_
As Ronald Reagan (not one of my heroes, I admit) famously said to an opponent: "There you go again!"
The two most powerful pointers to a mythematical disinformation campaign orchestrated by the gambling industry are the claims that past outcomes hold no clues to the future, and that simulations accurately reflect real-play conditions.
Come on! Let's use a little common sense here!
The French have a saying that translates to "The more things change, the more they stay the same" and any experienced gambler can confirm that it applies to what happens inside a casino as much as to life in the real world.
There is nothing mathematically unique about random results in games of chance, and learning from experience is as valuable for a gambler as it is for anyone who prefers to keep his money safe.
Simulations, on the other hand, have very little to teach us, because they assume that all players are self-destructive idiots, and you and I know we are better than that.
The long-standing campaign to discourage meaningful research in the field of casino table games smacks of age-old heresy trials at which clerics warned that those who asked too many questions were headed straight to hell.
It really is ridiculous to pretend that the future will not repeat the past. The past IS the future, and if we fail to take the time to learn from it, we deserve to lose.
I should qualify my objection to "sims": those that recreate the random numbers critical to roulette and craps can be helpful; those that eliminate every element of blackjack and baccarat other than the percentage of the house advantage are deliberately deceptive (dissimulations would be a better word for them).
Target betting is at its core the application of good sense to the gambling experience, which for most of its participants is about as removed from reason and wise judgment as an activity can be.
For many, the primary appeal of placing a bet is that it is risky and unwise, and the longer the odds, the greater the thrill of winning.
It's about being naughty and knowing that you are probably going to be punished for it while hoping that maybe this time you will get away with it, and be rewarded for your sins.
No one who feels that way will have much use for target betting, and will side instead with the chorus of "experts" whose message is always the same: You can't win.
You can win. But not without working at it.
I am often criticized for devising a betting method that can only be profitable for players who already have a lot of money.
The truth is that sensible money management is better than the senseless alternative even for weekend punters on a shoestring budget, although generally the best they can hope for is that it will simply make their money last longer.
What the casinos depend on is that gambling is all about choices, and most players will make the wrong choice almost every time.
Target betting, like basic strategy play at blackjack, exists to eliminate choices and replace them with consistent smart moves.
Because gambling is what it is, the smart move is only the right move when you win. But it stands to good sense (common sense) that consistency and discipline are sure to bring better results in the long run than flying by the seat of your pants.
It always amazes me how few gamblers take the trouble to learn the numbers that apply to the games they play, and with a nod to their worst enemy, I hereby offer the following easy acronym: WYNN, short for Watch Your Negative Numbers.
A week or so ago, I was playing blackjack in my hometown casino with a kid whose wrong moves were so frequent that finally the dealer blurted out in a stage whisper, "Are you sure you want to do that?"
He wasn't sure, and from then on the dealer and I between us coached him so successfully that his diminishing pile of chips took a turn for the better, and within 15 minutes, he was back in the black.
Target betting depends on constant awareness not just of the depth of the hole you are in, but that to win, you must always recoup your losses in fewer bets than it took you to get into trouble.
There is nothing delusional about that, and it is not heresy either. You will in the end always lose more bets than you win, so the only way to get ahead of the game is to win more when you win than you lose when you lose.
That requires discipline, confidence, consistency and (sometimes) a lot of cash, and none of those attributes conflict with the laws of arithmetic.
Google "progressive betting" and you will find hundreds of thousands of entries, most of which argue that it is a suicidal method that cannot win.
The truth is that it is the only method (other than dumb luck, which is not a method at all) that can overcome the reality that losing bets will always outnumber winning ones in the end.
House-trained mythematicians warn of the very real danger that at some point, the next bet in a progression will exceed the table limit "and then you are sure to lose" or words to that effect.
Quelle crappe, comme dites les Francaises!
No one without adequate funding should ever consider progressive betting, and for a player with a healthy bankroll, a looming table limit is simply a signal to back out of the game and go find a layout in a higher rent neighborhood.
The simplest progression is the Martingale or double-up, and players who succeed with it never incur more than three successive losses at one layout before moving on.
That way, they stand a chance of flying under PR (pit radar) while repeatedly turning their losses around and fattening their bankrolls still further.
They tend whenever they can to bet blackjack and field bets at craps, where naturals and x2 or x3 payouts will occasionally make a long-awaited win very profitable indeed.
Those Google citations I mentioned will often argue that a player has to be crazy to start out with a $10 bet and potentially risk thousands to win "just ten bucks" when a win finally breaks a losing streak.
They are written by math-challenged people who fail to grasp that a winning bet worth thousands wins thousands, not "just ten bucks" and achieves what most gamblers can only dream of: recouping all prior losses in a single wager.
In fact, the house's passive "system" is more like a Martingale than anything else, permitting a few players to get thousands of dollars ahead while secure in the knowledge that soon enough, they will lose and all those borrowed chips will be back where they belong.
In theory, a house edge of 1.0% at blackjack means that the casino will see a profit of just $100 for every $10,000 "at risk" - a level of reward that a Martingale player would find less than satisfactory.
In fact, most blackjack players are as bad at the game as the young man I mentioned earlier, and the true house edge is closer to 12% or $1,200 for every $10,000 of action.
Target betting requires knowledge and intuition, hence WYNN: watch your negative numbers, and when the house gets too far ahead, get the hell outta there!
Using my method with all its switches at their maximum setting can be a risky proposition, one that should not be undertaken without a very substantial bankroll.
But forget everything but the LTD+ response to a mid-series win, and the method is routinely more effective than a Martingale without the screaming sirens and flashing red lights that double-up will set off in any pit if a player is dumb enough to get caught using it.
I will say again, I don't recommend a Martingale, not because it is too risky, but because I do not want to be chased away from the games I love to play and WIN AT.
All those target betting switches can provide a long-term boost to profits, but their primary function is as camouflage.
They can be turned on or off or dialed up or down at will, which is one of the many reasons why simulations that feature a suicidal maniac betting exactly the same way ad infinitum are just plain dishonest.
I recommend that the starting point for nervous newcomers to target betting should be LTD+1u for an EOS goal, plus a win progression of x1.5 and MSL set at a modest -100.
If you have forgotten the rules, that means that in response to a mid-recovery win, you would bet LTD+$10 at a $10 table, repeating the formula if the end of series wager goes south for a total of $100 or less. After an opening win of $10, NB would be $15, then $25, $40, $60 and so on, with the eventual streak-ending loss becoming the new LTD.
Those cliff-drop negative trends that runaway sims depend upon cannot apply to a target player because of the spread limits that the rules impose: not more than 1 to 20 after a $10 opener, then not more than 1 to 5 at any one location.
Spread is the most critical factor in any casino table game, which is why the house imposes table limits that are getting ever tighter as the years roll by.
A big bankroll alone will not guarantee an overall win when losing bets outnumber winning bets.
A wide spread (1 to 5,000 is optimum) will make you a winner every time.
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.
_
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Irrefutable logic supports target betting as the best way to win consistently at casino table games. So yet again, the conventional wisdom is wrong!
_
(The truth is that when the word conventional precedes "wisdom" it is more often than not a synonym for false or erroneous. Remember the flat earth theory? Or all the "expert" assumptions about house prices and Wall Street?)
This has never been an argument about whether or not the house advantage exists in games of chance. Of course it does, or the games themselves would not exist.
And I have never disputed that the house edge is the undoing of at least 99.9% of all gamblers: anyone who bets either relatively flat or random amounts is sure to lose eventually.
I am accused of being innumerate or (my favorite) discalulic, because I can prove the obvious over and over again.
And in the minds of many who consider themselves smarter than the rest of us, when the obvious contradicts the conventional wisdom, then the obvious is obviously wrong.
You would think that the following statement is too logical to run any risk of being disputed:
If the combined value of a smaller number of winning bets exceeds the combined value of a greater number of losing bets, then the negative expectation derived from (L-W)/N or losses minus wins divided by number of bets is not relevant to the end result.
In other words, "If you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win will not hurt you."
But by golly, stalwart defenders of gambling's status quo contradict the notion all the time.
There is, they claim, no way to prove the "win more" concept, because past outcomes from games of chance are always anecdotal or subjective and can never be used to predict the future.
Never mind that the target betting principle can be applied successfully to any sample of outcomes of almost any size from any honest and objective source.
Or that using just the "LTD+" rule and none of the camouflage against countless outcomes as yet unplayed will confirm that target betting - progressive betting - makes the house edge irrelevant.
My critics keep falling back on the argument that if you lose more bets than you win, than you must in the end lose more money than you win.
And that makes me wonder exactly who those critics are, since casino operators everywhere know full well that their games can be beaten and are constantly on the lookout for players who threaten the house's bottom line.
I take comfort in the fact that those who are skeptical of target betting contradict themselves and each other all the time.
For example, the hundreds of thousands of real-play outcomes that I offer as indicators of target betting's power over the house advantage are routinely dismissed as anecdotal and mathematically suspect.
But when I confirm that there were two "busts" among 59,901 recovered series (a win rate of 99.997%), the response I get is: "Aha! That proves that your ideas are nonsense!"
Target betting has so far achieved a "hold" of 8.1% against 84,000 rounds of blackjack with a collective house edge of between 0.74% and 5.7%, winning $306,530 when it "should have" lost at least $27,000.
It won about the same amount against 202,000 rounds of baccarat, in spite of an indicated loss (house edge of 1.19% x total action) of $101,000.
It "tanked" twice in an additional 114,000 rounds of baccarat, confirming that target betting is not a 100% winning proposition, and therefore should not be treated as such by the gambling industry.
I look at it this way: Odds of better than 29,500 to 1 in my favor are logically and irrefutably superior to odds of 49-51 against me.
The caveat that we all need to be aware of is that the application of any rigid set of rules to a very large sample of outcomes, retroactively or in advance of play, contravenes normal human behavior.
Likewise, the pretense of accuracy, honesty and relevance for a runaway sim that denies the "player" any response to conditions and circumstances is disingenuous.
The Wizard of Odds, for example, is a well-funded shill for the gambling industry. His website touts his $20,000 "systems challenge" and its reliance upon a billion-bet simulation to "prove" that the house advantage is always unbeatable.
But what does any sim - let alone one that claims to represent at least 10,000 years of continuous betting! - have to do with real play? Answer: Nothing.
I have been using variations of target betting for more than 30 years now, and my application of the flexible rules depends on the current level of two things: my confidence and my bankroll, which while connected do not always move up and down together.
There is not a player alive who would sit through the kind of punishment that is routinely dished out by simulations that eliminate not just the critical human element but cards, dice, tables, wheels, balls, chips and real time.
Sim proponents like the Wizard of Odds (a great moniker when it was first used by someone else on TV in the '70s) would have us believe that human behavior can have no long-term effect on the probabilities that apply to gambling games.
That makes about as much sense as a claim that a rider cannot control a horse, or that a speeding car will crash with or without a driver behind the wheel who knows the difference between the gas and the brake pedal.
For a flat or random bettor, it may be true that "damage control" will make matters worse about as often as it improves them.
But a target player can recover prior losses in a fraction of the time it took for him to get into trouble in the first place. And a win-loss pattern that will cause him serious problems is, at worst, about a 10% probability.
The truth about the random game outcomes that we call hands, rounds, spins or rolls is that while they are individually unpredictable, in concert they form patterns and trends that are reliable and cyclical.
We know, for example, that most wins for either side, player or house, are immediately followed by an opposite result, that half as many are paired, and half as many again constitute a three-bet "streak." It's called arithmetic.
And in spite of all the "expert" claims to the contrary, the rules of probability keep a tight rein on the pattern variations that can occur in the course of a game of chance like blackjack, baccarat, craps or roulette.
There are exceptions to every rule, but they are rare enough to be of almost no consequence.
Here are some results that the conventional wisdom says are impossible, or at best fraudulent:
The good news for you and me is that the results above (for baccarat and blackjack samples with the optimal target betting rules applied) are scrupulously accurate, and confirm a consistency that is mathematically predictable.
The more complex the target betting tactics become - with the objective of increasing win values while camouflaging the strategy from prying eyes - the wider the variation between one positive outcome and the next.
And since additional strategic switches necessarily increase overall action and, by extension, potential risk, it makes sense to add them gradually, as the bankroll grows stronger.
Adjusting a betting method intuitively to suit circumstances and/or available resources is not something that "sim" supporters like the Wizard of Odds will ever permit.
Their systems-busting weapon of choice will only work for them if the "player" at the heart of them behaves like a suicidal idiot.
Like hurricanes in The Hamptons, aberrational departures from probable win patterns hardly happen.
But they will occur, and the player response to them before they can prove fatal becomes absolutely critical, while being blithely ignored by the Wiz and his ilk.
As the caption above points out, casinos themselves are much less impressed by computer game simulations than they are by real-time research out on the floor.
No new game, or modification to the rules of an old one, will ever happen without reliable data "from the field" to support its predictable contribution to the house's bottom line.
The summary below confirms that when the non-essential (but very effective!) target betting switches are turned off, session outcomes fall within a much more narrow range.
One of the jobs of a blog like this is to state the obvious the way the "experts" do ad nauseam, so let me say that given an average per-session win of around $10,000, it makes very little sense to persist with a million-dollar "bust" limit.
I would urge readers to take a very close look at this summary, and pay particular attention to the numbers on the far right, which track the win per round for each session.
Those numbers are, you will see, mostly within a percentage point or two of one another.
They confirm the consistency and predictability that I felt confident must exist in win-loss patterns in games of chance when I began this quest in 1978.
The "sore thumb" above, of course, is the double-whammy red splat next to sessions 14 and 15 from the Rodriguez baccarat data set.
Damage control would not have been merely optional in those two instances, it would have been strictly enforced by the casino's own table limits.
That being so, would the huge losses indicated in the summary have been possible in real play?
All the other numbers in the summary answer that question: No way.
Another question that is begged, of course, is the effect on all the other results of spread limits enforced throughout exactly as they would have had to have been in the losing sessions.
The honest answer: little or none.
That is because prolonged negative trends are rare events, and the chances of one of them continuing from suspended play into the very next session are slim indeed.
In the next post, I will put up results from the baccarat+blackjack database with a $25,000 to $250,000 spread limit applied.
Ignore any experts who tell you that what I am doing here amounts to experimentation with anecdotal data until a winning strategy is found.
Right now, all we are concerned with is the application of a target betting rule that has been in the public domain for a dozen years, plus an end-of-series rounding up rule which is nothing more "experimental" than a nod at reality.
Given a winning previous bet (PB) of $5,000 and an updated loss to date (LTD) of $775, would would your next bet (NB) be?
If your answer is $775, you are not wrong, exactly, just a little out of touch with the demands of real play...
