Years ago, a Las Vegas resident who promoted himself as the world's #1 expert on casinos and gambling told me that no betting method ever devised could beat the games in his city.
"Even if it could be done, the casinos would find a way to stop it," he said. "All they would have to do is limit spreads."
He was right. The casinos have the edge against 99.9% of all players, reporting a win percentage that is several multiples of the negative expectation at the toughest table game, roulette (5.26%).
Meaning that most players make such dumb choices when they are in a casino having "fun" that they guarantee that they will go home with a lighter wallet.
But the house advantage and the billions in easy money it brings in every year is not enough for the gambling industry.
Whenever casino personnel identify a player who they believe is winning "too often" they first satisfy themselves that he's not cheating...then treat him as if he is.
When mathematician Ed Thorp published his card-counting best seller, Beat the Dealer more than 40 years ago, Las Vegas casinos over-reacted by changing the rules of blackjack to block counters, prompting howls of protest from customers who didn't know how to count cards and didn't care to learn.
Double-downs and splits were cut back, and most annoying of all, shuffles were increased, slowing the game to a crawl.
Pretty soon, the gambling industry realized it had used a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Players willing to study how the game could be beaten and able to apply their new knowledge with skill and consistency were in a tiny minority, and blocking them meant losing revenue from everyone else.
Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, time is money in Las Vegas, and the faster hands are dealt, the more chips are raked into the dealer's tray.
In a matter of months, blackjack's rules returned to normal, and the crisis that wasn't a crisis at all was over.
Running a game is for the most part a passive process that permits the casino to provide the layout (the rope) and let the players do the work (hang themselves).
The house's influence is subtle, limiting the ratio of the highest permitted bet to the table minimum, to reduce the players' ability to recover prior losses while knowing that most punters limit themselves far more severely.
Spread limits are effective only against players who believe that the only way to combat a downturn in a given game is to keep on betting in the same location, hoping that sometime soon the tide will turn.
But a surprising number of gamblers play that way. Badly, in other word.
Players with a plan know where there's a table limit, there is a higher one not far away. If the next bet needed exceeds the table limit, there is a simple solution: Go play somewhere else.
It is an indisputable fact that both flat and random betting must eventually fall foul of the house edge at all games of chance.
It is also true that most players who are "in the hole" will fall into a pattern of robotic fixed betting, or will randomly hurl good money after bad by cranking up their wagers.
The hole will get deeper and deeper and the ladder (the bankroll) will get shorter and shorter, until eventually there is no way out.
Haphazard betting won't work. Flat betting won't either.
That makes progressive betting the only alternative.
And the realities of gambling also ensure that progressive betting will be relentlessly targeted for derision by anyone whose livelihood depends on promulgating the conventional wisdom that in the end, you can't win.
Blind luck can make you a winner for a while, but as we all know, luck never stays around for long.
Never forget that losing is a progressive process, because with each loss, the amount you are "behind" gets larger.
Betting the same amount each round against a negative trend will not enable you to recover, unless of course the win-loss pattern (WLP) changes and you are able to win more bets than you lose.
Betting less won't help either because even a prolonged winning streak will not get you out of trouble.
Again: Progressive betting is the only viable alternative. And the irony is that as long as you apply a disciplined, consistent plan, progressive betting is also less risky than any other option.
Say what?
It's like this: The vast majority of players tackle casino table games with far less money than arithmetic indicates is necessary to prevail against the house edge.
So in spite of the fact that the house advantage has to be relatively tiny in order to make occasional overall wins by players possible (without them there would soon be no customers) its relentless grind against an inadequate bankroll almost always proves fatal.
"Underfunded" players lose. Again and again. And losing is a very expensive way to have fun.
Progressive betting demands more up-front money, for sure.
But it very quickly builds the bankroll with recovery after recovery.
And as time goes by, ruin becomes a rapidly-diminishing threat.
Look at it this way: If you can't afford to win, you shouldn't play. Why even think about taking on the house if you know you probably don't have enough money to get the job done?
All of the BST logs posted here demonstrate that table limits serve the house, not the player.
No big surprise to some of you, but many people do not think about the fact that the quicker you get to your green ceiling, the more likely you are to be a victim of the house edge.
In blackjack session after session, playing up to the table limit and never beyond resulted in up to twenty times the number of high-value bets that unrestricted target betting required, and in consequence, far higher average bet and overall action values.
More action always means more risk. That's a gambling given.
Here are data from the current BST blackjack set (#15):
What we see here is that a betting spread tighter than 1-1,000 (the BST limit is 1-200) is certain to lose, over the long haul.
The two optimum spread ratios are $10-$25,000 (1-2,500) and $5-$25,000 (1-5,000).
$25,000 bets? That's madness! No, it's not.
It was never my hope, or my intention, to come up with a betting method that would permit a weekend punter on a shoestring budget to go home with his pockets bulging with casino cash.
That just is not possible, unless blind luck intervenes.
A successful player (not a gambler) has to think like the house, with big bucks up front and complete confidence that disciplined betting and The Math between them will make him a winner.
Look at the action numbers in the summary above and you will see far higher action/average bet figures for narrower spreads than 1-5,000, with a 1-500 spread losing after requiring risk that was almost ten times greater than the bet levels that optimum target betting needed to WIN!
A fluke, say the skeptics. A sample of just 7,300 hands is "not representative"! The data shown are anecdotal, meaning that they apply to this set of outcomes and have no relevance to future bets.
OK, so let's look at the summary for more than ten times as many outcomes (all the data sets in the current BST trial).
Bigger numbers, same story.
In coming posts, I will provide data from the two extended baccarat trials of target betting, the Jones outcomes and the Rodriguez sets covering more than 315,000 rounds over which I had no control, and that are verifiable at their independent sources.
Not representative? Of course not! One thing you learn when you challenge the status quo is that any sample of data, however large, that upends the YCW (you can't win) conventional wisdom is always non-representative and anecdotal.
Here's more BST fun and games...
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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