting against negative expectation is more likely to lose than to win. So the only alternative to losing long term is a disciplined method of money management that minimizes the damage from losing trends and maximizes the profit from a positive pattern.

In two words: progressive betting. In two better words: target betting.

The casinos and their house-trained "experts" work very hard to make sure that the words above are perceived as dirty ones.

That's because progressive betting consistently upsets "the math" for the house, repeatedly and indefinitely enabling the player to make money in spite of losing more bets than he wins.

Obviously, you will never see those proliferating side bets I mentioned earlier flagged with signs warning players "Don't waste your money, this is a seriously dumb bet."

And for the same reason, people who bet stupidly without taking the trouble to learn the game they are playing are never taken aside and given helpful advice on how to protect and conserve their bankroll.

The only way you will ever prompt a lecture on odds and optimum play from pit personnel is if you are spotted betting a progression. (Please see the comments at left under the heading, "An easy way to test the lie that progressive betting can't win").

If you want the house to love you to bits, showering you with sundry "comps" to induce you not to go next door or across the street, bet randomly within a very tight spread (1-5 is standard for most weekend punters), and keep telling yourself that losing is fun.

If you want to win, do as I tell you!

Here are numbers from the latest BST blackjack attack...

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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Everybody gets lucky once in a while. Penny-ante punters depend on it. If you are target betting, you don't need luck (but be grateful anyway!).

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In the interests of political correctness, even though being PC is no longer fashionable, let me say right now that I have nothing against penny-ante punters.

I respect and welcome them, because without them there would be no casinos.

They mystify and occasionally (when they stray onto "my" blackjack table and play badly) they frustrate me, but I would not be without them for the world.

The latest BST session inspired me to state the obvious, as in the headline above this post.

But in a field where what little discussion there is tends to be dominated by academic mathematicians who may never have placed a bet in their lives, stating the obvious is essential.

Target betting succeeds with predictable consistency because win-loss patterns, regardless of the randomness of individual outcomes, are in themselves predictable and consistent.

When bet values are also selected at random, the house advantage is almost certain to win, the exceptions being lucky streaks (accidents!) in which the player wins more bets than he loses, or when by a fluke he achieves an average win value that exceeds his average loss value.

If you give target betting a fair and open-minded trial, you will learn that end of series (EOS) bets occur every three bets, on average (less, actually, but only mythematicians know how to place 0.7 of a bet!).

Most of those recovery attempts will FAIL.

The failure rate for EOS wagers is also predictable: roughly 53%.

But what might seem to you like a worrisome demonstration of the inevitability of more losses than wins is in reality the reason why target betting can fail only very, very rarely indeed.

That's because the value of each EOS bet is not randomly selected, making each failure just a temporary setback.

There will always be more failures than successes. But the combined value of the smaller number of successes will always exceed the total value of the greater number of failures. Result: happiness!

The first session in the latest BST trial (which now may not end until I have reached 100,000 outcomes) was a perfect example of how accidental good timing can improve the performance of a betting method that is already very difficult for the house to beat.

The sample had 7 more losses than wins, but in spite of that, the profit after the last EOS was $9,835.

That was with the BST 1-200 ($5-$1,000) spread/table limit in force.

Target betting without the wimpy TL did less well, but only because I'm still working on modeling my real-time responses to dealer naturals and 3+ 21s:

bst090327a: 7.5 net AV = +3.52%, target win $3,798 = 29.49% of $12,878 action
227.5 net rounds incl 3-2 naturals, average bet $60, bets of $1,000+ = 10

Modeling a $1,000 TL with the same target betting rules applied produced these results:

7.5 net AV/HA = 3.52%, target win $7,500 = +3.30% of $227,500 total action
227.5 net rounds incl 3-2 naturals, average bet $1,068, bets of $1,000+ = 213

The standouts in these data are the ones that always highlight themselves: a much bigger action number with the BST TL imposed, caused by a far greater need for bets of $1,000 or more (10 with a wide spread vs. 213 with a "house" spread).

I have to confess at this point that the last few BST summaries have exaggerated the number of big-ticket bets for the BST TL. It is one of the hazards of spreadsheet modeling that every once in a while, a "bad" cell will proliferate, skewing results until the glitch is exposed.

I am as a rule a demon error-checker, but this one got by me for a week or so. Turns out the exaggeration goosed the numbers, but not by much. Here's a revised summary with the miscount corrected:

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
As you can see, a tighter spread (1-200 vs. 1-5000) resulted in an overall loss for BST TL, along with 3.5 x target betting's total action and average bet value, and almost 20 times the number of $1,000+ bets for a method that most people would assume to be "less aggressive."

In every sample that had a negative net AV/HA, the BST table limit delivered an overall loss, rendering target betting as ineffectual as any other betting method, including fixed or random values. And that of course is the whole purpose of spread limits: to ensure that the house advantage exacts its ordained toll on players who dare to challenge it.

When a player is able to widen his spread to suit his current needs, the house advantage becomes almost irrelevant.

A wide spread enables you to win more when you win than you lose when you lose, so that losing more often than you win will not prevent you from walking away from the game a winner. Isn't that what everyone on our side of the tables wants?