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 truth is that when the word conventional precedes "wisdom" it is more often than not a synonym for false or erroneous. Remember the flat earth theory? Or all the "expert" assumptions about house prices and Wall Street?)
This has never been an argument about whether or not the house advantage exists in games of chance. Of course it does, or the games themselves would not exist.
And I have never disputed that the house edge is the undoing of at least 99.9% of all gamblers: anyone who bets either relatively flat or random amounts is sure to lose eventually.
I am accused of being innumerate or (my favorite) discalulic, because I can prove the obvious over and over again.
And in the minds of many who consider themselves smarter than the rest of us, when the obvious contradicts the conventional wisdom, then the obvious is obviously wrong.
You would think that the following statement is too logical to run any risk of being disputed:
If the combined value of a smaller number of winning bets exceeds the combined value of a greater number of losing bets, then the negative expectation derived from (L-W)/N or losses minus wins divided by number of bets is not relevant to the end result.
In other words, "If you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win will not hurt you."
But by golly, stalwart defenders of gambling's status quo contradict the notion all the time.
There is, they claim, no way to prove the "win more" concept, because past outcomes from games of chance are always anecdotal or subjective and can never be used to predict the future.
Never mind that the target betting principle can be applied successfully to any sample of outcomes of almost any size from any honest and objective source.
Or that using just the "LTD+" rule and none of the camouflage against countless outcomes as yet unplayed will confirm that target betting - progressive betting - makes the house edge irrelevant.
My critics keep falling back on the argument that if you lose more bets than you win, than you must in the end lose more money than you win.
And that makes me wonder exactly who those critics are, since casino operators everywhere know full well that their games can be beaten and are constantly on the lookout for players who threaten the house's bottom line.
I take comfort in the fact that those who are skeptical of target betting contradict themselves and each other all the time.
For example, the hundreds of thousands of real-play outcomes that I offer as indicators of target betting's power over the house advantage are routinely dismissed as anecdotal and mathematically suspect.
But when I confirm that there were two "busts" among 59,901 recovered series (a win rate of 99.997%), the response I get is: "Aha! That proves that your ideas are nonsense!"
Target betting has so far achieved a "hold" of 8.1% against 84,000 rounds of blackjack with a collective house edge of between 0.74% and 5.7%, winning $306,530 when it "should have" lost at least $27,000.
It won about the same amount against 202,000 rounds of baccarat, in spite of an indicated loss (house edge of 1.19% x total action) of $101,000.
It "tanked" twice in an additional 114,000 rounds of baccarat, confirming that target betting is not a 100% winning proposition, and therefore should not be treated as such by the gambling industry.
I look at it this way: Odds of better than 29,500 to 1 in my favor are logically and irrefutably superior to odds of 49-51 against me.
The caveat that we all need to be aware of is that the application of any rigid set of rules to a very large sample of outcomes, retroactively or in advance of play, contravenes normal human behavior.
Likewise, the pretense of accuracy, honesty and relevance for a runaway sim that denies the "player" any response to conditions and circumstances is disingenuous.
The Wizard of Odds, for example, is a well-funded shill for the gambling industry. His website touts his $20,000 "systems challenge" and its reliance upon a billion-bet simulation to "prove" that the house advantage is always unbeatable.
But what does any sim - let alone one that claims to represent at least 10,000 years of continuous betting! - have to do with real play? Answer: Nothing.
I have been using variations of target betting for more than 30 years now, and my application of the flexible rules depends on the current level of two things: my confidence and my bankroll, which while connected do not always move up and down together.
There is not a player alive who would sit through the kind of punishment that is routinely dished out by simulations that eliminate not just the critical human element but cards, dice, tables, wheels, balls, chips and real time.
Sim proponents like the Wizard of Odds (a great moniker when it was first used by someone else on TV in the '70s) would have us believe that human behavior can have no long-term effect on the probabilities that apply to gambling games.
That makes about as much sense as a claim that a rider cannot control a horse, or that a speeding car will crash with or without a driver behind the wheel who knows the difference between the gas and the brake pedal.
For a flat or random bettor, it may be true that "damage control" will make matters worse about as often as it improves them.
But a target player can recover prior losses in a fraction of the time it took for him to get into trouble in the first place. And a win-loss pattern that will cause him serious problems is, at worst, about a 10% probability.
The truth about the random game outcomes that we call hands, rounds, spins or rolls is that while they are individually unpredictable, in concert they form patterns and trends that are reliable and cyclical.
We know, for example, that most wins for either side, player or house, are immediately followed by an opposite result, that half as many are paired, and half as many again constitute a three-bet "streak." It's called arithmetic.
And in spite of all the "expert" claims to the contrary, the rules of probability keep a tight rein on the pattern variations that can occur in the course of a game of chance like blackjack, baccarat, craps or roulette.
There are exceptions to every rule, but they are rare enough to be of almost no consequence.
Here are some results that the conventional wisdom says are impossible, or at best fraudulent:
The good news for you and me is that the results above (for baccarat and blackjack samples with the optimal target betting rules applied) are scrupulously accurate, and confirm a consistency that is mathematically predictable.
The more complex the target betting tactics become - with the objective of increasing win values while camouflaging the strategy from prying eyes - the wider the variation between one positive outcome and the next.
And since additional strategic switches necessarily increase overall action and, by extension, potential risk, it makes sense to add them gradually, as the bankroll grows stronger.
Adjusting a betting method intuitively to suit circumstances and/or available resources is not something that "sim" supporters like the Wizard of Odds will ever permit.
Their systems-busting weapon of choice will only work for them if the "player" at the heart of them behaves like a suicidal idiot.
Like hurricanes in The Hamptons, aberrational departures from probable win patterns hardly happen.
But they will occur, and the player response to them before they can prove fatal becomes absolutely critical, while being blithely ignored by the Wiz and his ilk.
As the caption above points out, casinos themselves are much less impressed by computer game simulations than they are by real-time research out on the floor.
No new game, or modification to the rules of an old one, will ever happen without reliable data "from the field" to support its predictable contribution to the house's bottom line.
The summary below confirms that when the non-essential (but very effective!) target betting switches are turned off, session outcomes fall within a much more narrow range.
One of the jobs of a blog like this is to state the obvious the way the "experts" do ad nauseam, so let me say that given an average per-session win of around $10,000, it makes very little sense to persist with a million-dollar "bust" limit.
I would urge readers to take a very close look at this summary, and pay particular attention to the numbers on the far right, which track the win per round for each session.
Those numbers are, you will see, mostly within a percentage point or two of one another.
They confirm the consistency and predictability that I felt confident must exist in win-loss patterns in games of chance when I began this quest in 1978.
The "sore thumb" above, of course, is the double-whammy red splat next to sessions 14 and 15 from the Rodriguez baccarat data set.
Damage control would not have been merely optional in those two instances, it would have been strictly enforced by the casino's own table limits.
That being so, would the huge losses indicated in the summary have been possible in real play?
All the other numbers in the summary answer that question: No way.
Another question that is begged, of course, is the effect on all the other results of spread limits enforced throughout exactly as they would have had to have been in the losing sessions.
The honest answer: little or none.
That is because prolonged negative trends are rare events, and the chances of one of them continuing from suspended play into the very next session are slim indeed.
In the next post, I will put up results from the baccarat+blackjack database with a $25,000 to $250,000 spread limit applied.
Ignore any experts who tell you that what I am doing here amounts to experimentation with anecdotal data until a winning strategy is found.
Right now, all we are concerned with is the application of a target betting rule that has been in the public domain for a dozen years, plus an end-of-series rounding up rule which is nothing more "experimental" than a nod at reality.
Given a winning previous bet (PB) of $5,000 and an updated loss to date (LTD) of $775, would would your next bet (NB) be?
If your answer is $775, you are not wrong, exactly, just a little out of touch with the demands of real play...
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.
_
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Don't blame bad luck when you lose at a casino table game...it's more likely that bad betting did you in.
_
Anyone who walks into a casino hoping to win more bets than he loses is probably going to be disappointed.
But that is exactly how most gamblers approach the challenge of beating odds that they know from the start are against them.
It doesn't make much sense, does it?
It is a demonstrable mathematical fact that if you bet the same amount each time, or choose your bet values randomly, you will eventually fall prey to the house advantage, more likely sooner than later.
And even if you apply money management to the process, responding appropriately to trends for and against you and restricting bet values to a limited proportion of your bankroll, you won't win in the end.
You will simply get to play a little longer.
Casinos are not in the business of money management...player management is their game, and they do what they do so subtly that most gamblers believe that the choices they make are entirely their own.
For example, before a casino in my Nevada neighborhood burned down a year or so ago, its blackjack tables offered a betting spread of $2 to $200.
When it reopened, its fancy new layouts all had table limits of $5 to $100.
To the vast majority of punters, table (or spread limits) are a matter of supreme indifference.
Most people do not spread their bets wider than 1-5, and the bigger their bankroll and their opening bet, the tighter their spread is likely to be.
It is possible for them to make a little money if the house advantage maintains its predicted level for a while and if they press while they are ahead and pull back during a downturn.
They will be in trouble when the house gets a few bets ahead, because they will need an equal number of wins to recover, and because of the game's bias, that may not happen in time to save their meager bankroll.
By imposing table limits, casinos exploit the fact that most players are reluctant to quit a game during a losing streak, especially if the joint is jumping on a Saturday night, and finding another seat might take a while.
So for nearly all of the players who returned to that rebuilt casino in Nevada, their only complaint is likely to be that $2 bets are no longer permitted, not that the maximum spread has dropped to 1-20 from 1-100.
I do not have access to the books at Topaz Lodge, of course, but I can promise you that the house win per player numbers at its blackjack tables are up, in spite of a slump in casino traffic.
The reason is quite simply that $25 players can now only spread 1-4 instead of 1-8, and while spreads that tight are sure to lose in the end, the prospect of a late lucky streak has been summarily halved.
Gamblers are creatures of habit and highly predictable, and casinos depend on their knowledge of human behavior to maximize their profits.
"System" is a word that in the gambling context has become a pejorative, conjuring up images of snake-oil salesmen and the gullible fools they prey upon to profit from their evil schemes.
Outside of casinos, the word is more likely to connote discipline, orderliness, good sense and professionalism, and sundry other attributes.
Inside casinos, only the management is systematic, secure in the knowledge that mathematics, perhaps the most orderly discipline in the known universe, will smooth out minor fluctuations in player behavior and the ups and downs of fate and fortune and deliver a profit at the end of the day.
It comes down to this: a player who does not bet systematically will lose.
It may not happen today or tomorrow, but it will happen in time, as surely as 2+2-5 is a negative number.
And in spite of that undeniable truth, 99.99% of all gamblers will tell you that there is no system known to man that can beat the house advantage.
Here is a different look at the latest pencil log from my BST blackjack trial:
The big numbers in the BST screenshots should come as no surprise by now, and I have stopped providing breakdowns of each step along the way to a final win because by now the point should have been made.
What may surprise some of you is that throughout the session, losing series, defined here as recoveries achieved in spite of more bets lost than won, are in the majority.
It should not come as a shock, but too many people are inclined to assume that luck is the only factor that can make you a winner in a casino, and it simply is not so.
Since none of us can ever know ahead of time if the very next bet is going to win or lose, systematic betting is our only option.
Call it money management if you like - call it grzignflumpf, even - but however you may choose to gussy up or disguise it, a "system" is what is needed here.
Casinos know this and are constantly on the alert for players who do not bet (and lose) the way they are "supposed to."
Table limits are one way to reign in players who may have the means and the inclination to "bet the farm" in the midst of a punishing losing streak and recover all their prior losses in a single bet.
Another is to come down hard on punters who are "foolish" enough to revert to the best known - and thanks to the gambling business, most reviled - system of them all, the double up, double down or the Martingale.
Unless we believe in luck, along with Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and other invisible benefactors, we all know that over time we are going to lose more bets than we win.
It that were not so, there would be no casinos.
It therefore follows that the only way we can win in the end is to rake in more money from a smaller number of winning bets than we give up from a greater number of losing bets.
A Martingale does the job very well: -1, -2, -4, -8, +16 delivers a 1-unit or +3.2% win against a house advantage of -3/5 = 60%, average win 16u, average loss 4u.
A Martingale also happens to be unplayable in a casino, except by professionals who spend their time in motion, losing no more than three bets in any one location before moving on in search of the single win that will give them a profit.
They find themselves out on the sidewalk from time to time, but they don't care: there is always another casino just a few steps away.
Nor do they care that "the math" is apparently against them: they are grateful that all but a tiny percentage of gamblers believe that to be so, leaving the field open to them.
Consider an opening bet of $5 and a relatively modest baccarat table limit of $15,000 (the current green ceiling at Harrahs Stateline), then the fact that 12 consecutive losses will be needed before the next bet in the progression ($20,480) will be unplayable.
Now think about the odds against 12 consecutive losses: roughly 0.002% or 2% of 1% or 1 in 4,016.
Next, consider that if our "Martingaler" places and wins a $15,000 bet at baccarat, he is $5,480 "in the hole."
End of story? Of course not! His chances of winning that first $15,000 bet are a little less than 50-50 (49.3 to 50.7), meaning that he will probably lose. But what he now has to ask himself is how likely it is that he can get just two bets ahead of the house ($30,000 less $10,240) after falling 12 bets behind.
Thanks to the house advantage, a force that pulls both ways, those chances are better than good.
The so-called Gambler's Fallacy is the assumption that because an inordinate number of bets have been lost, a win is somehow more probable at this moment than it would be otherwise.
When applied to individual bets, the delusion is well-named as a fallacious disregard of the negative odds that apply equally to every bet, regardless of what went before.
But our Martingaler has just lost 12 bets in a row, then won a single wager, indicating a house advantage for the sequence of -11/13 = 85%.
The known house edge for baccarat is about 1.4%, so how "probable" is it that the house will stay 11 bets ahead indefinitely?
Not very.
It is at this point that a large bankroll becomes essential to the task of eliminating the negative effects of the house advantage.
I have had many a mathematician scold me with a reminder that in theory, an egregious imbalance like the example above need never be offset sufficiently to enable a progressive bettor to recover his losses.
But I have yet to be provided with a real-play example of the house edge running amok without eventually returning to compliance with negative expectation for the game.
There is a good reason for that: It can't happen.
It can take a while, but the house edge cannot stay at 85% (or even close) forever. Remember, we are not betting the farm on a complete counter-swing of the pendulum, just one or two wins.
Mythematicians love to trot out runaway sims to "prove" their specious prophecies, so it seems fair that I offer one of my own, an Excel RNG that signals HELP! when the house edge exceeds 50% and SAVED! when paired wins occur.
