"Just who are you preaching to? Even if your ideas about beating the house edge made sense (and they don't), no one could afford to use them!"

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This is a criticism I hear from time to time, and my only answer to it is that making money is never cheap, except in everyone's dreams.

Setting up a business on fabled Main Street, for example, requires a huge outlay on premises, remodeling and inventory, just for starters, and often profits are not seen for years.

Building a casino costs billions these days, and since some players manage to win now and then (sometimes in the millions) the house has to keep huge sums handy to cover downturns and stay ahead.

There is no mathematically supportable way to beat the odds at games of chance without occasional risk, and betting a wide spread is inevitably expensive before it can be profitable.

Your own data show occasional enormous losses that wipe out hundreds of hours worth of winnings. That kind of disaster could happen any time, possibly in successive sessions. That means that your strategy could be suicidal. Admit it: you are working for the gambling industry.

Casino table games are all about probability. It is possible for target betting to lose because its win rate is less than 100%. But it is not probable.

In simple terms, you are looking at favorable odds of far more than 5,000 to 1 if you bet progressively using the target betting rules, and the odds against two successive losses are therefore at least 25 million to 1.

It has always seemed strange to me that the so-called systems debunkers whom I often refer to as mythematicians insist that if a betting strategy can lose just once, it must be worthless.

The house has the best system of them all, a passive strategy that encourages players to bet and behave in a certain way, but does not force them to put money on the table or tell them how much to wager. But even the house loses occasionally.

What happens with target betting is that even in the face of occasional "high exposure," profits come in rapidly and consistently, just as they do for the house.

Sometimes, winning is harder than usual, just as it is for the house.

And once in a very great while, the team has to take a hit, just like the house.

All of the figures posted here and elsewhere in support of target betting are honest and accurate, and all of them demonstrate that very infrequent setbacks are quickly recovered.

Your chances of being killed in a car crash in the U.S.A. are estimated at around 20,000 to 1 against. Does that guarantee that you will be road kill before the end of your 20,000th trip? Of course not!

What you get from auto safety data is much the same as the message derived from target betting trials, and that is that your risk of crashing and burning is too insignificant to preclude either driving a car or betting in a casino!

That assumes, of course, that you drive safely and sensibly on the road, and that you defy the odds in a casino by using target betting to win consistently.

Sounds like you never heard that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Your "proof" is not proof at all because your data are subjective and suspect at worst, and anecdotal and irrelevant at best. You can't use prior outcomes to develop a betting strategy that will work against future outcomes.

I am comforted that insanity is never defined as doing the same thing again and again and expecting the same result, which is what I do with each new target betting trial.

It is also why I recommend to those who are rightly at first skeptical about my ideas that they don't take my word for anything, but instead apply my method to "future outcomes."

They will quickly learn that they have nothing to fear, and much to gain.

It makes no sense to dismiss past outcomes as non-representative.

Even casinos do not do that!

A new game or a rule change to an old game might initially be tested against what I always refer to as runaway sims because they totally eliminate human control and restraint.

But that is never more than a first step.

A casino will insist that a new game must be tested against real players in actual "gaming" conditions before it has a chance of being introduced to the floor.

The gambling industry knows very well that people do not play like computerized robots, and that sims therefore cannot accurately reflect reality.

Face it, no one with the kind of money you say is needed to make target betting work would put it at risk the way you want them to. Gamblers may not be the smartest people on the planet, but they are not the stupidest either. They know that if you want to win, you have to protect your bankroll. You say the opposite.

"Conservative" betting is almost as dangerous to a player (please, let's not call him a gambler) as greed, which is Punter's Enemy #1 in a casino.

The house always wants people to bet conservatively because the math says that they are more likely to lose that way.

The ideal player, from a casino's point of view, is someone who bets a narrow spread (never more than 1 to 10), pulls back when he is losing, and responds timidly to a potential winning streak.

Table limits (spread limits) exist entirely to encourage players to be cautious in their betting habits, so that when they start losing, it is far more difficult for them to bet their way out of the hole.

It is a very simple matter for arithmetic to demonstrate the folly of narrow spreads, and you can be sure that the gambling industry knows that.

Nothing that I have published here or elsewhere in the dozen years since I first posted the principles of target betting for free on the Internet is new to the casino business.

Casino operators know very well that progressive betting is the only way to consistently and reliably overcome the house advantage, and they go to extraordinary lengths to discourage it.

I tell the "experts" that they should try progressive betting for themselves before helping the gambling industry disseminate more deliberate disinformation about how it can't possibly work.

It does work, and casinos hate it.

As for high rollers, most of them have survived expensive lessons on the hazards of trying to "buy the pot."

Big bets alone can never guarantee success at games of chance, and "whales" earned that nickname from the gambling business not because of the size of their bankrolls, but because they keep on taking a dive, then resurfacing for another go-around.

Las Vegas casinos love to put out press releases about the huge sums won by a high roller in from Hong Kong or the land down under. But you will never see publicity about a "whale" who dumped $10,000,000 at baccarat (or whatever) before limping home.

That's because winners bring in losers; losers are bad news, except for the bottom line.

Money alone will not beat the house advantage.

Money and a plan - a plan I call target betting - will always get the job done.

Losses will occur. But winnings will always exceed losses.

As I keep saying, the only way to stay ahead in a casino is to win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

There is nothing revolutionary (or insane!) about that idea: It is wholly logical, sensible and scientific.

If you keep on winning back your losses in fewer bets than it took you to fall behind in the first place, the house edge becomes meaningless.

So...here are the latest BST blackjack results. More of the same old same old!


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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If you don't believe that how a player bets can determine if he wins or loses, you probably should not be gambling.

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Gambling is not a word I am fond of, because it suggests a foolhardy disregard of the odds and a reckless trust in luck.

I have not thought of myself as a gambler in more than three decades. A player, sure. But let's face it, gambling is for suckers!

I have spent the last day or so making my spreadsheet models more accessible to other people, so that I have less explaining to do when I agree to polite requests for copies of the files than enable me to make the claims I do for target betting.

It is just a matter of tidying up the boilerplates so that the function of the conditional formulas is less of a mystery.

I know what they are for (I created them, after all!) but some of the functions have been in place for so long that even I have forgotten how some overall results are arrived at. I just know that they are accurate.

I need answers to a lot of questions whenever I plug in a new data set and every so often I clean house this way to make sure that errors have not crept in and then gone unnoticed.

Spreadsheets are wonderful things, but it is far too easy for an occasional small glitch to grow into a major problem if every cell is not carefully reviewed once in a while.

Along the way I have been looking at whether or not the "Push-plus" rule I apply to blackjack (PBx2, PB+$100 max) would not be a good policy for baccarat.

I have come to the conclusion that backing Banker all the way is, contrary to the advice of most of the experts I have read, a very dangerous idea, with or without what would technically become "Tie-plus."

I have tried to make sense of the "no commission" variations that have been spreading through casinos since around 2003, working on the assumption that "new rules" are never introduced to benefit the player.

After an excess of open-minded analysis, I am back to my long-held belief that betting on Player only is the surest way to stay ahead of the game.

The "Tie-plus" experiment highlighted what is really the only major difference between me and the self-styled experts in gambling mathematics.

They cannot fault my methodology or the accuracy of my results, so they switch gears and complain that the target betting strategy is "not practical."

I say the player has control over his eventual fate.

They say that whatever he does to try to dodge the bullet, eventually the invincible house edge will find its mark and do him in.

They say that runaway sims provide an honest and accurate gauge of any betting method's chances of upsetting the odds.

I say that as long as we are willing to accept what I now think of as the "presumption of inertia" (not to mention idiocy, insanity, and ineptitude and eventual insolvency), then simulations that eliminate the human element, along with cards, dice, wheels, tables and dealers, may have something to tell us.

