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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