For a Martingaler who is betting below his green ceiling, a single win is enough to recover prior losses. For a target player, it sometimes (about a third of the time) takes TWO, otherwise one is all that is needed.
Ask me nicely, and I will send you the file. Meantime, here are a couple of out-takes, and the formulas are at the bottom of this post.
Mythematicians, the guys who will defend the power of the house advantage no matter what, concern themselves with what is possible rather than what is probable, arguing that if a given betting method can fail even once in 50,000 bets, it should not be trusted at all.
In casinos, all manner of wondrous outcomes are possible, but not probable, and the probable outweighs the possible by a percentage just great enough to hand the house a profit at game over.
For example, a royal flush is possible on a $5 video poker machine, paying out $20,000 and making the lucky winner very happy.
But on average, at least $21,500 will have to be fed into the machine for every $20,000 paid out, making the house even happier.
And more than 98% of the people who play that machine between jackpots will take out considerably less money than they "contributed."
The HELP! SAVED! file is no more representative of an actual game of baccarat than any other runaway sim, but it serves to illustrate the important difference between what's possible and what is probable.
Once in a great while, a serious threat to the bankroll will emerge. But the greater likelihood is that by then, so much money will have been won that the potential damage from the exposure has been reduced or eliminated.
The sim features a Martingale rather than target betting as I prescribe it, but it confirms that if only paranoid pit personnel would permit double-up to be played, even that simple strategy will consistently overturn the house advantage.
Any pit boss you talk to will confirm that progressive betting of any kind, and the Martingale in particular, cannot possibly win in the long run.
But if your response to that is, "OK, then you won't mind if I give it a try," you will quickly learn that what he says is not what he believes.
The standard retort to any defense of a progression is that it risks too much to win too little, a nonsense criticism that would be meaningful only if it did not apply at least as much to every other method of betting, and to the house's exposure, too.
Think about it: the house permits players to bet whatever they want within the limits discussed earlier, anticipating a "hold" that can be less than 2% of total action.
In truth, the house's share of the churn is much higher than the predicted edge for table games, ranging from 1% at blackjack to 5.26% at roulette, but that's because most players bet as if they want to lose.
A player who can walk away with his bankroll intact, plus 2% of his action, does not have a whole lot to complain about - but systems "debunkers" pretend otherwise in defense of an agenda that is never clear.
The Martingale can be said to win "just $5" when a losing streak finally ends with a turnaround win, but it doesn't: It wins all prior losses PLUS $5.
If you are tempted to venture a Martingale, I recommend varying it a little to boost the bottom line: 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 500, 1000, 2000, 5000 and so on.
But do not get too attached to this approach. You will not be allowed to play it for long!
I have been relentlessly scrutinized and harassed over the years, more often than not with a charm that is skin-deep, and that hardly makes sense from an industry that claims to welcome progressive betting.
Before Caesars Tahoe banned me from its blackjack tables (unaware that target betting works almost as well at baccarat, craps and roulette, among other games) my wife and I were invited to a dinner show.
We had been seated barely five minutes when the Maitre D' brought another couple to our booth, explaining that the show was fully-booked and since we had been comped, our help would be appreciated. It was a large booth, so why not?
Almost before he had settled in his seat, our new table-mate introduced himself as "Tony" and boasted that he and his wife were there because of the huge sums he bet at baccarat in the casino's salle privee.
He was, he said, a high roller.
"So, what system do you use?" he asked, with no further preamble. "Mine is really simple: After I win, I bet five chips, after I lose I bet one, and because I never bet less than $500, I am happy if I get only one chip ahead per shoe."
I replied that I preferred blackjack to baccarat, and that I did not have a system - I was just lucky, I guess.
The same question was asked repeatedly - gently, but firmly - through dinner and the show that followed, and my answer was always the same.
Why on earth would a player with a "winning system" be interested in how someone else stayed ahead of the game?
He wouldn't, of course.
But the house would want to know.
For the record, Tony's "system" is a total disaster. Target betting is not.
Here are the primary cell conditionals for the HELP/SAVED simulation:
(A1)=IF(RAND()<=0.49,1,-1)
(B1)=+A1
(C1)=+B1
(D1)=+B1/C1
(E1)=IF(AND(D1>=50%,C1>=10),"HELP!","")
(F2)=IF(AND(B2<0,A2>0,A1>0),"SAVED!","")
(G1)=IF(AND(G1<0,H1<0),A2*MIN(15000,ABS(G1)*2),A2*5)
(H2)=IF(H1<0,G2+H1,G2)
(I2)=IF(AND(H1<0,H2>0),1,"")
That will get you started with a DIY version of my sim.
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.
_ale
Anyone who walks into a casino hoping to win more bets than he loses is probably going to be disappointed.
But that is exactly how most gamblers approach the challenge of beating odds that they know from the start are against them.
It doesn't make much sense, does it?
It is a demonstrable mathematical fact that if you bet the same amount each time, or choose your bet values randomly, you will eventually fall prey to the house advantage, more likely sooner than later.
And even if you apply money management to the process, responding appropriately to trends for and against you and restricting bet values to a limited proportion of your bankroll, you won't win in the end.
You will simply get to play a little longer.
Casinos are not in the business of money management...player management is their game, and they do what they do so subtly that most gamblers believe that the choices they make are entirely their own.
For example, before a casino in my Nevada neighborhood burned down a year or so ago, its blackjack tables offered a betting spread of $2 to $200.
When it reopened, its fancy new layouts all had table limits of $5 to $100.
To the vast majority of punters, table (or spread limits) are a matter of supreme indifference.
Most people do not spread their bets wider than 1-5, and the bigger their bankroll and their opening bet, the tighter their spread is likely to be.
It is possible for them to make a little money if the house advantage maintains its predicted level for a while and if they press while they are ahead and pull back during a downturn.
They will be in trouble when the house gets a few bets ahead, because they will need an equal number of wins to recover, and because of the game's bias, that may not happen in time to save their meager bankroll.
By imposing table limits, casinos exploit the fact that most players are reluctant to quit a game during a losing streak, especially if the joint is jumping on a Saturday night, and finding another seat might take a while.
So for nearly all of the players who returned to that rebuilt casino in Nevada, their only complaint is likely to be that $2 bets are no longer permitted, not that the maximum spread has dropped to 1-20 from 1-100.
I do not have access to the books at Topaz Lodge, of course, but I can promise you that the house win per player numbers at its blackjack tables are up, in spite of a slump in casino traffic.
The reason is quite simply that $25 players can now only spread 1-4 instead of 1-8, and while spreads that tight are sure to lose in the end, the prospect of a late lucky streak has been summarily halved.
Gamblers are creatures of habit and highly predictable, and casinos depend on their knowledge of human behavior to maximize their profits.
"System" is a word that in the gambling context has become a pejorative, conjuring up images of snake-oil salesmen and the gullible fools they prey upon to profit from their evil schemes.
Outside of casinos, the word is more likely to connote discipline, orderliness, good sense and professionalism, and sundry other attributes.
Inside casinos, only the management is systematic, secure in the knowledge that mathematics, perhaps the most orderly discipline in the known universe, will smooth out minor fluctuations in player behavior and the ups and downs of fate and fortune and deliver a profit at the end of the day.
It comes down to this: a player who does not bet systematically will lose.
It may not happen today or tomorrow, but it will happen in time, as surely as 2+2-5 is a negative number.
And in spite of that undeniable truth, 99.99% of all gamblers will tell you that there is no system known to man that can beat the house advantage.
Here is a different look at the latest pencil log from my BST blackjack trial:
The big numbers in the BST screenshots should come as no surprise by now, and I have stopped providing breakdowns of each step along the way to a final win because by now the point should have been made.
What may surprise some of you is that throughout the session, losing series, defined here as recoveries achieved in spite of more bets lost than won, are in the majority.
It should not come as a shock, but too many people are inclined to assume that luck is the only factor that can make you a winner in a casino, and it simply is not so.
Since none of us can ever know ahead of time if the very next bet is going to win or lose, systematic betting is our only option.
Call it money management if you like - call it grzignflumpf, even - but however you may choose to gussy up or disguise it, a "system" is what is needed here.
Casinos know this and are constantly on the alert for players who do not bet (and lose) the way they are "supposed to."
Table limits are one way to reign in players who may have the means and the inclination to "bet the farm" in the midst of a punishing losing streak and recover all their prior losses in a single bet.
Another is to come down hard on punters who are "foolish" enough to revert to the best known - and thanks to the gambling business, most reviled - system of them all, the double up, double down or the Martingale.
Unless we believe in luck, along with Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and other invisible benefactors, we all know that over time we are going to lose more bets than we win.
It that were not so, there would be no casinos.
It therefore follows that the only way we can win in the end is to rake in more money from a smaller number of winning bets than we give up from a greater number of losing bets.
A Martingale does the job very well: -1, -2, -4, -8, +16 delivers a 1-unit or +3.2% win against a house advantage of -3/5 = 60%, average win 16u, average loss 4u.
A Martingale also happens to be unplayable in a casino, except by professionals who spend their time in motion, losing no more than three bets in any one location before moving on in search of the single win that will give them a profit.
They find themselves out on the sidewalk from time to time, but they don't care: there is always another casino just a few steps away.
Nor do they care that "the math" is apparently against them: they are grateful that all but a tiny percentage of gamblers believe that to be so, leaving the field open to them.
Consider an opening bet of $5 and a relatively modest baccarat table limit of $15,000 (the current green ceiling at Harrahs Stateline), then the fact that 12 consecutive losses will be needed before the next bet in the progression ($20,480) will be unplayable.
Now think about the odds against 12 consecutive losses: roughly 0.002% or 2% of 1% or 1 in 4,016.
Next, consider that if our "Martingaler" places and wins a $15,000 bet at baccarat, he is $5,480 "in the hole."
End of story? Of course not! His chances of winning that first $15,000 bet are a little less than 50-50 (49.3 to 50.7), meaning that he will probably lose. But what he now has to ask himself is how likely it is that he can get just two bets ahead of the house ($30,000 less $10,240) after falling 12 bets behind.
Thanks to the house advantage, a force that pulls both ways, those chances are better than good.
The so-called Gambler's Fallacy is the assumption that because an inordinate number of bets have been lost, a win is somehow more probable at this moment than it would be otherwise.
When applied to individual bets, the delusion is well-named as a fallacious disregard of the negative odds that apply equally to every bet, regardless of what went before.
But our Martingaler has just lost 12 bets in a row, then won a single wager, indicating a house advantage for the sequence of -11/13 = 85%.
The known house edge for baccarat is about 1.4%, so how "probable" is it that the house will stay 11 bets ahead indefinitely?
Not very.
It is at this point that a large bankroll becomes essential to the task of eliminating the negative effects of the house advantage.
I have had many a mathematician scold me with a reminder that in theory, an egregious imbalance like the example above need never be offset sufficiently to enable a progressive bettor to recover his losses.
But I have yet to be provided with a real-play example of the house edge running amok without eventually returning to compliance with negative expectation for the game.
There is a good reason for that: It can't happen.
It can take a while, but the house edge cannot stay at 85% (or even close) forever. Remember, we are not betting the farm on a complete counter-swing of the pendulum, just one or two wins.
Mythematicians love to trot out runaway sims to "prove" their specious prophecies, so it seems fair that I offer one of my own, an Excel RNG that signals HELP! when the house edge exceeds 50% and SAVED! when paired wins occur.
For a Martingaler who is betting below his green ceiling, a single win is enough to recover prior losses. For a target player, it sometimes (about a third of the time) takes TWO, otherwise one is all that is needed.
Ask me nicely, and I will send you the file. Meantime, here are a couple of out-takes, and the formulas are at the bottom of this post.
Mythematicians, the guys who will defend the power of the house advantage no matter what, concern themselves with what is possible rather than what is probable, arguing that if a given betting method can fail even once in 50,000 bets, it should not be trusted at all.
In casinos, all manner of wondrous outcomes are possible, but not probable, and the probable outweighs the possible by a percentage just great enough to hand the house a profit at game over.
For example, a royal flush is possible on a $5 video poker machine, paying out $20,000 and making the lucky winner very happy.
But on average, at least $21,500 will have to be fed into the machine for every $20,000 paid out, making the house even happier.
And more than 98% of the people who play that machine between jackpots will take out considerably less money than they "contributed."
The HELP! SAVED! file is no more representative of an actual game of baccarat than any other runaway sim, but it serves to illustrate the important difference between what's possible and what is probable.
Once in a great while, a serious threat to the bankroll will emerge. But the greater likelihood is that by then, so much money will have been won that the potential damage from the exposure has been reduced or eliminated.
The sim features a Martingale rather than target betting as I prescribe it, but it confirms that if only paranoid pit personnel would permit double-up to be played, even that simple strategy will consistently overturn the house advantage.
Any pit boss you talk to will confirm that progressive betting of any kind, and the Martingale in particular, cannot possibly win in the long run.
But if your response to that is, "OK, then you won't mind if I give it a try," you will quickly learn that what he says is not what he believes.
The standard retort to any defense of a progression is that it risks too much to win too little, a nonsense criticism that would be meaningful only if it did not apply at least as much to every other method of betting, and to the house's exposure, too.
Think about it: the house permits players to bet whatever they want within the limits discussed earlier, anticipating a "hold" that can be less than 2% of total action.
In truth, the house's share of the churn is much higher than the predicted edge for table games, ranging from 1% at blackjack to 5.26% at roulette, but that's because most players bet as if they want to lose.
A player who can walk away with his bankroll intact, plus 2% of his action, does not have a whole lot to complain about - but systems "debunkers" pretend otherwise in defense of an agenda that is never clear.
The Martingale can be said to win "just $5" when a losing streak finally ends with a turnaround win, but it doesn't: It wins all prior losses PLUS $5.
If you are tempted to venture a Martingale, I recommend varying it a little to boost the bottom line: 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 500, 1000, 2000, 5000 and so on.
But do not get too attached to this approach. You will not be allowed to play it for long!
I have been relentlessly scrutinized and harassed over the years, more often than not with a charm that is skin-deep, and that hardly makes sense from an industry that claims to welcome progressive betting.
Before Caesars Tahoe banned me from its blackjack tables (unaware that target betting works almost as well at baccarat, craps and roulette, among other games) my wife and I were invited to a dinner show.
We had been seated barely five minutes when the Maitre D' brought another couple to our booth, explaining that the show was fully-booked and since we had been comped, our help would be appreciated. It was a large booth, so why not?
Almost before he had settled in his seat, our new table-mate introduced himself as "Tony" and boasted that he and his wife were there because of the huge sums he bet at baccarat in the casino's salle privee.