The best news of all is that with target betting strictly applied, single wins are all it takes to achieve recovery around 65% of the time. That's important, because isolated wins occur about twice as often as paired wins ("twins"!).

So, if you gamble because you believe in luck and imagine that you can somehow get more than your share, be ready to lose. If, like me, you accept that luck is a fickle ally and a plan is a whole lot more reliable and predictable than flying by the seat of your pants, welcome to target betting.

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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The YCW (you can't win) Brigade will tell you that if you can't be sure of winning, you should never attempt a betting strategy...

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...but if you don't have a plan, you are much more likely to lose.

It is plain to see who benefits most from the gambling attitude promoted by mythematicians, who go on to say: "You should think of gambling as entertainment, nothing more, and only bet what you can afford to lose."

My advice is fundamentally different: "Play to win, but don't play at all if you can't afford to win."

In other words, if a penny-ante bankroll is all you can muster (and there's no shame in that!) then you will probably be better off to trust to blind luck and hope that at worst, you break even.

Beating negative odds requires a bankroll large enough to keep you in the game through the inevitable rough spots when the house edge is temporarily far greater than standard negative expectation.

The latest batch of BST figures is not much different from its predecessors. It shows "the house" getting way ahead in terms of player losses vs. player wins, and as long as the 1-200 spread limit is applied, the result is another loss for the good guys (who don't work for the casino, let's be clear about that!).

Set target betting loose with an appropriate bankroll, and as before, we end up with an overall win with the total action (sessions A and B combined) greatly reduced. Also per prior experience, we see far more "big ticket" bets when the BST table limit is applied than without it.

So much for "conservative" play!

The BST results have been truly demoralizing lately, without target betting giving up a thin dime.

Here are the current "Batch #s 1-15 to date" numbers:-

Win Rate TD 100.0000%

ALL ahead +$1,715,420 = +5.17% of
$33,161,885 action
$25,000 max
$444 avg bet
$2,299 per hour
5.2 x avg bet


RISK (181,475) = 18.14% of bankroll
return 945%

EOS x 13,403 in 74,620 rounds
Avg EOS 5.6 rounds

AV/HA -5.28% (3,938) -5.28%
Expected ($1,750,087) per gross AV or (597) per net AV of -0.80%
TA/T 2.0 x expected result


+ MAX 12
- MIN -16
ABV $444
$1,000+ 3,536 4.74% of all bets

+ series 4,286 32%
0 series 4,153 31%
- series 4,964 37%
1-win EOS 8,737 65%

Most of the data are self-explanatory. Note that betting my way, big-ticket wagers were less than 5% of the total, and that the win to date represents better than a 5.0% "hold" of total action, against an overall house edge of between 0.8% and 5.28%, depending on the method of measurement.

Sometime soon, I will post average bet and $1,000+ data for a 1-200 spread for all 15 BST models, but it is safe to predict that action will be way up, the result will be an overall loss in line with negative expectation, and max bets will be in the majority, not a rare event at 1 in 20 or less.

I use a "net" number for the house edge (HA) or actual value (AV) which factors in doubles, splits and 3-2 payoffs for naturals. The old-fashioned way is to count hands as either won or lost: do that, and you end up with an HA that's more than SIX TIMES greater than my more inclusive approach.

As you can see, winning series (hey, they were ALL winning series) with more bets lost than won greatly outnumbered series with more wins than losses. Series that were negative or neutral still account for 68% of the total, so "expectation" demanded either a break-even or a loss in all those instances. Sorry, expectation.

The trial opened with a $1,000,000 bankroll almost 75,000 blackjack hands ago, and that has long since been covered by winnings, plus a 70% return on the investment which does not include $1,000,000 in profits left in the bankroll to take us through future downturns.

Maximum exposure for the initial bankroll was $181,475, or a little more than 18%.

I do not expect target betting to keep winning forever.

At some point, a win-loss pattern will be encountered that first pushes the strategy to its maximum bet, leaving it at the mercy of an ongoing negative surge that exceeds expectation for the game.

Then, the strategy will cease to be a strategy at all...it will have to wait out the surge and hope that sanity returns before the balance of the bankroll is swallowed up.

In the 300,000+ baccarat outcomes discussed in earlier blog posts, there was just one "crash and burn" and target betting came out way, way ahead in spite of it (see the archives or do a baccarat search).

The certainty is that winning sessions will always hugely outnumber losing sessions if you follow my rules.

The experts warn that the million-dollar bust could happen today or tomorrow, long before you have built up enough profits to avoid actual loss of your original buy-in.

But my way, probability is overwhelmingly on your side. Their way, it's against you every time you belly up to a blackjack table. The choice, of course, is yours!

The (nearly) 75,000 BST outcomes break down as follows:

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

Just for the fun of it, each of the target betting models also tracks results for two versions of the widely derided Martingale, the old-fashioned x2 kind (-5, -10, -20 etc.) and a more aggressive update which brings in more dough with a modified progression: -5, -10, -25, -50, -100, -250 etc.).