But given that actual casino table games are played by human beings, not mindless robots, their only useful lesson is that if you play like a total idiot, you will lose all your money!

Since I believe that experienced players can sense when it is time to back of from a bad situation, helped by betting rules that tell them when a change of location is due, I reject runaway sims completely.

Ah, say the experts, that's because computer simulations prove that your target betting strategy is bogus.

Au contraire, say I - very large samples of actual outcomes from reliable sources, along with on-going play against games that I have singled out as suitable for target betting, prove that my method is the only way to win consistently.

To get back to the topic of ties in baccarat, my policy has always been to ignore them, except when a dealer gets really pushy about trying to sell them as a sensible option.

When that happens (usually at a mini-baccarat layout), I smile my very best smile and say, OK, from now on, your tokes go on the Tie. The subject very rarely comes up again.

I found from reprocessing the Jones baccarat sample (more than 225,000 rounds with ties reinstated) that applying blackjack's push-plus to baccarat ties can add from 5% to 50% to the final win.

Here's a breakdown:-


Probably the first thing that jumps out at you here is that betting "Tie+plus" suffered two crippling busts while ignoring the ties (as I have for years) had just one minor hiccup that was quickly reversed in the next few shoes.

But then in 23 of 30 data sets averaging more than 7,000 rounds or 100 shoes apiece, the more aggressive betting approach paid off handsomely. That's better than 76%.

So what about those deadly busts?

Let's take a closer look at them, forgetting the illogical and unscientific caveat than in gambling, what's past can never be a predictor of what the future holds.


As the caption comments, not a pretty sight.

Now please consider the important fact that in real play, it would be impossible for prolonged downturns like these to do anything close to the damage indicated in the results summary you see here.

There is not a casino on earth that would permit you to open with a $5 minimum bet and progress all the way to a $25,000 wager, spreading 1-5,000.

Table limits exist solely to encourage gamblers to "spread tight," greatly limiting their chances of recovering from egregious downturns like those you see here.

In fact, spreads are getting tighter all the time, requiring a target bettor fighting a temporary slump to move several times from layout to layout before recovering prior losses (the all-important LTD) and starting over with a minimum bet.

Generally, I will suspend a new series when I lose a $100 bet at a $5 table, or lose $200 after a $10 opener, but there is wiggle room on the lower rungs of the ladder that enables playing conditions to dictate the first bail-out.

I do not always walk away from a $100 loss.

In fact, most of the time, I just fall back to a minimum bet, and make a mental note of the LTD/NB numbers from the unrecovered loss. Then I keep playing, perhaps suspending a few more series, until my brain cries out for a break so I can write those targets down before they evaporate!

The critical question that is begged here is How likely is it that when you bail out of a downturn, you will encounter another (and maybe another after that) when you resume play elsewhere?

For a haphazard, seat-of-the-pants gambler, the odds may be as bad as 50-50 that his lousy "luck" will continue and he will sink ever deeper into the hole, however often he bails out in search of greener pastures.

Not so the target strategist. He needs just two wins in succession to turn a losing series around. And more often than not a single win will do the trick.

The "worst case scenario" charts above confirm what you and I already know. Most of the time, the win-loss pattern in a game of chance is like ping-pong with more bounces: a win, a loss, two wins, three losses, a win, a loss, three wins and so on.

In blackjack, the average EOS comes in quite a bit less than six rounds. In baccarat, turnaround takes just a little longer.

The random bettor who is five bets behind is on a slippery slope, often needing to get the same number of bets ahead in order to escape the noose.

That is never true for a target player. Ever.

Because baccarat has only even-money payouts (less if you are crazy enough to bet on Banker!) it makes sense that it would have longer recoveries and lower EOS profits than blackjack, with all its doubles and splits and naturals to boost the player's bottom line.

For that reason, I strongly recommend adding the Tie-plus rule to your target betting strategy.

The painful busts you see above represent nothing more than a reminder that a player who will not take steps to mitigate the damage from a downturn probably deserves to lose.

My critics constantly parrot the notion that damage control is a fantasy for fools, but the math says otherwise.

Target betting enables a player to repeatedly recover his losses in fewer bets than it took to get him into trouble in the first place.

A random bettor can only achieve that end by accident.

As long as you are able to win more when you win than you lose when you lose (my turn to be a parrot!) then losing more often than you win will not hurt you.

Finally, more about the cliff-drop downturns illustrated in the charts above.

Here are details of the first few bets in each "killer" series.

The red shading shows where bail-outs would have been required by the target betting rules, or by house-mandated table limits.


Most recovery series wrap up in five bets or less, enabled by the paired player wins that are a consistent and reliable feature of every game's win-loss pattern.

Longer series occur more often in baccarat than in blackjack: about 10.5% of the time vs. 8.5%.

But even so, every time you bail out of a bad run, you have much better than an 80% probability that the WLP will level out enough to enable turnaround.

You also had an 80% chance of seeing an improvement if you had stayed where you were. But as the Chinaman once said, a killer losing streak must always begin with a handful of losses, so DBO (translation: don't bend over).

You cannot know ahead of time if the negative trend that just showed up will continue long enough to wipe you out. All you can know is that the threat you are facing is an aberration, one that probably will not continue if you suspend play for a while, and resume the LTD/NB elsewhere.

One of the many failings of the runaway sim is that by totally excluding the human element, it must ignore the simple question of morale and the extent to which intuition and good sense can enhance a player's winning prospects.

They dismiss gut feelings or intuition as pathetic irrelevancies.

They don't know what they are talking about.

A winning system that never fails is a mathematical impossibility. Even the house does not have one of those.

Does that mean that we should all play like fools and accept that losing is inevitable?

I don't think so.

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.

The appeal of online "casinos": No nosy pit critters or facial-recognition software, and very little risk of being barred from play!

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I am interrupting myself in a way to make a few comments on a report in yesterday's New York Times, highlighted today by CNBC.

Online gambling has been illegal in the U.S. since 2006, but with belts tightening in Washington D.C., there is growing interest in the possibility that reversing that policy could generate federal and state tax revenues of $10 billion a year.

I have no idea how the pundits could come up with a number that high, given that total worldwide revenue from Internet gambling in 2008 is estimated at less than $23 billion.

Nevada's casino win numbers have taken a calamitous hit in the recession, down 30% in some areas, and the win is generally figured to be around 12% of the total handle or churn.

Gambling taxes are never more than 25% of post-skim revenues, so the inference is that online betting in the United States could quickly total $350 billion a year!

Quelle crappe...that's more than $1,000 from every man, woman and child in the country.

Numbers aside, I know from personal experience (Metro and William Hill before Congress shut down their U.S. operations) that target betting has virtually (hah!) unlimited potential against Internet games.

I was warned years ago that online operations programmed their software to flag and counteract progressive betting, but I never saw any evidence of that.

I did well against "invisible dealers" before my suspicion of unregulated gambling using simulated shoes, dice and wheels got the better of me and I pulled the plug.

One thing I do remember was a $750 EOS bet that snagged a natural. That kept me revisiting Metro's "casino" for an extra day or two before the allure of real play in real time in real casinos in my neighborhood won out!

Assuming that they are honest (probably a naive assumption!), online operations are appealing because they allow lower minimum bets, and bet-by-bet logs are available for post-play analysis.

In 2003, Metro's house limit was $2,000 against an opening bet of $1. And since a 1-2,000 spread cannot even now be found at any one layout in Nevada and spreading wide is the key to winning, I felt pretty comfortable with occasional sessions lasting an hour or so at most.

My thousands of spreadsheet files confirm that the numbers that underpin target betting consistently conquer the house edge at games of chance. But real play requires a flexibility that would make computer models suspect.