He was, he said, a high roller.
"So, what system do you use?" he asked, with no further preamble. "Mine is really simple: After I win, I bet five chips, after I lose I bet one, and because I never bet less than $500, I am happy if I get only one chip ahead per shoe."
I replied that I preferred blackjack to baccarat, and that I did not have a system - I was just lucky, I guess.
The same question was asked repeatedly - gently, but firmly - through dinner and the show that followed, and my answer was always the same.
Why on earth would a player with a "winning system" be interested in how someone else stayed ahead of the game?
He wouldn't, of course.
But the house would want to know.
For the record, Tony's "system" is a total disaster. Target betting is not.
Here are the primary cell conditionals for the HELP/SAVED simulation:
(A1)=IF(RAND()<=0.49,1,-1)
(B1)=+A1
(C1)=+B1
(D1)=+B1/C1
(E1)=IF(AND(D1>=50%,C1>=10),"HELP!","")
(F2)=IF(AND(B2<0,A2>0,A1>0),"SAVED!","")
(G1)=IF(AND(G1<0,H1<0),A2*MIN(15000,ABS(G1)*2),A2*5)
(H2)=IF(H1<0,G2+H1,G2)
(I2)=IF(AND(H1<0,H2>0),1,"")
That will get you started with a DIY version of my sim.
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.
_ale
Sunday, May 17, 2009
"What can be asserted without proof can also be refuted without proof."
_
The quote above is from Christopher Hitchens, an author and philosopher who has the temerity to suggest that evidence is an important prerequisite for belief.
Those who doubt the existence of the house advantage at casino games of chance need only venture money and time to gather their own evidence that, barring blind luck, winning does not come easy.
It is also mathematically demonstrable (a pencil stub and the back of an envelope will do) that if you lose more bets than you win, you will most likely lose more money than you win.
But credulity begins to strain past breaking point when the mathematicians who bolster the gambling industry's disinformation machine insist that the numbers that support the house edge can under no circumstances be used to render it ineffectual.
A pencil and a scrap of paper confirms that if you can consistently win more when you win than you lose when you lose by a percentage significantly greater than the prevailing house bias, losing more bets than you win will not cost you money.
If in 100 bets against a 2% house edge your 49 winning bets bring add more chips to your stash than your 51 losing bets take away, you will end up ahead of the game in spite of negative expectation.
And if you can keep doing that again and again, you will soon become your local casino's worst nightmare.
Academic mathematicians (most of whom are way too smart to gamble), insist on a series of gambling axioms that beggar belief.
One is that blocks of outcomes from casino house games (blackjack, baccarat, craps and roulette among them) are uniquely random and therefore have no patterns or cycles that can be studied, and then relied upon to predict future results.
Another is that computer simulations based on random number generators (RNGs) very rapidly produce outcomes that closely match those that will be encountered in a real-time game of chance.
A third is that because of Rule #1 above, any sample of past outcomes, however large or objective - verifiable and unpolluted might be another way of putting it - is anecdotal and therefore totally irrelevant to any study of gambling, which is in itself a fatuous undertaking.
There is no evidence to support any of those contentions, but the position the "experts" take is much like a firm parent wagging a finger at an errant child: "It's so because I said so."
First, patterns.
Here are screenshots from two iterations of an Excel file that uses the Windows RNG to supply 5,000 outcomes in objective order with the house edge set at (-)1.5%.
(Click on an image to enlarge it)
SS#1 ended up with an actual house bias of more than 3.7% overall, which happens. Often.
Target betting relies on paired or "twin" wins to achieve turnaround for a recovery series, and you will see that in spite of the house bias, there were almost as many paired wins (339) as there were paired losses (343).
The simulation does not "double dip" meaning that three wins in a row do not count as both a double and a triple. This confirmed by the "streaks total" numbers on each side, which closely approximate the total number of wins and losses, each pair consisting of two bets, each triple, three bets, and so on.
Given 5,000 rounds, there were more of each category of losing streaks (pairs, triples, quads and so on) than there were matching winning ones, which we would expect in a sample with a high house edge overall.
In the second SS, there was a negligible house edge, which also happens. Not often enough.
There, twins, triple wins, quads and so on matched or exceeded the frequency of their "opposite numbers" but all in all, the difference was not worth much.
The file generates a new set of 5,000 rounds with each tap of the F9 recalc key, and anyone who would like to study it more closely is more than welcome to e-mail me for a copy.
I know I am safe in using a low-grade, less than perfect RNG because mathematicians everywhere love them to PCs (sorry) and will bravely stand up for them as accurate simulations of a real game.
So now to that second preposterous claim: the one about RNGs being reliable indicators of how an actual casino table game will apply its known pro-house percentage.
For anyone betting randomly or wagering flat or fixed sums, a prolonged negative trend or pattern is very likely to prove fatal, and it is possible that any attempts at damage control will ultimately fail.
"Damage control" in this context means either reducing bet values to ride out a negative trend of unknown duration, or walking away from a beating in progress hoping for a friendlier pattern at a different layout or game.
The same does not apply to a target player who has full confidence that as long as he has not yet reached his maximum bet value, two consecutive wins will get him out of trouble.
What makes the use of RNG output against a betting strategy both disingenuous and reprehensible is the knowledge that human beings have an essential role to play in the gambling process.
Any RNG-reliant sim, mine included, demands the assumption that a player would make no attempt to defend himself against a prolonged negative trend, either by varying his betting policy or walking away from the game and resuming play elsewhere.
Add this to the fact that sims also exclude cards, shoes, dice, wheels, dealers, money and real time, and the mathematicians who depend on them as indicators of actual play do not seem so smart after all.
I am much more comfortable with actual output from real games, so here is a streak analysis of a block of 5,000 bets taken at random from the BST blackjack trial that is still ongoing. (OK, not wholly random, because I took today's date, 0517, and extracted outcomes 517 through 5016 from BST blocks #5 and #6).
As you can see, there's not a whole lot of difference between the blackjack analysis and those for two RNG samples set at a 1.5% house edge. I would have preferred a clear negative expectation, but this is what happens when you select data at random: 4,884 rounds from BST05 and 16 from BST06.
Repeating patterns are everywhere in the course of any game of chance. But unless you know how to be ready for them so that you can use them to your advantage, that knowledge will be of no help to you.
You will not be able to see them coming, so you must bet in such a way that whenever favorable patterns occur, you will derive maximum benefit from them.
Successful betting, like so much in life, depends on good timing. But "good" does not have to mean "accidental" if you have a plan.
Skeptics often point to the size of the recommended bets for target play, usually because they do not understand that a narrow spread and a low maximum will invariably result in more action - and therefore more risk - than the levels I call for.
Here are some more patterns, tracking maximum wagering in two very large samples of baccarat outcomes, plus 80,000 or so rounds of "real" blackjack against Ken Smith's Blackjack Strategy Trainer.
Once again, any one set of data looks pretty much like any other...
The summaries at the bottom of each of these panels probably provide enough information for most readers.
Those of you who are more detail oriented might want to know the following:-
- The numbers in the second column refer to lines in each separate sample with the overall actual value (AV) to the right, indicating how many bets the "house" was ahead at the moment when the bet level hit the max.
- The AV for the series can be deduced from the next two columns to the right, which show first the series starting line, then the AV at that point.
- Skeptical mathematicians will often claim that there is no reason to hope that once the bet limit has been reached, robbing target betting of its "wiggle room", an egregious negative trend will abate sufficiently to permit recovery. This is invariably not the case, as columns 6 (ending line #) and 7 (AV at that point) confirm.
- The reason for predictable offsets to a very unusual house spike is shown in column 8, in bright red numerals: the series-to-date house edge at the moment when the first "max" bet was required. The average is around -50% and since generally it requires at least 25 bets to dig that deep a hole, numbers that large do not happen often.
- The next column to the right shows how much deeper the "hole" became before recovery was achieved. Usually not much, but once the max has been reached, the bankroll must be large enough to withstand an occasional ongoing slump before turnaround.
- Next comes the number of bets in the whole series, followed by the number of rounds it took to get into trouble in the first place.
The three separate summaries are very similar in many ways, confirming that outside of our inability to predict the outcome of the very next wager are options that enable us to win consistently in spite of the house advantage.
I have gone to great lengths here to refute the idiocy of some mythematical assertions with evidence, rather than without it, as Mr. Hitchens suggests in the quote at the top of this post.
Mr. Hitchens specializes in skewering traditions and attitudes that he believes have no basis in reality and no place in modern times.
The standard academic prohibition of the study and use of past outcomes is perhaps the most idiotic gambling axiom of them all, worthy of his attention if he were ever to turn it to earthly matters.
We cannot predict the outcome of the very next bet, or any one bet at any one point in the future.
We all understand that, with many of us falling back on the old cliche, "that's why they call it gambling..."
But when bets in quantity are studied collectively rather than one by one, distinctive patterns always emerge, as they must.
Denying the validity of analysis and its potential for prediction in "big picture" terms is both illogical and unscientific.
What on earth could make gambling's math distinct from any other kind of math? Nothing, that's what.
Perhaps there is one very good reason why house-trained mathematicians seeking to support the "you can't win" conventional wisdom refuse to accept the relevance of prior outcomes.
The study of what's past will invariably prove them wrong.
And wrong is something an academic (especially one with an agenda) hates to be.
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.
_ttern
The quote above is from Christopher Hitchens, an author and philosopher who has the temerity to suggest that evidence is an important prerequisite for belief.
Those who doubt the existence of the house advantage at casino games of chance need only venture money and time to gather their own evidence that, barring blind luck, winning does not come easy.
It is also mathematically demonstrable (a pencil stub and the back of an envelope will do) that if you lose more bets than you win, you will most likely lose more money than you win.
But credulity begins to strain past breaking point when the mathematicians who bolster the gambling industry's disinformation machine insist that the numbers that support the house edge can under no circumstances be used to render it ineffectual.
A pencil and a scrap of paper confirms that if you can consistently win more when you win than you lose when you lose by a percentage significantly greater than the prevailing house bias, losing more bets than you win will not cost you money.
If in 100 bets against a 2% house edge your 49 winning bets bring add more chips to your stash than your 51 losing bets take away, you will end up ahead of the game in spite of negative expectation.
And if you can keep doing that again and again, you will soon become your local casino's worst nightmare.
Academic mathematicians (most of whom are way too smart to gamble), insist on a series of gambling axioms that beggar belief.
One is that blocks of outcomes from casino house games (blackjack, baccarat, craps and roulette among them) are uniquely random and therefore have no patterns or cycles that can be studied, and then relied upon to predict future results.
Another is that computer simulations based on random number generators (RNGs) very rapidly produce outcomes that closely match those that will be encountered in a real-time game of chance.
A third is that because of Rule #1 above, any sample of past outcomes, however large or objective - verifiable and unpolluted might be another way of putting it - is anecdotal and therefore totally irrelevant to any study of gambling, which is in itself a fatuous undertaking.
There is no evidence to support any of those contentions, but the position the "experts" take is much like a firm parent wagging a finger at an errant child: "It's so because I said so."
First, patterns.
Here are screenshots from two iterations of an Excel file that uses the Windows RNG to supply 5,000 outcomes in objective order with the house edge set at (-)1.5%.
SS#1 ended up with an actual house bias of more than 3.7% overall, which happens. Often.
Target betting relies on paired or "twin" wins to achieve turnaround for a recovery series, and you will see that in spite of the house bias, there were almost as many paired wins (339) as there were paired losses (343).
The simulation does not "double dip" meaning that three wins in a row do not count as both a double and a triple. This confirmed by the "streaks total" numbers on each side, which closely approximate the total number of wins and losses, each pair consisting of two bets, each triple, three bets, and so on.
Given 5,000 rounds, there were more of each category of losing streaks (pairs, triples, quads and so on) than there were matching winning ones, which we would expect in a sample with a high house edge overall.
In the second SS, there was a negligible house edge, which also happens. Not often enough.
There, twins, triple wins, quads and so on matched or exceeded the frequency of their "opposite numbers" but all in all, the difference was not worth much.
The file generates a new set of 5,000 rounds with each tap of the F9 recalc key, and anyone who would like to study it more closely is more than welcome to e-mail me for a copy.
I know I am safe in using a low-grade, less than perfect RNG because mathematicians everywhere love them to PCs (sorry) and will bravely stand up for them as accurate simulations of a real game.
So now to that second preposterous claim: the one about RNGs being reliable indicators of how an actual casino table game will apply its known pro-house percentage.
For anyone betting randomly or wagering flat or fixed sums, a prolonged negative trend or pattern is very likely to prove fatal, and it is possible that any attempts at damage control will ultimately fail.
"Damage control" in this context means either reducing bet values to ride out a negative trend of unknown duration, or walking away from a beating in progress hoping for a friendlier pattern at a different layout or game.
The same does not apply to a target player who has full confidence that as long as he has not yet reached his maximum bet value, two consecutive wins will get him out of trouble.
What makes the use of RNG output against a betting strategy both disingenuous and reprehensible is the knowledge that human beings have an essential role to play in the gambling process.
Any RNG-reliant sim, mine included, demands the assumption that a player would make no attempt to defend himself against a prolonged negative trend, either by varying his betting policy or walking away from the game and resuming play elsewhere.
Add this to the fact that sims also exclude cards, shoes, dice, wheels, dealers, money and real time, and the mathematicians who depend on them as indicators of actual play do not seem so smart after all.
I am much more comfortable with actual output from real games, so here is a streak analysis of a block of 5,000 bets taken at random from the BST blackjack trial that is still ongoing. (OK, not wholly random, because I took today's date, 0517, and extracted outcomes 517 through 5016 from BST blocks #5 and #6).
As you can see, there's not a whole lot of difference between the blackjack analysis and those for two RNG samples set at a 1.5% house edge. I would have preferred a clear negative expectation, but this is what happens when you select data at random: 4,884 rounds from BST05 and 16 from BST06.
Repeating patterns are everywhere in the course of any game of chance. But unless you know how to be ready for them so that you can use them to your advantage, that knowledge will be of no help to you.
You will not be able to see them coming, so you must bet in such a way that whenever favorable patterns occur, you will derive maximum benefit from them.
Successful betting, like so much in life, depends on good timing. But "good" does not have to mean "accidental" if you have a plan.
Skeptics often point to the size of the recommended bets for target play, usually because they do not understand that a narrow spread and a low maximum will invariably result in more action - and therefore more risk - than the levels I call for.
Here are some more patterns, tracking maximum wagering in two very large samples of baccarat outcomes, plus 80,000 or so rounds of "real" blackjack against Ken Smith's Blackjack Strategy Trainer.
Once again, any one set of data looks pretty much like any other...
