Would a car crash at full throttle with the brakes disabled and no one behind the wheel? Will you lose at house games if you play like an idiot?

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The central plank in the mythematics of gambling is that a high-speed computer simulation of output from a random game of chance is exactly the same as the real thing, and so a betting method that can't beat a "sim" will fail in real play.

It is a great argument, swallowed whole by millions and bolstered by the implication that anyone who challenges simulated outcomes must be trying to hide fraudulence or foolishness, or both.

Sims are, of course, wonderful things, enabling mythematicians to bury any threat to the house advantage under a billion bets in the blink of an eye. That makes them far more convenient than the time-consuming task of testing a betting method in real time (a billion bets at, say, 100,000 rounds a year would take 10,000 years to play out!).

Trouble is, sims eliminate all the primary elements of games of chance: cards, dice, tables, wheels, real time, and, most important of all, people.

Imagine an automobile safety test that required a new car to survive being pushed at full throttle down a winding mountain road with the brakes and gas pedal disabled and no one behind the wheel. It would crash and burn, for sure. And the "safety test" would be unfair and utterly meaningless.

So it is with sims.

If all gamblers were robots who sat still and sucked up whatever the dealer, the dice or the wheel threw at them, betting flat or random sums without a thought of self-preservation until their money ran dry, runaway sims might accurately mimic their behavior.

But not all players are fools.

Many actually recognize that tables and shoes grow hot and cold and that prolonged negative trends can kill them, and they respond to playing conditions accordingly.

The mythematicians say that damage control (most simply defined as quitting a game and resuming play elsewhere) is ultimately irrelevant because the probability of a negative trend continuing in a new location precisely matches the probability that it will end if the player stays put.

But if you just glance at any sizable sample of outcomes from actual play, including the logs published in this blog, you will quickly see that prolonged negative trends are in truth not the norm in casino table games with a house edge that does not equate to player suicide.

My pencil logs are from a blackjack "sim" that makes random use of actual cards in an order that might occur in a real 8-deck shoe. In other words, once eight Kings of Hearts have been dealt, that card cannot reappear until after the next shuffle.

In blackjack, the draw choices a player makes can affect the outcome of the hand, and the game is unique in that regard (Pai-Gow Poker doesn't come close, and in baccarat, the player has no influence on the order in which cards are arrayed after they come out of the shoe).

In all casino table games, including blackjack, the only player choice that really matters is the size of the bet he makes before the next round.

Sims may have some small relevance to the expectation of gamblers who bet narrow spreads randomly, or fixed amounts without regard to what is left of their bankroll. But for alert, smart players who are not brain dead, they are completely meaningless.

Would you sit down at a table in a casino and place bets on fantasy cards dealt, dice thrown or wheels spun by a computer simulation?

If you are a slot player, you just might. And like a slot player, you would expect to lose and perhaps even consider it your duty.

Otherwise, I doubt it. I know I wouldn't. If the hands coming at me don't collectively meet certain criteria, I'll back away from a table and take my NB and LTD values somewhere else, and to hell with the cost of shoe leather.

Here's the latest BST session, another big win for target betting against (for a while) a truly nasty run of cards. If you want to at least partially imitate conditions in a multi-table casino, you can load Ken Smith's handy little app in as many browser tabs as your system will permit, and hop between them whenever the mood strikes you.

(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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