The YCW preachers scorn double-up as suicide, warning that "you will hit the table limit, and then what?"

"What," my friends (all of a sudden I'm John McCain?) is a move to a new location where the required NB is permitted. And if at some point you hit a house- or self-imposed green ceiling that can't be defied, then you keep on betting the max. The odds are very much in your favor that the WLP will stabilize and you will recover prior losses and then some.

Once again, I will say that I don't recommend double-up, not because it's a losing method, but because it is too easily spotted and casino pit staff will invariably interfere with its use.

I don't have double-up numbers for all 15 BST sessions yet, but here are the data for the current batch (#15). Notice that target betting is a more effective alternative.

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Here are the newest BST numbers. I have to stop doing this. But maybe not quite yet?

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The BST "table-limit" bets enormously outnumber max bets with target betting rules because in the current batch, a tight-spread punter would have been at the limit for the last 1,200 rounds. And since he's in the hole by more than $65,000, he is going to be betting the max until the cows come home.

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.
_

"Even with a win rate higher than 99.99%, someone has to lose - and it could be you."

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Back in the good old days when gambling discussion forums were not fatally targeted by spammers (and newspapers still made a profit), the topic of progressive betting brought frequent posts from a contributor who always signed his name with "Ph.D." after it, his presumed purpose being to tell us he was smarter than us, so we'd better shut up and listen.

The other day, I came across an old post from the guy I came to know fondly as "Harvey Phudd" and I offer it to you for your comments...

"The pythagorean theorem is more than 3000 years old, and it is still correct. You are implying that since the mathematics you blithely ignore is more than a century old that that the theorems are invalid. Sorry, the various theorems of probability and statistics that lead to the inevitable conclusion that "money management" or progressions can (sic) change the fundamental expectation of a gambling game are still valid.
"Progressions due (sic) skew results. That is, the chance of walking out at even or better is significantly increased. In some case, the increase is significantly in excess of 99%. No one disputes this. What you don't seem to understand is that the average win, when the progression system wins, is reduced, sometimes greatly, and the average loss, when the system loses, is significantly elevated.
"This is comparable, in the extreme, to a game where there are 2 blue marbles and 999,998 yellow marbles in a jar. A marble is drawn at random. The player wins $1 if a yellow marble is drawn and loses $1,000,000 if a blue marble is drawn. In this case, the player will almost always win this game. At some point, assuming that many players play, a player will lose now and again. The house (the casino) will make money on this game and yes, many players will also make money on this game. Heaven help the poor souls who lose however."

Harvey's argument typifies mythematics, which requires its followers to fudge facts and fiddle numbers and do whatever it takes to support the casinos' ordained right to beat the (stuffing) out of the rest of us.

Funnily enough, a believer in progressive betting or money management does not defy ancient axioms, whether Pythagorean or not, because it stands to modern as well as ancient sense that if you lose more bets than you win and bet flat or randomly, you must also eventually lose more money than you win.

My argument is with the assertion by Harvey Phudd and his ilk that a betting strategy that follows known and broadly predictable patterns in random outcomes cannot ever turn negative expectation on its ear.

Hell's bells! In the current BST trials, we're up to almost 75,000 outcomes and as you can see from the summary below, 68% of the series from which we made a handy profit were either negative or neutral, indicating that target betting "should have" lost 37% of the time and at best broken even 31% of the time.

It.
Didn't.
Happen.

Expectation is being in effect reversed in more than 2 series in every 3, and is being exceeded in those that remain.

Harvey is at least expanding the usually rigid, tiny-framed picture a little by saying that progressive betting can win close to 100% of the time but among thousands of players who make money from it, one or more is sure to go broke. It's the billion-bet runaway sim in a different guise.

I can't fight the argument that if a player takes no defensive measures whatsoever, he will lose eventually. But what does it tell us? That stupidity in a casino (often in the form of greed, ignorance, fatigue, distraction, or over-consumption of free booze) is a bad idea? I think most of us knew that already, Harvey.

Harvey concedes that progressions do skew results, and as long as my odds are being skewed to the good, I am in favor of that idea.

In the end, the choice is between negative odds of 495 to 505 (in a 1.0% game such as blackjack) or positive odds of 9,999 to 1 or better (13,328 to 0 in the current blackjack trial!) and I think I can guess which option most gamblers would prefer.

Harvey's million-marble analogy is interesting, but absent a Ph.D. I struggle to get his point. If the "winning" marbles don't go back in the jar, then sure, the odds of picking the right color will diminish with each bet until some sucker is sure to make an expensive mistake. Otherwise, odds that good are far better than those we face every time we get out of bed in the morning.

I know it's just an analogy, Harvey, but are there really people out there willing to risk $1,000,000 to win $1?

I'm comfortable risking a virtual "mill" at target betting because I know that soon enough, accumulated winnings will exceed my original seven-figure stake and I will be able to put it back in the bank and play on with my profits backing me.

Harvey is wrong when he says that average wins are reduced by progressive betting: the diametric opposite is true. And I doubt he meant to say, as he does above, that money management can change negative expectation, even though, for once, he was right.