The summaries at the bottom of each of these panels probably provide enough information for most readers.
Those of you who are more detail oriented might want to know the following:-
- The numbers in the second column refer to lines in each separate sample with the overall actual value (AV) to the right, indicating how many bets the "house" was ahead at the moment when the bet level hit the max.
- The AV for the series can be deduced from the next two columns to the right, which show first the series starting line, then the AV at that point.
- Skeptical mathematicians will often claim that there is no reason to hope that once the bet limit has been reached, robbing target betting of its "wiggle room", an egregious negative trend will abate sufficiently to permit recovery. This is invariably not the case, as columns 6 (ending line #) and 7 (AV at that point) confirm.
- The reason for predictable offsets to a very unusual house spike is shown in column 8, in bright red numerals: the series-to-date house edge at the moment when the first "max" bet was required. The average is around -50% and since generally it requires at least 25 bets to dig that deep a hole, numbers that large do not happen often.
- The next column to the right shows how much deeper the "hole" became before recovery was achieved. Usually not much, but once the max has been reached, the bankroll must be large enough to withstand an occasional ongoing slump before turnaround.
- Next comes the number of bets in the whole series, followed by the number of rounds it took to get into trouble in the first place.
The three separate summaries are very similar in many ways, confirming that outside of our inability to predict the outcome of the very next wager are options that enable us to win consistently in spite of the house advantage.
I have gone to great lengths here to refute the idiocy of some mythematical assertions with evidence, rather than without it, as Mr. Hitchens suggests in the quote at the top of this post.
Mr. Hitchens specializes in skewering traditions and attitudes that he believes have no basis in reality and no place in modern times.
The standard academic prohibition of the study and use of past outcomes is perhaps the most idiotic gambling axiom of them all, worthy of his attention if he were ever to turn it to earthly matters.
We cannot predict the outcome of the very next bet, or any one bet at any one point in the future.
We all understand that, with many of us falling back on the old cliche, "that's why they call it gambling..."
But when bets in quantity are studied collectively rather than one by one, distinctive patterns always emerge, as they must.
Denying the validity of analysis and its potential for prediction in "big picture" terms is both illogical and unscientific.
What on earth could make gambling's math distinct from any other kind of math? Nothing, that's what.
Perhaps there is one very good reason why house-trained mathematicians seeking to support the "you can't win" conventional wisdom refuse to accept the relevance of prior outcomes.
The study of what's past will invariably prove them wrong.
And wrong is something an academic (especially one with an agenda) hates to be.
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.
_ttern
Thursday, May 14, 2009
When crossing a minefield, should you march in a straight line and hope for the best, or tread carefully and make a few detours to stay alive?
_
My "spring cleaning project" (tidying up my data files so anyone can understand them) is going well, and I should have more to say about that by the middle of next week.
One topic that the task has brought to the surface again is the extent to which runaway sims differ from what a living, breathing player is likely to encounter during real play in real time for real money in a real casino.
The question at the top of this post sums it up, I hope.
It is fashionable for academic mathematicians to respond to my criticism of RNG game simulations by saying that I don't like them because my betting method cannot beat them.
They are free to bolster their position on the arithmetic of gambling with as many wobbly pit-props as they can find, but the truth is that no one alive plays the way a runaway sim tackles a gigantic sample of random numbers.
I have just started reading Sam Harris's controversial polemic, "The End of Faith," and take great delight in the analogies and allegories he uses to demonstrate the weakness of positions that some very smart people have been taking for centuries.
Mr. Harris and I have different objectives, of course, because I do not deny the existence of the house advantage at games of chance: I simply reject the contention that it cannot be beaten.
I fully accept that because of the house edge, any gambler is certain over time to lose more bets than he wins, and I have always conceded that the only way to avoid that certainty is to stay away from casinos and never place a bet.
Mr. Harris relies on irrefutable logic to back his arguments, and so do I.
Who in his right mind would question the proposition that if you win more when you when than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win will not cost you money in the end?
The argument is so solid that I often forget to add the qualification that of course the product of the percentage by which your average win value exceeds your average loss value must be greater than the product of the house advantage applied to overall action.
In other words, a difference of pennies between the AWB and the ALB simply won't cut the mustard!
Example: A 2% house edge was confirmed at the end of 100 hands because you lost 51 bets and won 49; happily (but not by chance), your AWB at $11 exceeded your ALB at $10 by 10%, giving you an overall win of $29 (+2.8%) rather than an "expected" or "indicated" loss of $21. Had AWB/ALB summed +3% (say, $10.30/$10), you would have won $504.70 and lost $510 for a final outcome of -$5.30 (-0.52%), less than negative expectation but not "less enough."
We must first agree that it is possible to consistently achieve an AWB that tops our ALB sufficiently to offset the house edge that most people think is unbeatable.
If you do not think it can be done, you should be reading someone else's blog right now (or be planning your next losing trip to a casino!).
I mention the Harris book because its premise is that throughout history, countless millions of people around the world have been persuaded to adopt beliefs that make no sense.
Getting gamblers to accept that games of chance are so uniquely magical and mysterious that they have their own special laws of mathematics is no stretch at all in comparison with the tenets that Mr. Harris cites.
The truth is that consistent winning does not take a miracle...just discipline, commitment, and an abundance of cash.
Target betting's primary rule, NB=LTD+ in response to a mid-series win, is on its own enough to achieve the "win more" goal at blackjack, and even betting the field at craps, because both games pay back 100% of the bet on a win, and occasionally more than that.
Blackjack's naturals and the x2 or x2, x3 craps "bonuses" for 1,1 and 6,6 have no equivalents in baccarat, so additional ammunition is often needed to get ahead of the house edge in that game.
Baccarat ranks below blackjack for target betting, but above craps and roulette, which should always be abandoned as soon as a series LTD begins to look like real money.
Logic supports both the OL (opening loss) and MSL (mid-series loss) rules, which seek to exploit the high probability that a house win will be immediately followed by a player win.
The math could not be simpler: isolated wins are the most common outcomes on both sides of the table, which helps the MSL and OL, 2L and 3L rules but works against NB=LTD+.
Paired wins come next, followed as we would expect by triples, quads and so on.
The core rule of target betting invariably pays off well ahead of serious trouble because the NB value is always modestly more than the LTD value, and an eventual win will save the day.
Thanks to the MSL, OL, 2L and 3L tactics, more often than not a target betting player does not even have to wait for two consecutive wins ("twins") - a single right bet will turn the recovery series around.
Given that reality, casino table games are logically less hazardous for a player who can recoup his prior losses in two wins or less than for a fixed-sum or random bettor.
Mathematicians repeatedly state that trying to run away from a prolonged negative trend is pointless in the long run because the house advantage will always see to it that matters will get worse ("out of the frying pan and into the fire") just a little more often than they get better.
Possibly true for a haphazard player, but logically not so for player in search of an oh so slight offset to a threatening downturn.
There is, it is true, no way of knowing if what might be a long losing streak will reverse itself if we stay put and tough it out instead of bailing out.
So we have to look at the numbers and apply them to any threat situation.
If a downturn continues (and, again, it may not), serious harm might come to our bankroll.
If we choose to suspend play for a while and walk away from a potential threat, the odds are better than 10 to 1 in our favor that we will quickly encounter paired wins, or a well-timed single win.
That is because most of the time, the win-loss pattern in a table game bounces back and forth (-1, +1, -2, +1, -3, +2, -1, +2) with just a slight bias for the house.
Paired wins show up, on average, every five bets or so. Single wins are slightly less than a 50% probability.
Most players bet a very tight spread, pick their bet values more or less randomly, and bet either too much or too little during a prolonged downturn.
They also hope (but mostly do not expect) to win with very little risk, and so they come to the table with an inadequate bankroll that is quickly wiped out if a long losing streak sets in.
Time to drag out a little homily: If you can't afford to win, you shouldn't bet.
Against most players, fluctuations in the win-loss pattern (WLP) do not have to be very great to hand the house the "contribution" it figures it is due.
Against a target strategist, the ups and downs of a gambling game have to be seismic for the house edge to prevail.
The gambling industry has always been very effective in sending players a mixed message which says, "Hey, we're offering you a chance to make more money than you could hope to earn any other way...but chances are you will lose."
Steve Weinberg, credited as the creator of modern-day Las Vegas, was on "60 Minutes" a while back telling viewers that the only long-term winners are the folks who own casinos.
I hate to use the name most people know him by, because to me a casino operator changing his name to WYNN is like a doctor adopting the moniker KYLL: It is insensitive at best!
So I will just say this in response to his cheery You Can't Win message: "Steve, you know better."
It is, however, very important for Mr. Weinberg's chosen business that its customers believe that winning is impossible, and losing is fun.
Money alone is not a guarantee that a player will beat the house edge and boost his bankroll in spite of losing more often than he won.
Money and a plan - the right plan - will invariably get the job done.
Spread, spread and spread are the three keys to success at gambling, which is why a casino does all it can to limit spreads, exploiting the average player's inclination to stick to the same game and keep betting far longer than he should.
And of course a target bettor will face severe challenges from time to time, and that is when he will need his discipline, confidence, commitment and money the most.
His exposure is greatest when he has reached his maximum bet, whether it is self-imposed or mandated by the house rules.
The good news is that in order to push his bets that high, the current house edge will have to have reached a number far above the norm for the game.
The experts tell us that past outcomes can have no effect on future outcomes and smugly quote what is sometimes called the Law of Independence of Trials.
In the short term, it is a powerful principle. Long term, it is hogwash.
When the house edge for a given sample reaches, say, 40% in a 1% game like blackjack (and it does happen, occasionally), we cannot state with certainty that there will be a significant offset in the next 10 or 20 bets.
We can however be sure that a swing against the house must come eventually in order for the laws of real mathematics (as opposed to mythematics) to be complied with.
It may not be - probably will not be - a 100% swing in the opposite direction from the prolonged negative trend.
But it invariably will prove to be enough, as long as the player's cash resources are likewise.
Prospects are helped by the fact that the rules of target betting simply will not permit a player to stay in one place longer than it is safe to do so.
After starting a new series with, for example, a $5 bet (at craps or roulette or even 3-card poker if all the available blackjack tables have a $25 minimum), it is probably safe to spread as wide as 1-20 or $5 to $100 in a busy casino before moving on.
Generally, a 1-5 spread is as wide as you should go in one place, to avoid attracting the unwanted attention of pit personnel ("Thousand in play! Up from $100! Come get him, Boss!").
That means that in a prolonged downturn, you will be moving from layout to layout and even game to game quite a bit before EOS.
And each time you do that, there is better than a 90% probability that EOS is just a few bets away.
There is also a 90% probability that if you had stayed where you were, recovery would have happened in a hurry.
But since your NB would have had to have been inside the danger zone, who cares?
Runaway sims that depend on robot "players" wandering blindfold into a minefield require us to believe the preposterous without question.
Some people do that every day of their lives. You don't have to...
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.
_
My "spring cleaning project" (tidying up my data files so anyone can understand them) is going well, and I should have more to say about that by the middle of next week.
One topic that the task has brought to the surface again is the extent to which runaway sims differ from what a living, breathing player is likely to encounter during real play in real time for real money in a real casino.
The question at the top of this post sums it up, I hope.
It is fashionable for academic mathematicians to respond to my criticism of RNG game simulations by saying that I don't like them because my betting method cannot beat them.
They are free to bolster their position on the arithmetic of gambling with as many wobbly pit-props as they can find, but the truth is that no one alive plays the way a runaway sim tackles a gigantic sample of random numbers.
I have just started reading Sam Harris's controversial polemic, "The End of Faith," and take great delight in the analogies and allegories he uses to demonstrate the weakness of positions that some very smart people have been taking for centuries.
Mr. Harris and I have different objectives, of course, because I do not deny the existence of the house advantage at games of chance: I simply reject the contention that it cannot be beaten.
I fully accept that because of the house edge, any gambler is certain over time to lose more bets than he wins, and I have always conceded that the only way to avoid that certainty is to stay away from casinos and never place a bet.
Mr. Harris relies on irrefutable logic to back his arguments, and so do I.
Who in his right mind would question the proposition that if you win more when you when than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win will not cost you money in the end?
The argument is so solid that I often forget to add the qualification that of course the product of the percentage by which your average win value exceeds your average loss value must be greater than the product of the house advantage applied to overall action.
In other words, a difference of pennies between the AWB and the ALB simply won't cut the mustard!
Example: A 2% house edge was confirmed at the end of 100 hands because you lost 51 bets and won 49; happily (but not by chance), your AWB at $11 exceeded your ALB at $10 by 10%, giving you an overall win of $29 (+2.8%) rather than an "expected" or "indicated" loss of $21. Had AWB/ALB summed +3% (say, $10.30/$10), you would have won $504.70 and lost $510 for a final outcome of -$5.30 (-0.52%), less than negative expectation but not "less enough."
We must first agree that it is possible to consistently achieve an AWB that tops our ALB sufficiently to offset the house edge that most people think is unbeatable.
If you do not think it can be done, you should be reading someone else's blog right now (or be planning your next losing trip to a casino!).
I mention the Harris book because its premise is that throughout history, countless millions of people around the world have been persuaded to adopt beliefs that make no sense.
Getting gamblers to accept that games of chance are so uniquely magical and mysterious that they have their own special laws of mathematics is no stretch at all in comparison with the tenets that Mr. Harris cites.
The truth is that consistent winning does not take a miracle...just discipline, commitment, and an abundance of cash.
Target betting's primary rule, NB=LTD+ in response to a mid-series win, is on its own enough to achieve the "win more" goal at blackjack, and even betting the field at craps, because both games pay back 100% of the bet on a win, and occasionally more than that.
Blackjack's naturals and the x2 or x2, x3 craps "bonuses" for 1,1 and 6,6 have no equivalents in baccarat, so additional ammunition is often needed to get ahead of the house edge in that game.
Baccarat ranks below blackjack for target betting, but above craps and roulette, which should always be abandoned as soon as a series LTD begins to look like real money.
Logic supports both the OL (opening loss) and MSL (mid-series loss) rules, which seek to exploit the high probability that a house win will be immediately followed by a player win.
The math could not be simpler: isolated wins are the most common outcomes on both sides of the table, which helps the MSL and OL, 2L and 3L rules but works against NB=LTD+.
Paired wins come next, followed as we would expect by triples, quads and so on.
The core rule of target betting invariably pays off well ahead of serious trouble because the NB value is always modestly more than the LTD value, and an eventual win will save the day.
Thanks to the MSL, OL, 2L and 3L tactics, more often than not a target betting player does not even have to wait for two consecutive wins ("twins") - a single right bet will turn the recovery series around.
