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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