It may also be true that even if you and me and everyone we know adopts target betting and wins consistently with it until we each fall off our perch, it will not alter the fact that casinos collectively will continue to reap fat rewards from the house advantage.

That has more to do with the nature of most gamblers than the numbers for or against progressive betting. Most gamblers expect to lose, even want to lose, and will do little or nothing to improve their chances, so perhaps they deserve their inevitable fate.

I have been warned on occasion that challenging or tampering with the status quo is immoral and unfair, and that casinos have a divine right to profit from the idiocy of the average gambler.

I say that if house games can be beaten without cheating or breaking the rules in any way, as many people as possible should be taught how to do it.

Here's the latest BST session. And OK, it's time for me to admit to myself that I am addicted to this process! I keep hearing the skeptics cry, "But it won't work next time!" and I have to keep on saying, "Just watch me win again!" And then I do.

(Good news that will be supported in detail in a later post is that almost TWO of ever THREE winning series will end with a single win, rather than the "twin" wins that are required for recovery without the OL and MSL rules in place. OL is short for opening loss, and calls for NB=PBx5 if the first bet in a new series goes south; MSL is mid-series loss and says that if PB is less than or equal to $1,000, the NB=LTD+ rule is repeated).


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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.
_

Another cold and wintry day brings another ray of sunshine for target betting in defiance of the conventional "wisdom."

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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.
_

Another day, another lesson that tight spreads will kill you. (Once you hit that "green ceiling," there's nowhere to go but down).

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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.
_

A little progressive betting perspective here, and some thoughts on why robots can't ski, and gorillas can't putt...

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In a situation where you have lost several bets in a row or losses outnumber wins so much that you are in a deep hole, you have two recovery options:

Increase your bet values in the hope that going forward, a smaller number of wins will undo the damage done by a greater number of losses, OR
Keep betting the same amount each time, and cross your fingers that soon, the number of wins will exceed the number of losses, resulting in a profit.

Advocates of card counting will tell you that the only winning method is to set bet values according to the high/low ratio of the cards remaining to be dealt in the deck or shoe, and to control the spread to avoid attracting attention.

Counting only applies in blackjack, of course, and even then has to overcome the fact that a "rich" deck is only fractionally better for the player than for the house, if at all.

I have always questioned the message that comes across in pretty much every book about gambling that was ever written and in all mathematical papers on the subject: "Sorry, suckers...you can't win."

The truth is that you can win, and win consistently. But not if you play like a fool.

Over the years I have used several analogies to help illustrate the unscientific idiocy of applying clumsy runaway sims to the nuanced art of gambling well, and two of my favorites are the golfing gorilla and the robot on skis.

The golfing gorilla putts the way he drives, so in spite of the pinpoint accuracy of his long shots, he can never win a game.

The robot on skis sometimes gets to the bottom of the slope in one piece, but more often he ends up in a crumpled heap, defeated by such subtleties as trees and rocks, moguls and other skiers.

The reality of gambling is that you are, in the end, certain to lose more often than you win.

And if you don't bet in such a way that the sum total of all your wins exceeds the sum total of your greater number of losses, you are perforce doomed to lose more money than you win.

What is required is a combination of progressive betting and a keen sense of self-preservation.

Mathematicians argue that "damage control" is a waste of time and effort because negative expectation applies equally to every bet, so running away from a losing trend is as likely to make matters worse as it is to improve them.

They reject my contention that prolonged negative patterns are a relative rarity in games of chance, even though the runaway sims that mythematicians depend upon confirm what is in any case plain common sense.

A runaway sim will show a betting strategy nosediving into ruin after a pattern of losses than no human being would tolerate.

Like the golfing gorilla and the skiing robot, sims blunder into certain failure, unable to shift balance, steer away from trouble, or modulate their "stroke."

What I am hoping readers will take away from this blog is the realization that the technique I advocate can be applied with skill and subtlety, adjusting to changing circumstances and modifying the rules to match resources.

As in golf and skiing, sometimes brute force is appropriate, and sometimes precision saves the day.

There is an alternative, of course. It's called losing.

I have posted an Excel RNG file to make it available for download. LTD+1 RNG.xls uses a simplified set of target betting rules to demonstrate that a clear house advantage can be consistently beaten. Hit the recalc (F9) key several times, and you will see far more frequent overall wins than losses. When the green line dips drastically south of the Zero line, go look for the pattern that did the damage and ask yourself if you would stick around for such a battering if you were making the decisions rather than a robot on skis or a gorilla with a 5 iron! If you don't believe that a move has a better chance of helping than hurting, freeze the RNG values above the killer series, then watch the problem disappear. Life's like that, too: bend over, and you will be badly beaten; take steps to protect yourself and you (probably) won't. The odds in your favor are better than 7 to 1 in this situation.

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.
_

If you don't want "too much information," skip these blackjack data and ignore the pattern they reveal!

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The blackjack summary in an earlier post might not be enough to convince sticklers for detail, so here are screen shots from all 15 data sets in the current BST trials.

Click on any of the images to make them readable, but before you do that, you might want to see the pattern that emerges here.