Given that reality, casino table games are logically less hazardous for a player who can recoup his prior losses in two wins or less than for a fixed-sum or random bettor.
Mathematicians repeatedly state that trying to run away from a prolonged negative trend is pointless in the long run because the house advantage will always see to it that matters will get worse ("out of the frying pan and into the fire") just a little more often than they get better.
Possibly true for a haphazard player, but logically not so for player in search of an oh so slight offset to a threatening downturn.
There is, it is true, no way of knowing if what might be a long losing streak will reverse itself if we stay put and tough it out instead of bailing out.
So we have to look at the numbers and apply them to any threat situation.
If a downturn continues (and, again, it may not), serious harm might come to our bankroll.
If we choose to suspend play for a while and walk away from a potential threat, the odds are better than 10 to 1 in our favor that we will quickly encounter paired wins, or a well-timed single win.
That is because most of the time, the win-loss pattern in a table game bounces back and forth (-1, +1, -2, +1, -3, +2, -1, +2) with just a slight bias for the house.
Paired wins show up, on average, every five bets or so. Single wins are slightly less than a 50% probability.
Most players bet a very tight spread, pick their bet values more or less randomly, and bet either too much or too little during a prolonged downturn.
They also hope (but mostly do not expect) to win with very little risk, and so they come to the table with an inadequate bankroll that is quickly wiped out if a long losing streak sets in.
Time to drag out a little homily: If you can't afford to win, you shouldn't bet.
Against most players, fluctuations in the win-loss pattern (WLP) do not have to be very great to hand the house the "contribution" it figures it is due.
Against a target strategist, the ups and downs of a gambling game have to be seismic for the house edge to prevail.
The gambling industry has always been very effective in sending players a mixed message which says, "Hey, we're offering you a chance to make more money than you could hope to earn any other way...but chances are you will lose."
Steve Weinberg, credited as the creator of modern-day Las Vegas, was on "60 Minutes" a while back telling viewers that the only long-term winners are the folks who own casinos.
I hate to use the name most people know him by, because to me a casino operator changing his name to WYNN is like a doctor adopting the moniker KYLL: It is insensitive at best!
So I will just say this in response to his cheery You Can't Win message: "Steve, you know better."
It is, however, very important for Mr. Weinberg's chosen business that its customers believe that winning is impossible, and losing is fun.
Money alone is not a guarantee that a player will beat the house edge and boost his bankroll in spite of losing more often than he won.
Money and a plan - the right plan - will invariably get the job done.
Spread, spread and spread are the three keys to success at gambling, which is why a casino does all it can to limit spreads, exploiting the average player's inclination to stick to the same game and keep betting far longer than he should.
And of course a target bettor will face severe challenges from time to time, and that is when he will need his discipline, confidence, commitment and money the most.
His exposure is greatest when he has reached his maximum bet, whether it is self-imposed or mandated by the house rules.
The good news is that in order to push his bets that high, the current house edge will have to have reached a number far above the norm for the game.
The experts tell us that past outcomes can have no effect on future outcomes and smugly quote what is sometimes called the Law of Independence of Trials.
In the short term, it is a powerful principle. Long term, it is hogwash.
When the house edge for a given sample reaches, say, 40% in a 1% game like blackjack (and it does happen, occasionally), we cannot state with certainty that there will be a significant offset in the next 10 or 20 bets.
We can however be sure that a swing against the house must come eventually in order for the laws of real mathematics (as opposed to mythematics) to be complied with.
It may not be - probably will not be - a 100% swing in the opposite direction from the prolonged negative trend.
But it invariably will prove to be enough, as long as the player's cash resources are likewise.
Prospects are helped by the fact that the rules of target betting simply will not permit a player to stay in one place longer than it is safe to do so.
After starting a new series with, for example, a $5 bet (at craps or roulette or even 3-card poker if all the available blackjack tables have a $25 minimum), it is probably safe to spread as wide as 1-20 or $5 to $100 in a busy casino before moving on.
Generally, a 1-5 spread is as wide as you should go in one place, to avoid attracting the unwanted attention of pit personnel ("Thousand in play! Up from $100! Come get him, Boss!").
That means that in a prolonged downturn, you will be moving from layout to layout and even game to game quite a bit before EOS.
And each time you do that, there is better than a 90% probability that EOS is just a few bets away.
There is also a 90% probability that if you had stayed where you were, recovery would have happened in a hurry.
But since your NB would have had to have been inside the danger zone, who cares?
Runaway sims that depend on robot "players" wandering blindfold into a minefield require us to believe the preposterous without question.
Some people do that every day of their lives. You don't have to...
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.
_
Monday, May 11, 2009
"Your methodology is a mess and your alleged strategy is too complicated for anyone else to understand. This isn't math, it's madness!"
_
How rude!
But I guess when you choose to go public with ideas that challenge the conventional wisdom, you have to be ready to take a little unfriendly heat.
I have never claimed to be a traditional academic mathematician, and I suspect if I were, I would never have leaped into this project in the first place.
Mathematicians as a breed, and I have known one or two, have always seemed to me more interested in getting their heads around other people's ideas than coming up with anything new of their own.
Maybe they feel that this late in the game, there can be nothing new to come up with.
And I have to admit that my methodology, as target betting has evolved, has not been all that it could be.
I am too easily distracted by questions that occur to me in the middle of one aspect of the challenge of overcoming the house edge at games of chance, and as a result, my data is disorganized and hard to follow for people with tidier minds than mine.
I usually finish what I have started, but not in the methodical manner that a trained mathematician would insist upon.
So, here and now I am announcing a spring-cleaning project, which is especially appropriate today because just before dawn, I heard my first wren of the season staking his claim on this little piece of Northern Nevada.
Step one will be to take the blackjack outcomes and break out each separate component of target betting to see how it performs on its own.
That means starting with just the LTD+ rule (the one that makes it possible to win more when you win than you lose when you lose) and then carefully adding and subtracting elements such as the OL (opening loss), WP (win progression) and MSL (mid-series loss) rules.
Once I have the blackjack summary, I will post it here and then move on to the far larger baccarat data sets that together account for about 80% of the "real" outcomes in my database.
I should say once again that I flatly reject the notion that past outcomes from games of chance have nothing to tell us about what we can expect in the future.
There might be something to it if I were building a betting method from scratch using just the outcomes to hand, because there would be a real danger that I would end up with a strategy that works only for those outcomes.
It would be tough, I suspect, to devise a method that beats more than 400,000 outcomes from two very different casino table games, but that is not what I am about here.
Target betting, aka Turnaround, has been in the public domain for a dozen years now, and has existed in my head and in my spreadsheet files for almost two and a half times that long.
The basic idea, the deferral of a recovery bet until a single win ends (or at least interrupts) a losing pattern, owes nothing to the Jones and Rodriguez baccarat samples, or to the 80,000-plus rounds generated with the help of Ken Smith's Blackjack Strategy Trainer.
It's going to take me a while to get all of this done, but I will get there.
I can tell you right now that with all of the frills, feints and dodges stripped away, the LTD+ rule alone turns a 0.81% house edge into a 1.4% player edge, flipping an indicated LOSS of at least $263,000 into a WIN of $454,000.
That alone is impossible, according to those well-trained, tidy-minded, methodical mathematicians I mentioned earlier.
Adding my WP rule, which keeps re-doubling the bet after an opening win in a new series to a maximum of $200, adding $100 each round until the streak inevitably ends, pushes the overall win to $841,000 (+2.46%).
(An indicated loss, remember, is the product of the actual value of the house edge in a given sample, multiplied by the total action from the same sample).
Adding the MSL rule (repeating an EOS bet of LTD+ if the first attempt failed and the value of the lost bet was $500 or less) kicks the overall result up another notch to $1.05 million (+2.69%).
On its own, MSL bumped the final win from $454,000 (+1.4%) to $702,000 (+1.92%).
Adding OL=NBx2 to the bare-bones version of target betting reduced the final win by almost half to $222,000 (+0.79%), but when it was combined with WPx2, the outcome was a win of $886,000 (+3.12%).
And so it goes...
Of course, no betting rule is worth even a nickel if all it does is increase the final win by what could be a onetime fluke.
It has to be effective most of the time and that is something that can easily be tracked with a spreadsheet platform.
Runaway sims, the weapon of choice for self-styled systems debunkers, usually supply as little information as possible - the final result, total action, overall AV/HA and the invariably identical product of loss/action.
One of the purposes of target betting's "extra" rules is to provide a strategy player with a means to vary his tactics from time to time to camouflage what he is up to.
But many of them also serve to boost the overall profit from the betting method.
The numbers I get from existing data sets will not be precisely reflected in future play (assuming that games other than baccarat gave us the means to track every hand and conduct a post-win breakdown).
However, different samples from different games report strikingly similar results, enabling us to evaluate all those non-basic rules individually and collectively.
I can confidently predict that one of the good things that will come out of this spring-clean inquiry is confirmation that while individual "switches" can be turned on and off, together they make the strategy more profitable than it would be without them.
The rules are like a tasty stew, with each ingredient working together more effectively than if it were the only "flavor" in the mix.
And really, what is so complicated about the target betting rules? They become second nature very quickly, and eliminate the stress of trying to decide what to bet on the next round - a goal worth fighting for.
Perhaps their greatest gift (apart from steady profits) is that they tell you when you have won enough, and that it is time to quit the big-money arena and get back to square one.
Winners usually never know when to quit, a dilemma that more often than not makes them losers in the end.
Gamblers want a quick rush - money in a hurry.
Players with a plan know that a slow build with minimal risk is the only way to go.
One thing I should mention about the "new" tests (actually a repeat of work I have done before, with the results presented in a much more orderly manner!) is that I have streamlined bet values to fall in line with the demands of real-time play.
Given an LTD of -$875, for example, you would not fumble a pile of chips together to match that amount...you would push out $1,000 and be done with it, happy at the prospect of a $125 series profit if all goes well.
In all the past models, bets of clumsy amounts have been permitted, because this has always been as much a matter of proving the conventional wisdom wrong as of taking a bite out of the gambling industry's over-padded bottom line.
After all, how much can I do on my own?
That is why target betting is in front of you right now: I want as many people as possible to learn it, gain full confidence in it, and then use it to chip away at a business that has somehow managed to find respectability by exploiting the greed and ignorance of others.
Wall Street's bubble kept ballooning for years with excessive doses of disinformation and deception pumped into it day after day, and we all know what happened.
Target betting will not destroy (or even much discomfort) the gambling industry, because most punters are happier flying by the seat of their pants and losing than learning how to win consistently.
But as the old joke says about 10,000 lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean..."It's a pretty good start."
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.
_
How rude!
But I guess when you choose to go public with ideas that challenge the conventional wisdom, you have to be ready to take a little unfriendly heat.
I have never claimed to be a traditional academic mathematician, and I suspect if I were, I would never have leaped into this project in the first place.
Mathematicians as a breed, and I have known one or two, have always seemed to me more interested in getting their heads around other people's ideas than coming up with anything new of their own.
Maybe they feel that this late in the game, there can be nothing new to come up with.
And I have to admit that my methodology, as target betting has evolved, has not been all that it could be.
I am too easily distracted by questions that occur to me in the middle of one aspect of the challenge of overcoming the house edge at games of chance, and as a result, my data is disorganized and hard to follow for people with tidier minds than mine.
I usually finish what I have started, but not in the methodical manner that a trained mathematician would insist upon.
So, here and now I am announcing a spring-cleaning project, which is especially appropriate today because just before dawn, I heard my first wren of the season staking his claim on this little piece of Northern Nevada.
Step one will be to take the blackjack outcomes and break out each separate component of target betting to see how it performs on its own.
That means starting with just the LTD+ rule (the one that makes it possible to win more when you win than you lose when you lose) and then carefully adding and subtracting elements such as the OL (opening loss), WP (win progression) and MSL (mid-series loss) rules.
Once I have the blackjack summary, I will post it here and then move on to the far larger baccarat data sets that together account for about 80% of the "real" outcomes in my database.
I should say once again that I flatly reject the notion that past outcomes from games of chance have nothing to tell us about what we can expect in the future.
There might be something to it if I were building a betting method from scratch using just the outcomes to hand, because there would be a real danger that I would end up with a strategy that works only for those outcomes.
It would be tough, I suspect, to devise a method that beats more than 400,000 outcomes from two very different casino table games, but that is not what I am about here.
Target betting, aka Turnaround, has been in the public domain for a dozen years now, and has existed in my head and in my spreadsheet files for almost two and a half times that long.
The basic idea, the deferral of a recovery bet until a single win ends (or at least interrupts) a losing pattern, owes nothing to the Jones and Rodriguez baccarat samples, or to the 80,000-plus rounds generated with the help of Ken Smith's Blackjack Strategy Trainer.
It's going to take me a while to get all of this done, but I will get there.
I can tell you right now that with all of the frills, feints and dodges stripped away, the LTD+ rule alone turns a 0.81% house edge into a 1.4% player edge, flipping an indicated LOSS of at least $263,000 into a WIN of $454,000.
That alone is impossible, according to those well-trained, tidy-minded, methodical mathematicians I mentioned earlier.
Adding my WP rule, which keeps re-doubling the bet after an opening win in a new series to a maximum of $200, adding $100 each round until the streak inevitably ends, pushes the overall win to $841,000 (+2.46%).
(An indicated loss, remember, is the product of the actual value of the house edge in a given sample, multiplied by the total action from the same sample).
Adding the MSL rule (repeating an EOS bet of LTD+ if the first attempt failed and the value of the lost bet was $500 or less) kicks the overall result up another notch to $1.05 million (+2.69%).
On its own, MSL bumped the final win from $454,000 (+1.4%) to $702,000 (+1.92%).
Adding OL=NBx2 to the bare-bones version of target betting reduced the final win by almost half to $222,000 (+0.79%), but when it was combined with WPx2, the outcome was a win of $886,000 (+3.12%).
And so it goes...
Of course, no betting rule is worth even a nickel if all it does is increase the final win by what could be a onetime fluke.
It has to be effective most of the time and that is something that can easily be tracked with a spreadsheet platform.
Runaway sims, the weapon of choice for self-styled systems debunkers, usually supply as little information as possible - the final result, total action, overall AV/HA and the invariably identical product of loss/action.
One of the purposes of target betting's "extra" rules is to provide a strategy player with a means to vary his tactics from time to time to camouflage what he is up to.
But many of them also serve to boost the overall profit from the betting method.
The numbers I get from existing data sets will not be precisely reflected in future play (assuming that games other than baccarat gave us the means to track every hand and conduct a post-win breakdown).
However, different samples from different games report strikingly similar results, enabling us to evaluate all those non-basic rules individually and collectively.