For example, obstinate betting against a prolonged negative trend (a hallmark of most gamblers' play!) is not possible for a target bettor because of the tight spreads imposed by table limits. And the clumsy bet values calculated by a rigid application of the rules written into a computer model have to be rounded up in real play.

My experience has always been that real-time, real money play is far less dangerous than the automated equivalent, because intuition - the human element - enables damage control, and damage control really does make a difference.

It is impossible to simulate the gut feeling that your bankroll will suffer a fatal hit if you don't take steps to protect it. Or the times without number that I have taken flight from a "hot" dealer and then recovered my temporary losses within a few bets of moving to a new layout.

All my models are based on outcomes derived from actual play, but I know for sure that a flesh-and-blood player would never keep betting against the over-a-cliff negative trends that show up in the charts from time to time, usually in the baccarat samples.

The baccarat sets from Lorenzo Rodriguez (Zumma) and Lee Jones cover entire shoes played from start to finish.

My own blackjack data includes losing patterns that would have driven me away in real play, but I sat through them to demonstrate that target betting can get a player out of trouble that would be fatal to a random bettor!

But as usual, I digress...

Online application of the target betting method has great potential because of the impersonal relationship between automated "dealers" at one end and shrewd players at the other.

If the games are as fair and honest as, say, Ken Smith's Basic Strategy Trainer for blackjack, they can be consistently beaten.

The best real-play policy is to separate accessible casinos into different categories ($5 to $500, $500 to $2,500, $2,500 to $10,000, $10,000 to $25,000, for example) to camouflage the strategy.

The same approach could easily be applied to online targets.

Keep in mind that the math of target betting does not require every recovery series to be played from opening bet to EOS without interruption.

Constantly perambulating back and forth between casinos to turn around a prolonged series is not a practical option, so I favor taking a series to a preset point when necessary, suspending it and starting another, then stepping up to the next level with a handful of higher value targets.

I have been doing that for years, after being barred from one casino (Caesars Tahoe) because I naively assumed no one would notice my repeated progressions from $5 opening bets to $1,000 turnarounds, and I was wrong.

Switching casinos online is far easier with today's computers than it was in 2003.

Four gigs of RAM and decent speed combined with broadband can easily handle multiple browser tabs kept constantly live, even if once in a while an online "casino" posts a threat of imminent shutdown because of inactivity!

I have serious doubts that Congress will reverse itself on Internet gambling anytime soon, and I do not recommend online play against unregulated virtual casinos before then.

It's something to think about, though...

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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Baccarat "tight spread" results are in, and it's not a tale of triumph, just another lesson in the wisdom of wideness!

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Running target betting under tight restrictions is not something I relish because I know ahead of time that a hobbled horse can't win a race.

Still and all, limiting the spread to 1-200 ($5 to $1,000) resulted in 40,706 bets of $1,000 or more. Target betting spreading wide needed only 4,859...but with most of the recommended rules set aside, it lost anyway.

Baccarat is a frustrating game because somehow it is far "streakier" than blackjack. And since backing Banker is a bad idea because of the 95-100 payout on wins, I find it about as much fun as watching a deep puddle evaporate on a cloudy day!

With the rules fully intact, target betting handily beat a 1.6% house edge, but that was not the object of this particular exercise.

As we know, the target strategy bets more but less often. And the wiggle room it gets from its wide spread wraps up series faster.

Crippling the method with a $1,000 limit brought the final outcome in line with negative expectation (-1.6%) with an actual AV of -1.77%.

Turning off most of target betting's switches but leaving the $25,000 maximum in place gave us far fewer busts (4 vs. 26) but the hobbled version's failures were huge, and its overall AV was more than double expectation at -3.61%.

There was just one "bust" with all the rules in place, and next time I will post charts that again raise the critical question, Would a sentient being stand (or sit still) for a beating this bad...?

Here are the relevant summaries, "tight" first, then "wide." The third shot covers target betting with the recommended rules modified to compensate for baccarat's slower pace and its lack of doubles and splits or bonus payouts.

(Click on an image to enlarge it)



The experts who deny that the house advantage is vulnerable in the long term reject any data that indicate to the contrary, and these will be no exception.

Analysis of past outcomes (the only analysis that is possible!) is not ideal, but as with studying the weather, history is all we have.

That is why I recommend to anyone who wants to learn how to win that they apply target betting's rules to real-time play as soon as possible, preferably without risking any money until they know what they are doing.

Reality contradicts theory and analysis all the time, but that is in target betting's favor (actual conditions are almost invariably easier to handle than situations in which intuition and experience cannot be applied).

For example, table limits and the need to disguise the betting method from prying eyes make prolonged negative trends far less likely. And EOS bets have to be rounded up in real play, sometimes increasing exposure for a while, but always resulting in greater overall profits.

The summaries above all reflect the application of a rule requiring that an EOS bet cannot be less than the value of the successful bet that preceded it. In real play, that would be optional.

One thing you can take to the bank is that if the house edge was truly invulnerable, all of the results posted in this blog would be flat-out impossible.

They are real and accurate because winning more when you win than you lose when you lose is the only antidote to the house advantage.

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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Back to blackjack, and more of the same old same old. It's a good thing that winning consistently never gets old (even if it's not real money!)

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I doubt that the results that a disciplined and adequately funded player can get with target betting would come as a huge surprise to any of the long-dead mathematicians who have expounded on gambling theory.

They determined that however much a player may bet, over time he is sure to fall prey to the house advantage in games of chance, and they never felt the need to add as long as he bets randomly, or bets the same amount each time because that's the way at least 99.999% of all gamblers play.

Formulas that support the axiom that any amount bet against a negative expectation must ultimately have a negative result can run to several pages, and are impressive to behold.

But they don't mean a thing when it comes to target betting.

The formula that supports the concept 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 fills barely half a line.

And it is as true as some ancient axiom that seems to hand the gambling industry guaranteed profits from any player who does not break the mold and quit permanently as soon as he gets ahead.

Bet smart, and you will beat the house. Bet like almost everybody else, and you won't. And that's the name of that tune, as my (former) friend Robert Blake used to say.

Here's the latest BST blackjack sample (hardly new, since I haven't played a round in almost two weeks, but hey, I've been busy!).



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 bet larger sums, you will end up with more action, greater risk, and a bigger loss overall. That's logical, right? Wrong!

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There are times when common sense does not make sense, and it happens a lot in gambling.

Table and house limits are often touted as a way for a casino to reduce its exposure and avoid having to pay out too much if a high-roller gets lucky.

In fact, tight spreads are more often imposed by players upon themselves than by a casino seeking to limit its losses.

And only a self-styled expert who has not bothered to study the numbers would dare to pretend that spread limits are really intended as a defense against big-money players.

The math demonstrates with absolute finality that limits are a weapon that the gambling industry uses against everybody!

Worse news than that is that at least 99.99% of the time, a casino does not need to haul this deadly weapon out of its armory.

Most players bring their own means of destruction with them every time they play, and eliminate themselves from the game long before they can be a threat to the house's bottom line.

Let's be clear.

Tight spreads can only win on those rare occasions when a player makes more right bets than wrong ones.

And thanks to the house advantage, that doesn't happen often.

The purpose of this post is to examine the wisdom of the linchpin of the academic argument against any and all betting strategies, which is a rejection of analysis of past outcomes, however large the sample.

Only in the field of gambling mathematics are we required to accept that what's past has nothing whatever to teach us about the present or the future.

And it is, of course, a wholly unscientific and illogical premise.

We are told that gambling outcomes are so unpredictable and erratic, so totally devoid of patterns or trends that are likely to be repeated at any time in the future, that they have an almost magical, mythical quality (one that has led me to make frequent references to mythematics!).

Utter twaddle! Codswallop, too.

If casino table games were as inconsistent and unreliable as academics (the Math Mob, or You Can't Win Brigade) would have us believe, they would be profitable only in the very long term.