Narrow spreads, which most weekend punters use because their limited bankrolls offer them no alternative, fail in almost every set of outcomes.

The "safe" range is 1-1,000 and above ($10 to $10,000 up to $5 to $25,000).

Please keep these things in mind:

• Money alone cannot "buy the pot" as all the millionaires who have ever gone broke in a casino can attest!
• Almost always, a wider spread results in reduced overall action and a dramatic drop in the number of high bets, defined here as $1,000-plus. That translates to much greater risk when spreads are constrained voluntarily by a player or by table limits, not the opposite as we are encouraged to believe.
• Table limits vary greatly from casino to casino and even from one layout to the next in the same casino, so there is no need to accept a "green ceiling" if your bankroll allows you to move to a richer game when target betting rules require it.

Average bet values plummet as your betting spread widens, and simple logic explains why: Spreading wider enables recovery series to "turn around" more rapidly, and so fewer high-value bets are required before the NB value falls back to the minimum.

Casinos seeking to cripple consistent winners without kicking them out the door have a simple solution: a "flat bets only" rule. Think about that!

The closer your spread comes to flat betting, the more trouble you are likely to get into. Think of it this way: Wider Is Nicer, which boils down to an appropriate acronym...WIN.

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.
_

Mythematics: Any sample of outcomes, however large, is totally unique. Reality: If that were so, there would be no house advantage.

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The gambling industry's mighty disinformation machine holds that the house edge cannot be beaten in the long run because every sample of random outcomes differs from every other except in one component: negative expectation.

We are all supposed to believe that a sample of more than 70,000 blackjack outcomes like those in the current BST trial can never be duplicated, so a betting method that beats that data set will fail against another of similar size.

Quelle crappe! comme ils disent en France.

It is, like so much of the conventional wisdom applied to gambling, a partial truth. And we all know that a half truth is not a whole lot truer than a lie.

Within a representative sample of more than 50,000 outcomes, pair patterns will be constantly repeated, three-round patterns less so, identical four-bet sequences less often, and so on. By the time you widen the sample within a sample to look for identical patterns of 10 bets or more, you are going to be out of luck.

So it is true to say that one large sample of random outcomes can never be precisely repeated.

And that begs the terse two-word question: So what?

The house relies for its profits on broad or big picture predictability in two critical areas, player behavior and/or resources, and random win-loss patterns.

The house edge is more reliably predictable the larger the sample of outcomes, and much the same applies to gamblers (the bigger the crowd, the deeper the hole!).

There may be a few dozen outcomes in which the house advantage can barely be discerned, just as a handful of players in thousands might have the knowledge and bankroll to be a serious threat to the casino's bottom line.

But the further we "zoom out" in terms of sample size, the more likely it is that the house advantage will prevail and that the majority of gamblers, even those who won more bets than they lost, will surrender their bankrolls in dutiful compliance with with negative expectation.

Today's post revisits the topic of the certain danger inherent in tight betting spreads by examining expanded data from the BST blackjack trials.

Here's a summary:-

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What this tells us is that narrow spreads (defined as 1-500 or less!) are virtually certain to fail, even with target betting rules applied. And the negative odds, bad as they already are, worsen still further if disciplined money management is not in play.

I have used a $5-$25,000 spread (1-5,000) throughout the blackjack trials, and I am well used to skeptics squawking in unison that a bet range that wide is ludicrously unrealistic and far out of the reach of the regular weekend punter.

To take the last point first, the regular weekend punter has neither the resources nor the desire to do what it takes to win consistently.

And in this context the only function of the "recreational gambler" is to provide the gambling industry with the profits it needs to pay off a few winners here and there without going broke.

Very large bets are indeed a reality, especially in casinos that try to cater simultaneously to shoestring players arriving by coach to fritter their tiny wads on the slots, and high rollers winging in from afar in private jets.

A $25,000 bet is 10% of what some "whales" will risk on the turn of a card, and no one knows better than the gambling industry that big bucks do not a winner make any more than does a penny-ante purse-full! In other words, the pot cannot be bought...it has to be earned.

I remember years ago playing at a blackjack table with an immaculately-dressed and courteous gent from Mexico City whose response when the dealer warned us of her current hot streak was, "You can't beat me; I have too much money."

He said it with tongue in cheek, but I got the feeling he believed it, and ever since I have wondered how he fared during his wild weekend in Nevada. Badly, I fear.

Money is essential to long-term success at gambling, there is no doubt about that. But money alone will not beat the house advantage in the long run.

As for the claimed "uniqueness" of large blocks of random outcomes, casinos know that even a runaway sim cannot produce representative data sets in which prolonged negative trends are not at least partially offset by opposite patterns.

It simply can't be done.

A gambler who, like most players, relies on winning more bets than he loses will eventually surrender his bankroll. That's a fact. Even an equal number of wins and losses is a long-term impossibility in a game with a house bias (and of course, there is no other kind).

The only way to win, therefore, is to recoup losses from a succession of "wrong" bets with a smaller number of winners.