I can confidently predict that one of the good things that will come out of this spring-clean inquiry is confirmation that while individual "switches" can be turned on and off, together they make the strategy more profitable than it would be without them.
The rules are like a tasty stew, with each ingredient working together more effectively than if it were the only "flavor" in the mix.
And really, what is so complicated about the target betting rules? They become second nature very quickly, and eliminate the stress of trying to decide what to bet on the next round - a goal worth fighting for.
Perhaps their greatest gift (apart from steady profits) is that they tell you when you have won enough, and that it is time to quit the big-money arena and get back to square one.
Winners usually never know when to quit, a dilemma that more often than not makes them losers in the end.
Gamblers want a quick rush - money in a hurry.
Players with a plan know that a slow build with minimal risk is the only way to go.
One thing I should mention about the "new" tests (actually a repeat of work I have done before, with the results presented in a much more orderly manner!) is that I have streamlined bet values to fall in line with the demands of real-time play.
Given an LTD of -$875, for example, you would not fumble a pile of chips together to match that amount...you would push out $1,000 and be done with it, happy at the prospect of a $125 series profit if all goes well.
In all the past models, bets of clumsy amounts have been permitted, because this has always been as much a matter of proving the conventional wisdom wrong as of taking a bite out of the gambling industry's over-padded bottom line.
After all, how much can I do on my own?
That is why target betting is in front of you right now: I want as many people as possible to learn it, gain full confidence in it, and then use it to chip away at a business that has somehow managed to find respectability by exploiting the greed and ignorance of others.
Wall Street's bubble kept ballooning for years with excessive doses of disinformation and deception pumped into it day after day, and we all know what happened.
Target betting will not destroy (or even much discomfort) the gambling industry, because most punters are happier flying by the seat of their pants and losing than learning how to win consistently.
But as the old joke says about 10,000 lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean..."It's a pretty good start."
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.
_
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Casino table games are sucker traps. And if you don't play like a sucker, the welcome mat will be whipped out from under your feet.
_
First, the latest from the ongoing BST blackjack trial...
Skeptics who don't question my honesty or the accuracy of my published results will sometimes suggest that target betting might work in theory, but cannot be successful under real-play conditions.
It is certainly true that a prolonged negative trend (defined for target betting as clumps of losing rounds separated by isolated wins) will drive bet values very high very fast, making it impossible for a strategy player to remain in one location.
In my experience, table-hopping in one casino or moving from one casino to another as the win-loss pattern demands makes good sense for all sorts of reasons, not the least of them being that it helps a target player to avoid attracting attention.
As always, it is all about common sense. If you are in a near-empty casino at 3:00am, then jumping in and out of games with a wide range of bets is going to set off alarms left and right.
The same is not true mid-evening on a Friday, when all the games are in full swing, and finding a seat at layouts under $100 can require a whole lot of walking.
The mathematical question that comes up involves the effect constant mid-series motion is likely to have on long-term profitability, and the short answer is: None.
Anyone who has studied gambling games knows that negative expectation is a constant factor, like gravity, or the slow-moving DOWN escalator I described in an earlier post.
Supporters of card counting in blackjack insist that a rich deck value reduces or eliminates the house edge, but most players do not count cards and even those who do have often lost heavily in spite of conditions that seemed to favor them.
In a game with any house edge (and casinos do not offer games without one), the percentage of negative expectation applies equally to every bet, meaning that in a 2% game, the player's odds of winning the very next bet are 49-51 against him.
All of the target betting models track not just winning EOS bets but failed attempts too, and naturally more potential turnaround bets go south than succeed and save the day.
If that were not true, there would definitely be something wrong with my methodology.
So the only difference between theory and practice is a little thing called time.
In the models, as with all simulations, bets are placed without regard to table or house limits, and the only inhibiting factor is the standard target betting "bust" limit of $1,000,000 in funny-money.
In actual play, it is not smart to spread wider than 1-5 in any one location, although if the risk of attracting unwanted attention is low, there is some room for maneuver.
An exception is at the bottom level: $5 to $100 (1-20) is generally OK, but again, sometimes it is better to suspend a series sooner than that after assessing local conditions.
And suspending a series does not have to mean taking yet another walk, especially if you know it will be a while before you can find an empty slot.
It works just as well (and saves shoe-leather) if you cut a series off in mid-recovery, remember or jot down the LTD/NB numbers, and begin another series with a minimum bet.
When you have several targets stored in your sharply-honed, always reliable grey cells, you can move on ready to recover them one by one elsewhere.
All simulations, including mine, eliminate the human factor, which happens to be at the top of the list of factors that determine long-term success at gambling games.
When the human factor (hn in those terrific TV commercials!) is reintroduced to the formula, everything changes for the better except if the human being involved is one of those who thinks that losing is fun.
When spread limits are applied, series that begin with a $5 bet and end with a $25,000 win simply cannot happen - but that in no way alters the fact that a threat to the bankroll can be turned around 99.99% of the time (or better) with target betting.
It just takes a while longer in real play.
There is, I can reassure you, no contradiction between my assessment of your prospects when you bail out to comply with spread limits and your chances if you back out of a game to duck a particularly deadly downturn.
Whatever your reason for moving, the numbers are the same: a quick 2-win turnaround is a 10-1 probability, with the odds in your favor.
So staying put through a negative trend that threatens your bankroll makes no sense at all, and trusting your gut is the right thing to do.
Gamblers only get into trouble when their "gut" is allowed to set bet values, and target betting does not permit that. The strategy wins because there is a rule for every eventuality.
Occasional threats are inevitable, but you can take comfort in the fact that in order for a maximum bet to be required, the house edge will have had to balloon to 30% or more, a far cry from the 1-5% that usually applies.
If you had to rely on a 100% correction of an egregious swing in the house's favor, you would probably be out of luck.
But with target betting, just a short offset against the trend that got you into trouble is all it takes to rocket you out of the hole and back into profit.
A glance at any of the thousands of AV charts that track negative expectation in my models confirms that substantive offsets in the player's favor are a reliable feature of the WLP after (and often during) a downturn.
Without a bankroll big enough to keep you afloat through rough waters, you and your money will be out of the game before one of those offsets can happen.
And that is why a wide spread and fat wad, the same weapons that the house wields against you, are essential to long-term success.
You have to be able to think like a casino operator and have full confidence that "the arithmetic" will take good care of you, no matter what.
In theory, a 1.5% house edge means that the house can be sure of keeping $15,000 for every million bucks that goes back and forth in a given game.
In fact, the gambling industry does much better than that.
Casinos win more money and more often than negative expectation says they should because the only house advantage that really matters is that the house has a bigger bankroll than the players do. All of them put together, that is.
If you check the Nevada casino win numbers, dwindling as they may be in a down economy, you will not find a game where the reported win percentage matches standard expectation.
Blackjack, for example, has a house edge of 1-2%, depending on the level of a player's compliance with basic playing strategy.
The win for all of Nevada's blackjack layouts in February 2009 was 11.65% (10.4% for baccarat and 26% for 3-card poker!).
In March of '09, the matching numbers were 11.69%, 10.3% and 26%.
Who says gambling games are "unpredictable"?
And that is really what it all comes down to, isn't it?
I say, and can prove, that win-loss patterns for games of chance are broadly predictable and so can be exploited with the right math-based approach.
My critics argue that casino games are unique in all the universe, able to generate WLPs that, like quicksilver or Tinkerbell, cannot be second-guessed, and woe betide the heretic who tries.
I am going to wrap this up with a spread pattern breakdown of a random sample of series.
It is possible to produce an almost infinite number of these things, but I think just one tells the story well enough.
In actual play, the majority of recovery series turn around rapidly and without incident, paying a modest profit even though most of them have a zero or negative actual value.
When a move is called for (shaded light blue above), the chances of a turnaround remain the same: about 90%.
Once in a while, spread limits will require a series to be suspended a second or third time, or as often as it takes before two consecutive wins deliver EOS.
Overall, the average length of a recovery series is less than six bets.
You know you are going to lose more bets than you win, over time, and that reality must always translate to more money lost than won unless you can win more when you win than you lose when you lose.
Target betting delivers on that promise for tens, even hundreds of thousands of rounds in succession, although sometimes, a sizable chunk of your bankroll will have to be put into play before it can be bolstered by yet another big win.
There is no winning alternative to progressive betting, and as far as I know, target betting is the best method of money management available anywhere.
Steve Wynn, credited as the creator of the modern Las Vegas, said on "60 Minutes" the other night that the only way to beat the house is to be the house, and he needs you to believe that.
Even though he knows better...
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.
_
First, the latest from the ongoing BST blackjack trial...
Skeptics who don't question my honesty or the accuracy of my published results will sometimes suggest that target betting might work in theory, but cannot be successful under real-play conditions.
It is certainly true that a prolonged negative trend (defined for target betting as clumps of losing rounds separated by isolated wins) will drive bet values very high very fast, making it impossible for a strategy player to remain in one location.
In my experience, table-hopping in one casino or moving from one casino to another as the win-loss pattern demands makes good sense for all sorts of reasons, not the least of them being that it helps a target player to avoid attracting attention.
As always, it is all about common sense. If you are in a near-empty casino at 3:00am, then jumping in and out of games with a wide range of bets is going to set off alarms left and right.
The same is not true mid-evening on a Friday, when all the games are in full swing, and finding a seat at layouts under $100 can require a whole lot of walking.
The mathematical question that comes up involves the effect constant mid-series motion is likely to have on long-term profitability, and the short answer is: None.
Anyone who has studied gambling games knows that negative expectation is a constant factor, like gravity, or the slow-moving DOWN escalator I described in an earlier post.
Supporters of card counting in blackjack insist that a rich deck value reduces or eliminates the house edge, but most players do not count cards and even those who do have often lost heavily in spite of conditions that seemed to favor them.
In a game with any house edge (and casinos do not offer games without one), the percentage of negative expectation applies equally to every bet, meaning that in a 2% game, the player's odds of winning the very next bet are 49-51 against him.
All of the target betting models track not just winning EOS bets but failed attempts too, and naturally more potential turnaround bets go south than succeed and save the day.
If that were not true, there would definitely be something wrong with my methodology.
So the only difference between theory and practice is a little thing called time.
In the models, as with all simulations, bets are placed without regard to table or house limits, and the only inhibiting factor is the standard target betting "bust" limit of $1,000,000 in funny-money.
In actual play, it is not smart to spread wider than 1-5 in any one location, although if the risk of attracting unwanted attention is low, there is some room for maneuver.
An exception is at the bottom level: $5 to $100 (1-20) is generally OK, but again, sometimes it is better to suspend a series sooner than that after assessing local conditions.
And suspending a series does not have to mean taking yet another walk, especially if you know it will be a while before you can find an empty slot.
It works just as well (and saves shoe-leather) if you cut a series off in mid-recovery, remember or jot down the LTD/NB numbers, and begin another series with a minimum bet.
When you have several targets stored in your sharply-honed, always reliable grey cells, you can move on ready to recover them one by one elsewhere.
All simulations, including mine, eliminate the human factor, which happens to be at the top of the list of factors that determine long-term success at gambling games.
When the human factor (hn in those terrific TV commercials!) is reintroduced to the formula, everything changes for the better except if the human being involved is one of those who thinks that losing is fun.
When spread limits are applied, series that begin with a $5 bet and end with a $25,000 win simply cannot happen - but that in no way alters the fact that a threat to the bankroll can be turned around 99.99% of the time (or better) with target betting.
It just takes a while longer in real play.
There is, I can reassure you, no contradiction between my assessment of your prospects when you bail out to comply with spread limits and your chances if you back out of a game to duck a particularly deadly downturn.
Whatever your reason for moving, the numbers are the same: a quick 2-win turnaround is a 10-1 probability, with the odds in your favor.
So staying put through a negative trend that threatens your bankroll makes no sense at all, and trusting your gut is the right thing to do.
Gamblers only get into trouble when their "gut" is allowed to set bet values, and target betting does not permit that. The strategy wins because there is a rule for every eventuality.
Occasional threats are inevitable, but you can take comfort in the fact that in order for a maximum bet to be required, the house edge will have had to balloon to 30% or more, a far cry from the 1-5% that usually applies.
If you had to rely on a 100% correction of an egregious swing in the house's favor, you would probably be out of luck.
But with target betting, just a short offset against the trend that got you into trouble is all it takes to rocket you out of the hole and back into profit.
A glance at any of the thousands of AV charts that track negative expectation in my models confirms that substantive offsets in the player's favor are a reliable feature of the WLP after (and often during) a downturn.
Without a bankroll big enough to keep you afloat through rough waters, you and your money will be out of the game before one of those offsets can happen.
And that is why a wide spread and fat wad, the same weapons that the house wields against you, are essential to long-term success.
You have to be able to think like a casino operator and have full confidence that "the arithmetic" will take good care of you, no matter what.
In theory, a 1.5% house edge means that the house can be sure of keeping $15,000 for every million bucks that goes back and forth in a given game.
In fact, the gambling industry does much better than that.
Casinos win more money and more often than negative expectation says they should because the only house advantage that really matters is that the house has a bigger bankroll than the players do. All of them put together, that is.
If you check the Nevada casino win numbers, dwindling as they may be in a down economy, you will not find a game where the reported win percentage matches standard expectation.
Blackjack, for example, has a house edge of 1-2%, depending on the level of a player's compliance with basic playing strategy.
The win for all of Nevada's blackjack layouts in February 2009 was 11.65% (10.4% for baccarat and 26% for 3-card poker!).
In March of '09, the matching numbers were 11.69%, 10.3% and 26%.
Who says gambling games are "unpredictable"?
And that is really what it all comes down to, isn't it?
I say, and can prove, that win-loss patterns for games of chance are broadly predictable and so can be exploited with the right math-based approach.
My critics argue that casino games are unique in all the universe, able to generate WLPs that, like quicksilver or Tinkerbell, cannot be second-guessed, and woe betide the heretic who tries.
I am going to wrap this up with a spread pattern breakdown of a random sample of series.
It is possible to produce an almost infinite number of these things, but I think just one tells the story well enough.
In actual play, the majority of recovery series turn around rapidly and without incident, paying a modest profit even though most of them have a zero or negative actual value.
When a move is called for (shaded light blue above), the chances of a turnaround remain the same: about 90%.
Once in a while, spread limits will require a series to be suspended a second or third time, or as often as it takes before two consecutive wins deliver EOS.
Overall, the average length of a recovery series is less than six bets.
You know you are going to lose more bets than you win, over time, and that reality must always translate to more money lost than won unless you can win more when you win than you lose when you lose.