And anyone who knows anything at all about gambling knows that against random or fixed-bet punters, the house makes short-term gains as a matter of routine.

The gambling industry exploits the fact that it is not just players who are predictable, but the games themselves.

The only uncertainty is the outcome of the very next bet. But analyzed in groups, from a handful (no pun intended) to dozens and scores, then hundreds and multiple thousands, outcome patterns are considerably more reliable than the weather.

Imposing narrow betting spreads increases the mathematical reliability of the house advantage. Widening spreads does the opposite, just as logic would suggest.

The catch is that the gambling industry and its house-trained numbers experts do not want us to even take a glancing look at the past, let alone learn from it.

And for some reason, intelligent people who really should know better are happy to accept that gambling is only about the future, and an uncertain one at that.

For many gamblers, not knowing is where the excitement lies, and that is why the best betting strategy in the world will never be a serious threat to the casino business.

One assumption most gamblers make, even those with fat bankrolls and a proportionately greater prospect of profit, is that higher bets and wider spreads must always lead to greater risk and, in the end, bigger losses.

And that simply is not true.

It is not possible to use spreadsheets and formulas to model the behavior of a random bettor because imposing order as a simulation must is the antithesis of a haphazard gambler's path to ruin.

But it is possible to clamp down on table limits and examine the effect of restrictions that players as a whole impose on themselves, either out of ignorance or because their bankrolls are woefully inadequate.

For example, the 80,000 outcomes in the ongoing BST blackjack trial offer an opportunity to discover how many bets of $1,000 or more would be required if the spread limit is set at 1-200 or $5 to $1,000 (higher bets being permitted when double-downs or splits come up, and higher returns applied for player naturals).

In one simple test, I eliminated most of the target betting switches that I recommend in the rules, "playing" a streamlined version of the strategy.

One element I left untouched was the WPx2 rule, which doubles the bet after an opening win in a new series, redoubles to $200, adds $100 thereafter, and ends the series after a loss of $500 or more.

Any player who does not exploit winning streaks, rare as they are, is missing a critical opportunity and probably deserves to lose!

With target betting's 1-5,000 spread limit in place, there were 3,796 bets of $1,000+, amounting to less than 1 in 20 (4.56%). Target betting won $293,000 overall in spite of two busts, retaining 0.67% of its overall action.

The gross HA was 4.76%, cut to 0.67% (a coincidence) by doubles/splits and naturals.

With the 1-200 spread limit applied, TB LOST a little over $100,000 (-0.32% vs. the HA of -0.67%) and was "in the hole" most of the time.

The most damaging effect of the spread limit was that $1,000+ bets were needed 26,735 times, or almost every third bet (32.13%).

The problem is of course that the quicker you bump up against your "green ceiling," the less likely you are to win in the end because at that point you are totally at the mercy of the house edge.

The tight spread run-through generated total action of $31.24 million, required an average bet of $388 and lost the equivalent of $125 for every hour of play.

Betting wide won $290,000 from $43.7 in action, needing an average bet of $542 but WINNING $363 an hour.

Overall action was higher with the wider spread, as expected. But the difference (40%) was far less than suggested by the considerable gap between a maximum permitted wager of $1,000 and one of $25,000.

I will have baccarat comparisons soon, but here are more detailed summaries of the blackjack results. First the "tight" application of limits, then the "wide" one.

(Click on an image to enlarge it)

Runaway sims produce meaningless, deliberately disingenuous results because they assume absolute inertia on the part of a player under pressure. To some extent, the same problems plague my spreadsheet models, even though the outcomes that they analyze are derived from "real" play.

"Busts" are always a bone of contention, because I argue that a non-suicidal player would not stick around when a potentially deadly downturn develops, and academics insist that bailing out of a bad run is ultimately pointless.

That fact is that prolonged series occur less than 10% of the time when target betting rules are fully and consistently applied, and when a potentially fatal pattern is avoided, the odds are better than 10 to 1 that more favorable conditions will be found when play resumes.

The odds can also be said to be 10-1 that the win-loss pattern will improve if you stay where you are. But smart gambling has to be about a "better safe than sorry" approach.

With target betting, all you are looking for by way of a more "friendly" environment after a bail-out is two consecutive wins, and often, a single win will save the series.

For the random bettor, it may be statistically a wash, because a player who is, say, five bets behind will often need an equal swing in the opposite direction to get out of the hole.

The whole point of target betting is to win more in fewer bets than you lost in a greater number of bets.

Here's how target betting did against the same set of blackjack outcomes with the rules fully deployed:-


Worth noting is the big drop in the average EOS number (the number of hands or rounds it takes to go from opening bet to recovery). bove, it's 5.1, as it was when the rules were modified for the spread limit comparison. The "tight spread" reading was 6.7 rounds.

You should also know that the risk assessment or maximum exposure number shown here is a "worst case" estimate, indicating that at one point, the strategy had to put almost $400,000 on the table to achieve eventual recovery.

Because target betting wins almost all the time, the bankroll keeps growing stronger, and in this test the true exposure was less than 20% at $182,000. At the point when the most money was at risk, the method had already more than doubled the bankroll.

You will see in the next screen shot that the big bucks were in play in session #13, about 60,000 rounds after the first bet, and with a profit of almost $1.2 million providing the fire power.



Watch this space for the same rules set applied against first the "LR" baccarat outcomes, then the much larger "LJ" sample (the initials indicate the verifiable sources of both data sets).

Lastly, my answer to the question, Why are you posting all this information? Are you looking for big-money backers, or what...?

This blog is intended primarily as an information resource for players who genuinely want to learn how to beat the house at its own games by overcoming the effects of the house advantage.

Secondly, it is a record of the work I have done down the years, serving as proof that my research is both unique and meticulous.

I went the backer route years ago. Twice.

Both "money men" were good company and fun to work with, to a point.

But both of them had far less hard cash at their disposal than they claimed when they initially contacted me, and both sought to undermine the principles of target betting to (as they wrongly saw it) minimize their exposure.

Caution and restraint have their place in gambling, but generally they work more in the house's favor than the player's.

"Scared money never wins" is an old Las Vegas cliche, and it's the truth.

My early backers were, like most gamblers, looking for quick profits for minimal risk, and I had to tell them that they were deluding themselves.

The analogy I used was an oil-drilling survey of a gigantic field that showed that 99.99% of the reserves were at 5,000ft or deeper, with a few little puddles or pockets at 500ft.

Target betting's backers wanted to keep drilling 500ft wells all over the place, hoping for a brief gusher, because digging deeper costs a lot more money before the big payday.

Drill deep, and you will have profits forever. Do the other thing, and dry wells will far outnumber "wet" ones. And even the mini-gushers will soon dribble away.

Remember, it takes money to get money. And knowledge and experience, discipline and commitment are a big help, too.

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.
_

"The trap you have sprung on yourself is classic! You have taken just one set of outcomes and fiddled and faked until you found a way to beat them."

_
That is just the start of a fairly typical response from an academic mathematician determined to defend the conventional wisdom that games of chance with a house edge cannot be beaten in the long run.

It goes on...

"You might think you are defying gravity and making fools out of some of the greatest mathematical minds in human history, but the only fool is you.

"Very smart people do not uphold the status quo for any other reason than that it is the truth.

"There's no agenda here, no conspiracy with the gambling industry to stop people from winning, just honest mathematics at work.

"If you were honest, you would accept that it is possible to take a large data set and try different betting methods until they win against that sample of outcomes and no other.

"If you were honest (and perhaps you are lying to yourself without knowing it) you would see that the very next time those rules are tried against objective outcomes, your betting method will fail to overcome negative expectation."

I have to admire the way my critics are able to convince themselves that they are the only honest ones, and I am out to challenge them by fraud.