To repeat a simple example: 49 wins and 51 losses against a game with a 2.0% house edge adds up to red ink if the overall average bet value is $10; but if the average win value is $10.50 and the average loss value is $9.50, $514.50 in wins trump $484.50 in losses in spite of that same 2.0% house edge, delivering a profit equal to a 3.0% "hold" of action.

The house always has complete confidence that over time, wild fluctuations against it will be evened out by the anti-player bias, and that a slightly greater number of player losses than wins will, given random bet values, make the game profitable for the casino.

Without that "big picture" predictability, any game would be too risky for the house to venture. And that's the name of that tune...

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.
_

Give target betting a try where your learner's mistakes won't cost you cash. Then please share your experience with me!

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I could keep on posting new examples of target betting demolishing a house edge far greater than negative expectation, but there are people out there who will not believe it until they do it themselves.

And that is how it should be.

What I have been working hard to demonstrate here is that my method's consistent success is not a fluke, it is just common sense and arithmetic at work.

The basics of target betting have been around for more than three decades and available on the Internet since 1997, but still I get warnings that my ideas won't work "next time."

How many next times do there have to be, I wonder?

I once had an interesting conversation with the publisher of a now-defunct gambling magazine who summarily dismissed all my claims for target betting, but added: "Even very smart people who ought to know better wish in their hearts that the house advantage could be beaten. And if you show them something new in a casino and start winning real money as they watch, they are very easily impressed."

His point was that personal experience is a more powerful influence than prejudice or theory, adding that the keenest academic minds can be dulled by the thrill of an easy win.

So anyone contributing to this unending series of trials should fight any temptation to rush to judgment, even if their judgment is that target betting is the only way to win.

My publisher friend said that for his part, he would remain officially unconvinced if I showed him solid wins against millions of verifiable outcomes, and he hinted that I had come to the wrong place for support.

And of course he was right.

Most of his advertising came from casinos, and his sponsors would be seriously unamused if he started teaching his readers how to threaten the gambling industry's billions in profits.

I had naively assumed that his magazine put its readers first and would be glad to make gambling more pleasurable for them. But without casino ads, there would be no publication, and sometimes self-interest trumps the greater good (ask any politician!).

Here's the latest BST session, the last for a while (winning is fun, but less fun when there's no real money to take to the cashier's cage!). Hopefully one of these days, I will be posting results that other people have obtained.

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A few more words about spread limits...

Given BST's $1,000 table limit against the current batch of blackjack outcomes to date (2,418 bets), with no target betting rules applied, a by-the-book player would have squeaked out a win of $5,388/$642,815 (+0.84%) with an average bet value (ABV) of $266 and 604 bets of $1,000+.

With only target betting's LTD+ rule added, the win would have been $13,553/$1.04m (+1.31%), ABV $428, 943 x $1,000+.

Bump the table limit to $25,000, add the full array of target betting rules, and you get an overall win of $44,635/$786,000 (+5.68%), ABV $325, 131 x $1,000+.

The notion that tight spreads and a low green ceiling constitute a smarter way to bet is exposed for what it truly is: mythematics, devised by the gambling industry for the gambling industry, with player protection not even a passing consideration.

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.
_

Mythematical logic: Winning 50,000 sessions in a row is irrelevant; It only counts when you lose. And you will always lose in the end.

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If you want America's casinos to welcome your patronage, it is important for you to always keep in mind that serious attempts at winning are frowned upon.

Gambling is meant to be fun, not a regular source of revenue. Unless, of course, you own a casino.

Most of the academic mathematicians I have encountered over the years dismiss even the most prolonged winning record as non-representative and therefore irrelevant.

The word they like to use the most is anecdotal, meaning that even the most promising results, whatever the size of the sample, are unique and therefore have no bearing on future performance.

When the conventional wisdom fails to explain the success of target betting, its promoters often abandon their lofty academic posture and ask such questions as, If your method is so effective, why aren't you just using it to make millions instead of telling the world about it?

Or Why can't you accept the results that you say you are getting are impossible and stop wasting everyone's time?.

Believe me or not, if I had not for years been getting results that defy negative expectation, without the need for cheating or self-delusion, I would have given up this quest a long time ago.

Mathematicians might think I am innumerate and suffering from (I love this word) dyscalculia, but in truth I am a logical person, drawn to the magic of numbers but not academically trained in it.

I was also at one time in my life an inveterate gambler, and gave up challenging unbeatable odds in my early 20s because the "amateur arithmetician" inside kept telling me there had to be a better way.

Here's the latest BST data...

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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.
_

You'd think a strategy that gives players favorable odds better than 5,000 to 1 would be a serious threat to casinos. Why it isn't...

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Gamblers are their own worst enemies. Casinos know that, exploit it, and are grateful.

Blackjack is probably the most documented game in gambling, or was before the current poker craze caught on. That's because it is the only "house game" in which how a player plays his hand is almost as important as how he handles his money.

Poker, of course, is not a house game: the casino takes a percentage or "rake" from every pot or applies a fixed charge per round, but participants are betting against each other.

That's the main reason poker interests me only as a spectator sport, and even then not much.

