"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."

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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.
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