There would be no sense in that. But that is hardly an adequate defense since the mythematicians who take occasional pot-shots at target betting say there is no sense in any of my ideas!

All I can do is repeat my offer to discuss my methodology and provide details of all my results to anyone without a transparent pro-casino agenda. That would enable a rigorous scrutiny of how I have managed to accurately (and honestly) end up with data that are diametrically in conflict with negative expectation, otherwise known as the conventional wisdom.

I have always been aware of the risk of inadvertently manipulating an existing data set until it gives me the results that I want, and that is why I place great importance in the ongoing blackjack trial that has been the subject of most of the posts on this blog and will be covered in many more.

It's not that I have "massaged" anything, but simply that I am aware of the pitfalls that have tripped others who have tried to beat games of chance. I work constantly to avoid the traps, and can disprove any observer's perception that I might be deluding myself.

Blackjack is, in my experience, the best of all the house games for target betting, because of its minimal house edge when disciplined rules of play are applied.

It is also one of the few popular table games in which player decisions can affect the outcome of a wager (pai-gow and 3-card poker can be disregarded because they do not offer an option to draw additional or substitute cards and change a hand).

In most games, you bet, and then you wait. Blackjack requires that you play a greater role in the process than just pushing out a pile of chips and crossing your fingers.

The honest truth is that the results you see in this blog are supposed to be impossible.

Words like anecdotal and subjective and non-representative are routinely bandied about by people who sometimes see themselves as "systems debunkers," out so save the world from snake-oil salesmen and other shameless charlatans.

The honest truth is that the house advantage is only unbeatable if gamblers bet the way the house wants them to, randomly, emotionally, erratically and irrationally.

Stop gambling and start playing to win, and the house is in trouble.

I made one little error in the previous post which I'm going to 'fess up to here to show readers how honest I am.

I said that target betting versus the baccarat data set had resulted in FIVE busts in 55,000 recoveries, for a win rate of 99.989%.

Truth is that combining Player-only and Banker-plays plays, there was ONE bust in more than 118,000 recoveries, for a rather more encouraging win rate of 99.9983%.

Then along came the Wobble set, which on its own had FIVE busts in 57,763 (not 36,720) recoveries, dropping its WR all the way down to 99.9913%.

I posted the pattern charts for four of the five WBL crash n burns, and suggested that in real play, target betting rules would have required the player to bail out of each of those cliff-drop sequences before serious damage could be done. (The fifth "worst case scenario" is attached to this entry).

Combining PO, BO and WBL into a theoretical team-play result that would have required three guys to sit side by side for three years and bet 4,200 shoes three different ways would have seen SIX busts in 175,940 recoveries. That's a WR of 99.9966%.

Simply squeezing a break-even out of the baccarat set by playing WBL with target betting and the 5% skim was not a great success, and it suggests that skimming is only a good idea if you expect to win more bets than you lose over the long haul.

There is only one option in a casino that makes that promise: betting Banker only at baccarat.

As for the fiddling and faking charge I quoted, there is only one fundamental target betting rule, and that is that after one or more losing bets, followed by a win, the next bet (NB) must be increased to cover the loss to date (LTD) plus the pre-set win target.

All the other rules (OL, or opening loss, 2L, 3L, the win progression or WP, and the MSL or mid-series "do over" rule) help to boost the EOS (end of series) profit but are dispensable.

So the charge that I have been twiddling and tweaking for years to defeat a unique sample of outcomes is false, as is the claim that the house edge is unbeatable.

The baccarat data set came to me independently from Lee Jones and Lorenzo Rodriguez long after the principles of target betting (also known as Turnaround) were published on the Internet in 1997.

The ongoing BST blackjack trials began in mid-2008, and as I type this, target betting is ahead $1.83 million in funny-money against 80,457 rounds with an overall gross HA of 4.73% (0.63% net). The win is more than 5.0% of total action. There have been 14,366 recoveries so far, for an average EOS of 5.6, and NO busts. The blackjack AWB/ALB number is 127%, which is dramatically higher than the 109% achieved in the baccarat set. The expected result (ER) given negative expectation of -4.73% is a LOSS of $1.7 million, not a WIN of $1.8m. Using the net HA (-0.63%), the result "should have been" a loss of $226,000.

What we see from both trials is that it is not only possible to win more when you win than you lose when you lose, but absolutely necessary.

Over the years, I have dealt with gambling experts who look at my results, back off from insisting that they are either fraudulent or impossible, and focus instead on the size of the bets required.

All I can say to that is that I never expected to be able to discover a betting strategy that could turn a shoestring bankroll into a fat wad of cash.

"It takes money to make money" is a cliche not just for gamblers but for investment in any commodity from which a substantial return is expected.

I have never pretended that target betting is easy or cheap, just that it enables a disciplined player to win consistently, making a steady profit over the long haul.

Money alone is not enough to beat the house. Countless former millionaires who went broke trying can testify to that.

But together, money and target betting make a very powerful antidote to the house edge.

Here are more nails in the coffin of the house advantage. The red numbers, rare as they are, show that once in a very great while, target betting can get into trouble.

(Click on an image to enlarge it)
The question is, does the strategy win often enough to recover those occasional busts and get back on the road to overall profit?

The answer is clear.

Even with five busts in the WBL run-through, target betting was able to win back each loss before ending up with a result that was slightly better than a break-even.

I have included the WBL data even though it is clear to me that betting that way to offset the commission gouge may not be a good idea.

I believe that WBL may be a viable way to go if the player is alert and sensible, like a human being should be. But I can't prove it, so I have to let my readers judge for themselves.



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.
_

It would be great to win all the time, but the gambling industry would hate us for it. So how about a 99.989% win rate?

_
Last time, I put up data that showed target betting flipping a $3 million LOSS betting Banker only into a $3 million WIN simply by compensating for the damage done by the 5% commission on Banker wins.

We have already seen that backing Player only against the same data set, avoiding commission entirely, would have been very profitable using the target betting technique.

So how about "the Wobble," my Americanized name for a bet-selection method the French call avant dernier (thanks, Google, for helping me discover the correct word order and spelling for "before last" en Francais)...?

The idea is that you catch streaks either way in baccarat or roulette by betting on whichever even-money option came up in the hand or spin before the last won, so P,P would call for a bet on Player, and B,R would indicate a bet on black.

It's not a bad way to go, because there is nothing more frustrating than zigging when the shoe or wheel zags (or vice versa!).

Given a six-bet Player streak at baccarat that was preceded by P,B you will catch 5 of 6 wins, or 4 of 6 if the streak was preceded by B,B.

Being right two-thirds of the time is certainly better than missing every switch in the kind of ping-pong pattern that is common in both baccarat and roulette.

Wobble comes from win before last (WBL), and it is a useful escape from brain strain for those players who need a break from blackjack or (horrors!) refuse to play it at all.

My reluctance to allow the house to withhold 5% of the win that just turned around a losing sequence and put me back in the black has kept me away from Banker bets for years.

I now accept that that was probably a mistake.

It is certainly true that when Player is getting hammered for hand after hand, the voice in my ear that whispers "just bet Banker" gets louder and louder until the only alternative is to stand up and walk away from the game.

I would like to be able to report that adding the 5% skim to target betting gave WBL a solid win against the baccarat data set, but it did not happen, and here are four good reasons why:

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
When I first posted my ideas on an Internet gambling forum a dozen years ago, target betting was quite a bit more complicated than it is today and I was repeatedly "flamed" (such a '90s term!) to a crisp when I suggested that players with more than half a brain do not stick around when the dice, deck, shoe, wheel or whatever turns against them.

Damage control is a non-viable concept, said the experts, because no one can ever know if backing away from a downturn will be jumping from the frying pan into the fire, or if the negative trend would have reversed itself if the evasion tactic had been ignored.