My aim is for every punter on the planet to win a little, and the house - all casinos everywhere - to lose a lot. We know that they, at least, can afford it!

In spite of all the good advice that can be had about blackjack in particular, very few people bother to learn the fundamentals of good play, and fewer still remember the right moves when the pressure's on.

Back in the '50s and '60s, when card counting began to catch on, the casinos panicked and began to dream up all manner of dodges to thwart players who had the bad manners to try to win.

Then they realized that the measures they had brought in to defend against a tiny minority of players were irritating everyone else. They did the math, and concluded that there was more money to be made from keeping the masses happy than could be saved by defeating the disciples of card counting.

I tried card-counting way back when and became pretty good at it. But in the end it falls foul of the fact that a "rich" deck (one with more 10s than the expected ratio) is often as good for the house as it is for the player, and over time expectation remains negative.

Other problems with counting are its narrow betting spreads (the experts warn against anything wider than 1-10) and its requirement that you have to stick around and keep playing against one deck or shoe - you cannot keep moving, as I recommend whenever the bad guys are getting all the good hands!

Of course I accept that adults have the right to do whatever they want with their money, and if their choice includes defying preposterous odds in the hope of making a big killing, it is none of my business.

Or to put it more selfishly, the more losers there are, the more opportunities there will be for winners to get in the game. And judging from the folks I get to meet every time I visit a casino, for them losing really is fun.

So, back to the heart of it all: tight betting spreads, and most importantly, narrow spreads that players impose on themselves, do much, much more to boost a casino's bottom line than the piddly percentage values of the house advantage at any given game.

Most players bet against themselves and still manage to lose. All the house has to do is provide a game, along with an occasional "free" drink. Give 'em a rope, you might say.

The latest BST sessions produced some numbers that I find interesting, and I hope you will too. Most people will ignore them!

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Again, it's all about spread limits, which really are the nitty-gritty when it comes to beating the odds (forget about card counting, rabbits' feet and all that other hocus-pocus!).

As reported in the session summary, a 1-200 table limit (far wider than most players would dream of betting) results in 1,088 bets of $1,000-plus, the "plus" applying to splits and doubles, an average bet value of $792, and a hefty overall loss.

In contrast, against the same outcomes, target betting delivers a win worth almost 10% of total action, 73 bets of $1,000-plus, and an ABV of $208, or less than one third of the average bet required by so-called "conservative" play.

Over and over again, the BST table limit defeats by-the-book play, but the same outcomes are easily beaten by target betting.

The casinos are of course paranoid about anyone who beats them consistently, and so target betting does run into trouble now and then, not from what comes out of the shoe but from the people in the pit behind it.

It doesn't matter much in the long run.

Suppose that you are target betting and a canny pit boss keeps his distance until you are in a deep hole before stepping up and asking you to leave.

You are, say, $10,000 down, with a $2,000 bet due, and all of a sudden, you're out of the game. No problem. By now, you will be ahead of the overall game by tens of thousands, and a little patience is not going to leave you broke.

Just save the current NB/LTD numbers for another time, another place. In the gambling business, there is always someone, somewhere ready to take your bet.

In my book, I talk about two concepts, team play, which is self-explanatory, and tier play, which isn't.

Human nature often makes team play more hazardous than it ought to be, but the general idea is that if you hit a road block like the one I just described, you just pull out your cell phone and text the critical numbers to another player, who picks up the ball and runs with it until recovery is achieved.

Tier play splits casinos into different categories: $5-$200, $200-$2,500, $2,500 to $10,000 and $10,000-plus, for example.

At the "D" or lowest level, every time you lose a bet of $200+ you abandon the series, and start over with a minimum bet, gradually accumulating a block of NB/LTD numbers to be played out at level "C" later. And so it goes on.

Skeptics have suggested that the tier concept I describe is no different than betting a tight spread with, in many cases, far higher opening bets than I usually apply to target betting trials.

But that's just not true.

What the strategy does is not just tell you how much to bet, but when to stop...and those last three words describe a winner's biggest dilemma.

Target betting does as its name indicates. It provides a player who's "in the hole" with a goal to meet, then tells him to reduce his bet once he gets there.

Every haphazard or random player that ever was has tales to tell about the time he got way ahead, then lost everything because he kept his bets too high. Do that, and you are at the mercy of the house advantage. And if the WLP has already been unusually kind to you, chances are that you are due for more losses than wins.

Don't confuse this with the famous Gambler's Fallacy which holds that after a string of losses, the very next bet is "more likely" to win. It isn't. But in a situation where eight bets out of ten have been losses, giving the house an edge of 60%, it is safe to surmise that during the next several bets, there will be more wins than losses. Maybe.

Remember, with target betting you don't need 8 wins to recover your losses from 8 wrong bets. Just a couple will do the trick, and with the MSL rule applied, one win will be enough.

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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Read between the ads, and you will find the casinos' true message: "You can't win so don't waste time trying. Just learn how to love losing."

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Here's a question for anyone out there who fits the gambling industry's profile of the perfect punter.

