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!

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
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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