Overall, they say, it's a wash: a little less than half the time, damage control will help, and a little more than half the time, it won't.

The "experts," I want you to know, are full of it.

For a fixed-bet or random player, they may actually be right. But for a target bettor (a progression player is another way to describe him) they have it all wrong.

Take another look at the fatal four-pack above.

The experts tell us that when a prolonged spike in the house's favor occurs, pushing the HA far beyond standard negative expectation for the game, there is no reason to hope that it will be substantively offset in time to enable recovery of prior losses.

Again, that may (or may not) be true for a random punter. But for a player who can get out of the hole with two consecutive wins, and more than half the time can make a profit with just ONE win, ducking a potentially deadly downturn will prove right far more often than not.

Each of the killer streaks above was followed by offsets that would have handed target betting a turnaround in a heartbeat. They just didn't come soon enough for the robot player who opted to keep taking punches on the nose instead of picking up his chips and walking away.

Runaway sims "beat" any betting method ever devised by requiring the preposterous assumption that a player would not respond to a downturn like the ones you see above.

He would just keep on betting until his bankroll ran out.

Common sense does not support that conceit any more than science does.

Because of spread limits and the constant need to maintain a low profile to avoid casino interference with a winning method, a target player does not have to trust his own judgment to figure out the right time to bail out of a downturn. The strategy rules do the job for him.

I recommend a 1-5 spread limit in any one location, except at an opening layout (one where you started with a minimum bet), where 1-20 is probably OK.

In the "killer" series above, target betting would have been out of the first one 11 gets in with a $300 loss and a ($575) LTD.

The fatal series in #13 began with seven consecutive losses, and a move would have come before the 11th bet at -200 (-375).

In #20, we would probably have been out at -100 (-100) after four consecutive opening wins, and certainly after the next loss (-200).

Finally, #23's black hole would have ended after at most seven bets at -200 (-375).

Applying those strict rules would of course have affected countless other series and required a whole lot of healthy exercise and worn out shoe leather.

But one thing we know for sure is that on average, recoveries come in less than SIX bets, and series dragging on for TEN bets or more are substantially less than a 10% probability.

And let's face it, probability is what gambling in a casino is all about.

You have to know the numbers, and how to exploit them for consistent profit.

Usually, I figure at least a 99.992% win rate for target betting.

This time, the strategy delivered 99.989%, darn it.

Against a 1.35% HA game, a random punter's win rate will be 49.335%, giving him an expected 5,068 losses in 10,000 bets.

Target betting's performance betting the Wobble against the baccarat data set was ONE loss in 10,000 series (about 55,000 bets!).

You choose: 1 loss in 55,000 or 27,870 in 55,000!

OK, it's a trick question, because of course target betting will lose as many individual bets as any other method. The house advantage will see to that.

The 1 loss in 55,000 rounds is not just a loss, it is ruin, crash and burn, wipe-out or whatever else you might choose to call it.

What matters is that with target betting, more lost bets than won bets will not result in an overall loss of money 99.989% of the time.

The reverse, in fact.

Except once in 55,000 rounds IF you are dumb enough to sit still and suck it up when the house edge goes haywire.

Here are the data for the WBL "skim" run-through:


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.
_

Math orders the universe, so you can be sure it won't wait outside while you are betting the farm in a casino.

_
On the face of it, it's tough to argue with the mathematical rationale that "proves" that the house advantage at casino games of chance cannot be beaten in the long run.

So most people don't bother to try.

The logic goes pretty much like this: Even if you bet Banker all the way at baccarat, winning more often than you lose, the 5% commission on all wins will see to it that your are in the hole at the end of the day.

That's because each time you win, you are paid a little less than even money, but every losing bet is 100% in the toilet.

Here is an example of what you can expect in, say, three years of playing baccarat for five hours a day, five days a week:

Total rounds excl. ties 315,049
Average bet value ABV $527
Banker edge 1.36%

Total action $166,047,465
Total wins $83,588,338
Total losses ($82,459,127)
Gross win $1,129,211
Commission on all wins $4,179,417
Net outcome, a LOSS of ($3,050,206)

This is not good news!

What happened in the scenario above was that bet values were in effect randomly selected, and the "Banker edge" was simply not enough to offset the 5.0% gouge.

Winning more often than you lose is a rare privilege in a casino, especially after sitting through more than 315,000 wagers!

But if the so-called "5%" commission at baccarat is going to leave you with a whopping liability that's almost 4x your total win, what's the point?

Now let's try the same scenario with target betting applied at every step to ensure that (sing along with me) you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

Total rounds excl. ties 315,049
Average bet value ABV $527
Banker edge 1.36% (4.46%)

Total action $166,047,465
Total wins $86,837,610
Total losses ($79,426,415)
Gross win $7,411,195
Commission on all wins $4,341,881
Net outcome, a WIN of $3,069,315

AWB/ALB 109.33% vs. W/L +1.36%

There is nothing magical or mysterious about the results achieved in the second scenario. It's just math.

Note the two numbers after Banker edge, above. The first is the actual value (AV) derived from dividing the difference between the greater number of wins and the lesser number of losses by the total number of outcomes. The second is (money won minus money lost) divided by (overall action).

Now check out the AWB/ALB percentage (for average winning bet divided by average losing bet). That is target betting's sole objective.

The bottom line was a healthy positive number in the second scenario because although the total bets won (as opposed to the total money won) was the same in both examples, target betting won far more chips than haphazard wagering did, and lost fewer.

What we see here is discipline (a PLAN!) at work. And I think we can agree that winning is better than losing.

I revisited the baccarat data and plugged in the missing requirement that all potential EOS bets be boosted by 5% to cover commission due on a turnaround win.

Here's how it looks:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
I am still inclined to recommend that betting Player only and avoiding commission is the best way to apply target betting to baccarat if you really must stray from the blackjack tables.

But the effectiveness of the 5% "skim" makes a compelling case for flexibility, and it is certainly true that the more options you permit yourself in a casino, the more likely you are to win while maintaining a low profile.

Field bets at craps can be lucrative, even-money bets at roulette too. Even 3-card poker can boost your bankroll, if you ignore Pair-plus and halve your LTD before making a potential EOS bet (ante the first half and bet the rest if you have a hand worth backing).

But whenever a series starts to get serious you should back away from a high-HA game and take your chips and your LTD/NB numbers to a friendlier game: blackjack or baccarat.

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.
_

Gambling is not sensible, logical or rational. Mathematics is nothing but. So what am I trying to do here? Win sensibly, that's what!

_
I have spent most of this week testing my idea that the crippling effect of the baccarat gouge (the so-called 5% commission on Banker wins) can be overcome by arithmetic.

I plowed into the problem well aware that every baccarat book ever written says the game cannot be beaten, and that no less a gambling luminary than Prof. Edward O. Thorp gave up trying way back in the 1980s.

I actually met the man at a backgammon bash in Pebble Beach, Calif., more than 30 years ago, and the author of the best-selling blackjack bible of all time told me then that he had baccarat in his sights as his next gambling target.

Pity it didn't work out for him...

First, a summary of the results achieved when what I now think of as "skim theory" is applied to the 315,000 baccarat outcomes mentioned in earlier posts.

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

The highlighted columns contain results from individual data sets for Player only bets, Banker bets without the "skim" modification, and Banker bets with the anti-gouge LTD adjustment applied.

The surprise to me is that the new method turns out to be an even better bet than staying away from commission wagers entirely (+2.22% of overall action vs. +1.53%).

But I should be used to surprises by now: the good ones help me to do a better job, and the bad ones teach valuable lessons before I bury them forever.

Academic mathematicians and others who oppose the idea that the house advantage in casino games of chance is vulnerable will reject these results. That's their loss, because there is a lot they could learn here if they would only open their minds!