Which is riskier: Betting to a $1,000 table limit, and then hoping your luck will change while you are at the max, or switching locations so you can make even bigger bets - up to $25,000! - until you recover past losses and can fall back to a minimum bet?

OK, OK, the answer is obvious because of who's asking the question, but let's look at facts confirmed in the latest BST challenge.

In the first session logged below, a target betting player following the current rules variation (see the second screen shot for details) would have won $4,208 on total action of $31,778, which is +13.2%. Betting the BST table limit would have resulted in a LOSS of $2,500 on total action of $237,500 (-1.05%).

The target bettor's average bet value would have been $136. His "cautious" counterpart's ABV would have been $1,019 (higher than the table limit because of splits/doubles).

In the split session that preceded this one, the numbers were: (Part A) Target betting +$4,905/$30,615 = +16.02% ABV $114; BST Lim +$4,875/$33,815 = +14.4% ABV $126; (Part B) Target +$5,265/$123,055 = +4.28% ABV $136; BST Lim -$23,413/$187,878 = -12.5% ABV $1,019.

The lesson, once again: Tight spreads will kill you!!!

(Click on any image to enlarge it)



I'm in this to shake up the conventional wisdom and encourage as many people as possible to see for themselves that they are being hung out to dry, fleeced, conned and otherwise deliberately misdirected whenever they gamble.

I am not suggesting that they shouldn't visit casinos and bet when they feel like it, just that they would be better off with a full knowledge of what is involved.

Comparative numbers like those quoted here will be reflected throughout the scores of data sets featured in this blog, covering close to 400,000 "real play" outcomes in all. That is around four years of betting for a full time gambler, and a lifetime's worth for most weekend punters!

For now, let's just look back to "Batch #15," the last full set of rounds (8,020) from BST sessions. Target betting "won" (in quotes because no one has sent me a check yet) $172,398/$3.04m = +5.67%, ABV $380; table limit per BST would have lost $44,573/$5.26m = -0.85%, ABV $655.




If you remain unconvinced and need more evidence, just drop me a line.

I know there are people out there who truly believe that all this study and analysis drains the fun out of gambling, turning it into a chore rather than rest and relaxation.

Maybe. But in my experience (and I have had a lot of it) winning is a whole lot more fun than losing.

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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There's good news and bad news. Target betting prevails against yet another nasty BST sample. And finally, thanks to baccarat, we have...a loser!

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The conventional wisdom (along with the laws of probability, which do not always dovetail with the CW) requires that no betting method can win forever, and finally target betting has met a data set it really didn't like

My method has never been touted as 100% bullet-proof, and this first ruination outside of the deliberately deceptive world of runaway sims puts its win rate quite a bit higher than the 99.9920% I have used for years as a guideline preceded by the words at least.

As things stand everywhere outside of New Jersey, casinos are permitted to bar a player for any reason, and winning just a little more than probability indicates is one of them.

I have long dreamed of accumulating enough profit to be able to launch a legal challenge to this patently unreasonable state of affairs, and I suspect that a foolproof way to win would not be well received. Not that a 99.9920% WR is likely to be popular, either!

First, the latest blackjack data set...

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
I have daubed green ink all over the pencil log this time to highlight the paired (or better) wins that make it possible for target betting to overcome the fact that in this sample as in many others, there are far more losses than wins.

The term conventional wisdom can be defined as "what most people believe," and it has long been clear that where casino gambling is concerned, most people are wrong.

That is a bigger advantage to the house than the house advantage itself, and whenever I take time out from winning to watch other people's betting habits, I am reminded that while ignorance may be bliss, it can also be very expensive.

Logic confirms that if you can repeatedly turn a profit from a small series of bets in which you lost more often than you won, then it follows that over a very large number of contests, you will do serious damage to the house edge and might actually (perish the heresy!) reverse it.

If you bet flat or fixed amounts and losses outnumber wins the way Loser's Law ordains it, you will certainly lose more money than you win. That's just simple arithmetic.

But if you bet in such a way that you consistently and predictably win more when you win than you lose when you lose, then the house's bottom line will run with red ink and yours won't.

Red ink ran the wrong way for target betting in just one series out of almost 58,000 (315,000 rounds!) of baccarat supplied by two sources over which I have no control, along with no desire to alter the data they sent me.

The strategy was more than $900,000 (in Monopoly Money) ahead when the bleep hit the fan, and ended up with a +0.13% profit on turnover or action vs. an overall house edge of 0.92%.

The good news is that the setback was temporary, and was in due time more than offset by $1.97 million in wins with relatively few brown-trouser moments.

And then, of course, came seventy-odd thousand blackjack rounds against Ken Smith's BST app, and almost $1.6m in funny-money winnings.

The win rate (WR) therefore stands at 1-(1/70,000) = 99.9986%. I'm so sorry it's not 100% but, hey, we're in a recession right now.

The Rodriguez data set looks like this:

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
The crash'n burn came with the target betting rules set as indicated. When OLx was eliminated, while leaving WPx2 and MSL-1000 intact, the ruination turned into jubilation with a win of +4.7% of action. That's a big endorsement for the entire LTD+ after a win concept that is at the very core of target betting.

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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