They will doubtless argue that 315,000 outcomes is not a representative sample, or that I somehow managed to massage that huge data set until I came up with a rules combination that beat over 4,000 shoes of baccarat. Sorry, guys.

As always, my methodology has been scrupulously careful, fair and accurate. Any other approach to the challenge would be a waste of time and toil.

The bottom line here is that backing Banker all the way does not have to be a losing proposition in spite of the fact that every win pays less than even money.

Beating one of the most artfully camouflaged rip-offs on the casino floor does not require any change to the rules of target betting other than the deduction of 5% from the value of each win before it is applied to the loss to date (LTD).

My erstwhile baccarat buddy would probably tell me that this new approach is a no-brainer and that he does it already. But unless he has changed his ways in recent years, he doesn't and he won't. His "method" is to apply target betting rules to a point, then abandon them at the time he needs them the most. And as a result, he is a certain long-term loser, with no hope of recovery.

The effect of the "skim" is that a recovery series continues until enough has been won to offset prior losses PLUS all commission due on winning bets throughout that series.

And the rules modification is greatly helped by the fact that over time, there will always be more wins for Banker than for Player (betting under those conditions is a unique experience for me!).

It sounds simple, if not simple-minded, but consistency is the key to beating the house advantage, and that is a very uncomplicated concept.

Hard as I try to get everything right, the one thing I did not build into this week's test is a 105% boost to each potential EOS bet to offset commission due after recovery. I'll get to that later...

Note that the total action required for the modified method to win $6.3 million before commission is fractionally less than the action necessary to make Player a $2 million winner.

And I don't doubt for a moment that even better results could be achieved by letting "The Math" identify a more efficient antidote to the gouge.

I don't want to get into that here because of the academic prohibition against "twiddling and tweaking."

As things stand, the models apply bets that would be rounded up in real play, inflating overall action but hopefully also benefiting the final win. That is one problem with a mathematically accurate, nit-picky approach: precision must sometimes be compromised to a degree to reflect reality, but only after a theory has been proved.

Speaking of reality, here's a chart of the win-loss pattern (WLP) that was disastrous for Player-only bets against the Rodriguez/Jones baccarat sets and led to the one "bust" in more than 50,000 successful recoveries:-


Bear with me a moment and ask yourself if you would stick around for an over-the-cliff plunge like this if you were playing baccarat for real money and a shoe went this far south this fast.

If your answer is No, as mine sure is, the next question that's begged is, Would it make any difference in the long run if you walked away from every egregious "house spike" in the hope of finding a friendlier WLP elsewhere?

The academic defenders of the status quo say no, absolutely not. But both mathematics and common sense say they are wrong when gambling is set aside and target betting replaces it in the equation.

For a fixed or random bettor there will often come a point where the hole he is in is too deep for the longest ladder (in the form of a partial reversal of a negative trend). Once he is 20 or 30 bets behind, as in the pattern depicted here, he's dead meat.

But the target strategist is only seriously threatened when he reaches his maximum bet value, which has nothing to do with table limits and all to do with how much money he has behind him.

Until then, two wins in succession will get him out of the hole...a mighty short ladder by any definition. And more often than not, a single win will save his bacon.

So while the mythematicians who manipulate arithmetic in the service of the gambling industry are not exactly telling a lie when they say you can't run away from bad luck, their "truth" does not apply to target betting.

I will be posting some more "over a cliff" sequences for your amusement from time to time. And I use the cliff analogy with good reason, recognizing that seeing into the future is a little easier on the road than it is in a casino.

Imagine that you are driving down a mountain road and you see a sharp curve coming up and what could be a 1,000ft drop straight ahead. Do you apply the brakes and turn the wheel, or do you keep going? The answer (Duh!) is so intuitive that it now has a place in the Merriam-Webster American Dictionary: used derisively to indicate that something just stated is all too obvious or self-evident.

And that takes me back to the heading at the top of this post.

Mathematics is not disconnected from logic and good sense, however frustrating and impractical its precision may sometimes be.

Gambling, the way most punters interpret and apply it, is illogical, irrational, imprecise and ultimately chaotic and hopeless (which is not to say that its practitioners do not keep doing the same things over and over again while hoping for a happier result!).

Arithmetic can beat the house, as we see here. Luck cannot.

The runaway sims that mythematicians use to "prove" that the house edge is ultimately unbeatable rely on rare patterns like the one above to undo a betting method.

A car driven at high speed with the steering and brakes disabled will almost certainly crash and burn.

A safety-conscious, sensible driver knows how to navigate the worst roads and weather conditions and get home (or to the bank) alive.

Which ride would you prefer?

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.
_

Strange to wake up in the morning and find your brain has been working on a problem while you slept!

_
Don't worry, this is not going to be a post about how dead people can help you win at baccarat (see the first blog entry, archived at left!).

But it is something of an experiment as I adjust to the process of allowing target betting to evolve day by day under public scrutiny.

As I have said many times, baccarat has always seemed to me about as exciting as watching grass grow next to blackjack, but now and then I feel obligated to revisit the game because of its huge international status.

As I drifted off to sleep last night, I was noodling the notion that since Banker always wins more hands than Player over the long run, target betting should be able to exploit that advantage by compensating for "The Gouge."

The gouge, of course, is the so-called 5% commission that, in my test, trimmed a $3.3 million funny-money win all the way down to barely $500,000.

My baccarat partner's long-ago suggestion that chips gobbled up by the gouge could be recovered with a post-EOS bet before NB reverts to the minimum did not at the time strike me as workable, and I still have my doubts.

But what if the potential EOS bet itself incorporated commission paid out during the current series, so that the NB equation would be something like NB=1.05*(LTD+Tgt+Comm)?

The effect might be disastrous, pushing bet values and overall action into the stratosphere and risk along with them.

But because Banker always has a solid edge over Player, it might just work.

The experimental aspect here is that I have never before speculated on the effectiveness of a modification ahead of actually applying it.

Given that I have 315,000 verifiable baccarat outcomes to work with, courtesy of Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Jones, I think it's worth the effort to give it a try.

Once again, the spreadsheet platform rules! Running the test will be straightforward enough, and of course I will post the results here as soon as I am done.

The hard part will be figuring out the conditional formula to make the test accurate and effective!

Watch this space...

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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A test of backing Banker all the way at baccarat, and how the "5%" gouge makes it a very bad idea!

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Baccarat may not be my favorite casino table game, but target betting certainly likes it!

Running queries for data on the effect of backing Player only, Banker only and WBL has in effect turned the Rodriguez and Jones combined data sets of 315,000 outcomes into a monster sample of 945,000, so it was well worth the effort.

Now the job's done, I am relieved to be able to confirm that there are no big surprises.

Many baccarat veterans recommend ignoring the Player option entirely, and my test indicates that if winning more often than you lose floats your boat, then that is the way to go.

But brace yourself for a very large "5%" commission tab that will slash your overall winnings by more than 80% (repeat, 80%, not 5%) and leave you with profits that pale against those achieved by the guy at the same table who used target betting to back just Player every time.

My baccarat buddy (the one who suggested cranking up the EOS bet to recover commission fees after a recovery) insisted from day one that the gouge or "vig" or whatever else it might be called was a non-issue.

I'd say that a penalty that slashes a $3.3 million win by more than four fifths is definitely an issue, but I don't play baccarat much so I will leave it to readers to decide.

I have known for a long time that target betting will prevail even if the outcome of individual rounds is reversed (win to loss, red to black, odd to even or whatever) but have never given it a whole lot of thought because blackjack does not offer that option.

It may be possible to apply the Wobble (WBL or win before last) method to 21, but I figure I have enough stuff to keep in my head when I am playing blackjack, and adding more might cause a gray-matter meltdown! So, I have never tried it. And I am hoping that having said that, I won't be tempted to investigate further.

In the chart and summary below, avoiding commission is confirmed as the right way to tackle baccarat, as long as target betting is the primary ingredient.

"Banker Only" sailed through the test with barely a speed bump, but that's not a surprise because (as we all knew before we got into this) Banker wins more often than Player.

I am still in touch with my former baccarat partner, who steadfastly refuses to do the smart thing and step up to blackjack, and he tells me that in Macao and other exotic gambling locations, commission has been replaced by a rule that gives the house a win on a 6-6 tie.

That change might be better for target betting, but somehow I doubt it. Let's face it, casinos very rarely make rules changes that benefit the player!

One of these days I might be able to evaluate the switch, but I have never bothered to record ties, let alone recommend putting money on them, so that is not on my to-do list for the current decade at least.

To me, baccarat is like dancing in deep treacle compared to blackjack, but I know there are millions of aficionados out there and I recommend that they give disciplined target betting a try.

Here's the promised data...

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
I get a kick out of the fact that, commission aside, target betting kicked butt three ways.

But I am not surprised.

The method did encounter a "bust" backing Player only, and it is true to say that the crash 'n burn could have come along in the very first series. However, given 55,000 successful recoveries and just one fatal downturn, we can conclude that "coulda, woulda, shoulda" the three most pointless words in the gambling glossary, do not apply here.

It makes more sense to speculate about what would have happened if the house spike that cost target betting a million bucks in funny-money had been subjected to the damage control that most players instinctively apply in various ways when the going gets extra tough.

It's moot in any case, because most players would prefer odds of 55,000 to 1 in their favor to odds of 49.33 to 50.67 (-1.35%) against them. I am excluding those gamblers who bet as if losing is fun, of course!

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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Surprise, surprise! Gambling's biggest big lie, the "5%" commission, will make losers out of winners in the long run.

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I said last time that I would at some point process a notional 5% commission on Banker wins throughout the 300,000-plus baccarat outcomes provides by Messrs. Rodriguez and Jones, and as I typed those words, I knew curiosity would make me run the query sooner rather than later.

Curiosity is really what got me into this in the first place: I couldn't believe that something protected by mathematics (the house advantage at games of chance) could not be as easily defeated by mathematics once the key was found.

Spreadsheet archives of large data sets make it relatively easy to revisit the past and apply a "what if?" scenario to potentially point the way to a better future.

My critics say that constantly reworking old data is a sure sign that I am massaging and distorting the numbers to prop up my deranged dream of beating something that is unbeatable.

The truth is that the spreadsheet platform makes it virtually impossible to cheat, especially given that all along I have offered to make my work available for microscopic analysis by the experts who keep telling me that they are far smarter than I am.

The "five percent" question has over the years made me wary of baccarat, because when I looked into the game, I quickly determined that the French derniere avant method of bet selection (backing Player or Banker according to which option won the round before last) had real merit but was sunk by the commission on Banker wins.

I call the method the Wobble, for WBL or win before last, and I am happy to report that a faster computer and enhanced methodology have made it much easier for me to get the information I needed than it was the last time I tried it.

There was just one piece of good news to emerge when all was done and dusted: target betting won handily against what was essentially a whole new set of 315,000 rounds of baccarat, giving it added vindication.

Backing Player throughout resulted in a +1.53% overall win against a house edge that, for the entire 315,000 outcomes, came out at -1.35% (pretty much on the money for baccarat, expectation-wise).

WBL won a lot more bets than Player did, and that, of course, is why those French joueurs love it so. The method catches streaks either way, which would be a handy dodge but for that so-called 5 percent gouge, which of course is why the vignes exists at all. The overall AV for the data set was trimmed from -1.35% to -0.31%.

Backing Player all the way resulted in just one failed recovery in more than 55,000 successes. WBL turned up a second "bust" along the way, but that would not have been fatal without the commission factor, which turned an overall win of $1.17 million into a LOSS of $269,000.

Here's the summary chart...

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
I am tempted now to restart the what-if process to discover how target betting would have fared backing Banker only instead of Player only, although obviously the final win that I am sure would result would be turned blood red by commission deductions.

The big news is that target betting has now been shown to be successful against 630,000 rounds of baccarat and will almost certainly prove effective against an additional 315,000 bets.

The explanation for all this is unchanged from the earliest days of target betting's evolution: Outcomes in games of chance are individually unpredictable, but when grouped together develop patterns that are reliably repeated and can be consistently and very effectively exploited.

The "grouping together" does not imply selection but describes the natural chronological process that occurs as one bet follows another. It is meaningless to players who bet randomly, and is everything to the disciplined strategist who knows that if he follows his plan, time will hand him a win even after he has lost more often than he won.

The original Jones+Rodriguez data set is a representative sample in any terms, since it is equivalent to at least three years of play by a full-time gambler.

The guardians of the status quo are inclined to argue that any sample of outcomes that depicts an overall player win in spite of a clear house advantage must be dismissed as anecdotal and irrelevant. But they have an agenda that does not stand up to serious scrutiny.

I still play baccarat from time to time, and can never shake off the recollection that it was a game invented by a doting Queen to amuse her inbred, bovine son, who was befuddled by the rules of every other card game that then existed.

I like blackjack best of all, partly because of the double-downs, splits and naturals that can boost a turnaround bet into a special payday, but also because each hand has to be played as well as bet upon.

However moronic and monotonous baccarat might sometimes seem to me, I need to get over it and accept that it has grown into the biggest of the big-money games, attracting more high roller dough than even poker (which, in any case, is not a house game).

Naturally (no pun intended) I stand by my recommendation that ideally, bets on Banker should never be placed, or should be limited to, say, $1,000. The real damage is done when critical EOS bets win just 95% of their face value.

It would not be hard to switch gears in mid-series and back Player only until EOS is achieved.

I once spent an enjoyable few weeks playing baccarat with a target betting convert who suggested that the "five percent solution" was to follow up a successful EOS wager with a bet calibrated to recover the combined cost of commission throughout the series that just ended.

So instead of following a $10,000 win on Banker with a reversion to the minimum and the start of a whole new series, there would be a supplementary bet of, say, $3,000 to offset the gouge.

I did not much cotton to the idea because it required a longer EOS winning sequence every time, and I mention it here only because it might appeal to some baccarat aficionados who can't live without bets on Banker.

I want to say again that results like those you see here could only be achieved two ways: By cheating, or because the invincible house advantage in all games of chance is not invincible at all.

It is safe to say that when you cheat, you don't win. And when you fail to follow a disciplined betting strategy that consistently delivers a profit from more lost bets than winning ones, you are in the same losers' boat. Sinking fast.

It is every weekend punter's dream to find a way to win time and again with little or no risk. It is also a hopeless fantasy.

Past posts to this blog offer a wealth of data supporting the plain truth that spreading wide is the key to vanquishing the house advantage, so long as it is paired with a viable betting strategy with a rule for every eventuality.

We have learned that a 1-1,000 spread is about as "tight" as we can go without feeling constant pressure from the house edge. Wider is better, and that takes money, sometimes a lot of it.

The good news is confirmed once again in the baccarat summary above. Target betting loses very rarely indeed, and as time goes by, the bankroll that backs it grows ever stronger.

You can see from the summary that backing Player only, target betting never had more than a fraction of its original bankroll on the line. There was just ONE "bust" spread across two data sets, and while that wiped out most of the method's prior winnings, the boat was not seriously rocked again, and the final win exceeded $2 million.

WBL and target betting together were 65% exposed at one point, but by the time the second "bust" came along, there was enough money in the bank to withstand it. Or would have been, but for the "5%" commission.

That tells us that target betting is viable. It may not be perfect and could be improved. But it WORKS.

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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