Target betting delivers on that promise for tens, even hundreds of thousands of rounds in succession, although sometimes, a sizable chunk of your bankroll will have to be put into play before it can be bolstered by yet another big win.
There is no winning alternative to progressive betting, and as far as I know, target betting is the best method of money management available anywhere.
Steve Wynn, credited as the creator of the modern Las Vegas, said on "60 Minutes" the other night that the only way to beat the house is to be the house, and he needs you to believe that.
Even though he knows better...
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.
_
Friday, May 8, 2009
"It's crazy to keep on betting the farm when the odds are against you. No one in his right mind would take the risks you recommend."
_
First of all, the odds are always against you in a house game, even for those dedicated but misguided souls who rely on card counting in blackjack.
And in fact, target betting never "bets the farm."
It simply demands a confidence in the numbers - "The Math" - to match the house's well-placed trust in the power of its long-term advantage.
The BST pencil logs that I have been posting in recent weeks provide a dramatic visual confirmation that anyone who bets randomly or relies on a tight spread is doomed to suffer a severe hit to his bankroll.
The state of play in the current BST test (#16, with 4,453 rounds and counting) provides yet another indication that progressive betting, and specifically target betting, is the only way to win.
As I type this, I have a win to date of 6.01% of my total action against a gross house edge of 5.14% and an indicated outcome of -$83,682 (a loss) on action of $1.63 million.
The net house edge so far is a much smaller number, thanks to doubles/splits and naturals: -47.5/4741 = -1.00% (not bad for an 8-deck shoe, but disciplined basic strategy play can work wonders!). The true negative expectation would therefore be a loss of $16,300 vs. my WTD of $97,805.
No magic tricks are required to get this kind of result again and again.
What is needed is acceptance that although each potential turnaround bet faces the same negative odds as every other bet, recovery is inevitable.
An eventual win can be counted on because after a failed EOS attempt and before another try, the target value is constantly updated to make the most of that next opportunity.
And of course, as long as your BR holds up, there will always be another opportunity.
The house has a serious problem when winning more bets than it loses does not automatically result in winning more money than it loses.
Against a random or fixed-bet player, the inexorable gravitational pull of negative expectation (positive for the house, of course) is enough to suck the punter's chips little by little into the dealer's tray.
And human nature is a big help.
A player whose BR is being battered by a prolonged negative trend - a "house spike" is another way to describe it - will very rarely choose a middle course in response: he will either drop his bets down to a minimum, or keep pressing his luck until his money runs out.
Either extreme is helpful to the house, and players who flip erratically from one to the other, as many do, further boost the effects of negative expectation.
Slow and steady wins the race for the house almost every time, and slow and steady is the way to beat those negative odds, with important exceptions that have to be very carefully timed.
Think of a casino house game as a ride on a very long escalator that you are trying to climb in defiance of a slow movement in the opposite direction.
You take one step forward, then move two steps the other way, three forward and two back, and after all that effort, you are back where you started, no closer to your goal.
Since you are determined to get to the top, you learn from past experience and figure out that the best way to beat the downward trend is to keep your head when you are going backwards, wait for a slowdown or (better yet) a reversal, and jump ahead several steps at a time when the opportunity presents itself.
Target betting is above all an opportunistic strategy.
Your chances of winning are no better when you bump up your bet than they are at any other time.
But if your "leap forward" coincides with the escalator moving up instead of down for a while, you have a very good chance indeed of ending up where you need to be.
Some people may find my analogies frivolous or even childish, and they are welcome to stick strictly to the numbers and keep right on losing.
I just know that when you are trying to climb up a down escalator, leaps and bounds are better by far than standing still while going backwards. Oops, there I go again...
To return to simple arithmetic, if you lose five bets in a row and then win one, you are four bets behind. And unless the current negative trend completely reverses itself, you will not make much headway either by betting randomly or sticking with the same amount.
That is what the house depends on for your "contribution" - a reluctance to spread wider than 1-5 at most, and an acceptance on your part that you are probably going to lose eventually.
In the current BST data set, 1,930 winning bets had an average value of $478 and 2,159 losing bets had an average value of $382.
Large amounts in both cases, for sure.
But since you are certain in the long run to lose more bets than you win, the only way you can counter the consequent drain on your bankroll is to make sure that you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.
Target betting, which can also be defined as both progressive betting and money management, makes that happen.
In the BST sample, losses exceed wins by 5.14%, spelling certain doom for the fixed or random bettor.
But since my average win value exceeded my average loss value by 25%, that big, fat house edge was no threat to me at all.
You cannot hope to achieve a long-term result remotely like that unless you are willing (and able, with an adequate bankroll) to bet whatever the win-loss pattern demands in order to maintain your upward momentum on that down escalator.
Dithering, sidestepping, hesitating, stumbling and abandoning the strategy in mid-ride will all hand the house your bankroll in the end.
Remember, the house's strategy is a passive one that consists of inviting you into a game, selling you a few chips, and allowing you to do pretty much whatever you want.
The house provides the rope. You do the rest.
You, however, have choices.
And if you have a foolproof method and a little bit of cold hard cash behind you, you have the means to grab control of the game and make the house advantage irrelevant.
In the current BST set, 69% of all successful recoveries were against a negative or neutral actual value (AV), meaning that according to negative expectation, the house should at worst have broken even about half the time and taken my money otherwise.
Didn't happen.
More than 60% of all recoveries were achieved with a single win, not the two consecutive wins (twins!) that I often refer to.
The numbers for all 90,000 blackjack rounds to date confirmed the pattern: 68% of all turnarounds had a zero or negative AV, 66% of recoveries were 1-win turnarounds.
Baccarat is a tougher table game to beat than blackjack, but the 202,130-round Jones sample produced some familiar numbers: 65% negative or neutral EOS, 73% 1-win turnarounds.
The Rodriguez/Zumma numbers also toed the line: 66% negative/neutral, 73% 1-win.
These results cover a sample of 400,000 rounds derived from two very different casino house games.
They are possible because win-loss patterns are in "big picture" terms absolutely predictable.
That does not mean, and never will, that we can know the outcome of the very next bet. But the broader and wider our net, the more sure we can be about what we will find in it.
The house believes in and thrives on the predictability of games of chance.
Players should do the same.
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.
_
First of all, the odds are always against you in a house game, even for those dedicated but misguided souls who rely on card counting in blackjack.
And in fact, target betting never "bets the farm."
It simply demands a confidence in the numbers - "The Math" - to match the house's well-placed trust in the power of its long-term advantage.
The BST pencil logs that I have been posting in recent weeks provide a dramatic visual confirmation that anyone who bets randomly or relies on a tight spread is doomed to suffer a severe hit to his bankroll.
The state of play in the current BST test (#16, with 4,453 rounds and counting) provides yet another indication that progressive betting, and specifically target betting, is the only way to win.
As I type this, I have a win to date of 6.01% of my total action against a gross house edge of 5.14% and an indicated outcome of -$83,682 (a loss) on action of $1.63 million.
The net house edge so far is a much smaller number, thanks to doubles/splits and naturals: -47.5/4741 = -1.00% (not bad for an 8-deck shoe, but disciplined basic strategy play can work wonders!). The true negative expectation would therefore be a loss of $16,300 vs. my WTD of $97,805.
No magic tricks are required to get this kind of result again and again.
What is needed is acceptance that although each potential turnaround bet faces the same negative odds as every other bet, recovery is inevitable.
An eventual win can be counted on because after a failed EOS attempt and before another try, the target value is constantly updated to make the most of that next opportunity.
And of course, as long as your BR holds up, there will always be another opportunity.
The house has a serious problem when winning more bets than it loses does not automatically result in winning more money than it loses.
Against a random or fixed-bet player, the inexorable gravitational pull of negative expectation (positive for the house, of course) is enough to suck the punter's chips little by little into the dealer's tray.
And human nature is a big help.
A player whose BR is being battered by a prolonged negative trend - a "house spike" is another way to describe it - will very rarely choose a middle course in response: he will either drop his bets down to a minimum, or keep pressing his luck until his money runs out.
Either extreme is helpful to the house, and players who flip erratically from one to the other, as many do, further boost the effects of negative expectation.
Slow and steady wins the race for the house almost every time, and slow and steady is the way to beat those negative odds, with important exceptions that have to be very carefully timed.
Think of a casino house game as a ride on a very long escalator that you are trying to climb in defiance of a slow movement in the opposite direction.
You take one step forward, then move two steps the other way, three forward and two back, and after all that effort, you are back where you started, no closer to your goal.
Since you are determined to get to the top, you learn from past experience and figure out that the best way to beat the downward trend is to keep your head when you are going backwards, wait for a slowdown or (better yet) a reversal, and jump ahead several steps at a time when the opportunity presents itself.
Target betting is above all an opportunistic strategy.
Your chances of winning are no better when you bump up your bet than they are at any other time.
But if your "leap forward" coincides with the escalator moving up instead of down for a while, you have a very good chance indeed of ending up where you need to be.
Some people may find my analogies frivolous or even childish, and they are welcome to stick strictly to the numbers and keep right on losing.
I just know that when you are trying to climb up a down escalator, leaps and bounds are better by far than standing still while going backwards. Oops, there I go again...
To return to simple arithmetic, if you lose five bets in a row and then win one, you are four bets behind. And unless the current negative trend completely reverses itself, you will not make much headway either by betting randomly or sticking with the same amount.
That is what the house depends on for your "contribution" - a reluctance to spread wider than 1-5 at most, and an acceptance on your part that you are probably going to lose eventually.
In the current BST data set, 1,930 winning bets had an average value of $478 and 2,159 losing bets had an average value of $382.
Large amounts in both cases, for sure.
But since you are certain in the long run to lose more bets than you win, the only way you can counter the consequent drain on your bankroll is to make sure that you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.
Target betting, which can also be defined as both progressive betting and money management, makes that happen.
In the BST sample, losses exceed wins by 5.14%, spelling certain doom for the fixed or random bettor.
But since my average win value exceeded my average loss value by 25%, that big, fat house edge was no threat to me at all.
You cannot hope to achieve a long-term result remotely like that unless you are willing (and able, with an adequate bankroll) to bet whatever the win-loss pattern demands in order to maintain your upward momentum on that down escalator.
Dithering, sidestepping, hesitating, stumbling and abandoning the strategy in mid-ride will all hand the house your bankroll in the end.
Remember, the house's strategy is a passive one that consists of inviting you into a game, selling you a few chips, and allowing you to do pretty much whatever you want.
The house provides the rope. You do the rest.
You, however, have choices.
And if you have a foolproof method and a little bit of cold hard cash behind you, you have the means to grab control of the game and make the house advantage irrelevant.
In the current BST set, 69% of all successful recoveries were against a negative or neutral actual value (AV), meaning that according to negative expectation, the house should at worst have broken even about half the time and taken my money otherwise.
Didn't happen.
More than 60% of all recoveries were achieved with a single win, not the two consecutive wins (twins!) that I often refer to.
The numbers for all 90,000 blackjack rounds to date confirmed the pattern: 68% of all turnarounds had a zero or negative AV, 66% of recoveries were 1-win turnarounds.
Baccarat is a tougher table game to beat than blackjack, but the 202,130-round Jones sample produced some familiar numbers: 65% negative or neutral EOS, 73% 1-win turnarounds.
The Rodriguez/Zumma numbers also toed the line: 66% negative/neutral, 73% 1-win.
These results cover a sample of 400,000 rounds derived from two very different casino house games.
They are possible because win-loss patterns are in "big picture" terms absolutely predictable.
That does not mean, and never will, that we can know the outcome of the very next bet. But the broader and wider our net, the more sure we can be about what we will find in it.
The house believes in and thrives on the predictability of games of chance.
Players should do the same.
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.
_
Thursday, May 7, 2009
In the commonsense dictionary, gambling is just another word for losing, and losing is not what target betting is all about.
_
Yesterday's e-mail brought a tentative suggestion that maybe a syndicate backing target betting to 1/10th of the recommended bankroll might stand a chance of making a profit.
It might, but it is not something I would be willing to support.
I sympathize with everyone who says that I have arbitrarily chosen a BR value that no one but the highest of high rollers (high in both senses of the word!) would dare to risk.
All I can do is point yet again to mathematical models that demonstrate that the widest possible spread and a BR to match together reduce long-term risk rather than increasing it.
Better yet, an optimum spread/BR combo promises greater profits at a faster pace, paying down an initial investment far more rapidly and building the strength of the bankroll so that threats are much less devastating.
And there will always be threats.
Win-loss patterns are broadly predictable, even if we can never know which way the very next bet is going to go.
And one of the things we can be sure of is that once in a while, we will have to work extra hard for our money.
My critics and I clash all the time over the question of whether or not a player can affect his long-term fate by relying on intuition and experience to apply judicious damage control when conditions get rough.
I am not interested in lectures about independence of trials and probability because I hear what they say and I have no quarrel with them.
A random bettor is just as likely to jump from the frying pan into the fire as he is to land in a safer haven.
Not so the target player, who only needs two consecutive wins to get out of trouble and more often than not will be saved by a single win.
With each fresh loss, the haphazard gambler becomes more likely to be a loser.
Without a plan that adjusts to every possible eventuality, luck is the only winning option, and anyone dumb enough to rely on luck had better be ready to pay a high price.
Both sides of the argument can go blue in the face repeating their conflicting mantras, but target betting at least is supported not just by past outcomes but ongoing tests against rounds as yet unplayed.
Here's my response to yesterday's query, followed by the latest BST set.
Interesting!
I have been posting baccarat-related data on the blog lately.
SPREAD is the critical factor, far more important than total bankroll, although of course the two are related (you can't have one without the other!).
To be more specific, a $1,000,000 bankroll is not in itself a guarantee of success with TA, any more than a $5,000,000 bankroll is sure to win without a PROVEN progressive money management method.
A spread of 1-5,000 ($5 to $25,000) and consistent application of the TA/Target rules, however, is a guarantee, assuming adequate funding.
I don't recommend a bankroll of less than 40xMax but have test data that suggests 20x might be adequate.
I have never posited viability for a $100,000 bankroll! I'll attach some numbers from my baccarat and blackjack data sets so you can see why.
The great frustration inherent in bucking the conventional wisdom is that any test outside of an actual casino environment must assume that a player would have no reaction whatever to a prolonged negative trend.
Sims fail if they are denied that unscientific "assumption of inertia," and so sims have little or nothing to tell us: they simply cannot recreate real play conditions, because they necessarily exclude the human element.
The data set I use has some of the problems associated with RNG-based sims, since each evaluation of minor changes in the strategy's parameters has to be applied to all 400,000-plus outcomes and that would be an impossible task in real time.
What's good about my data is that every outcome is derived from actual play and most are verifiably objective, since the two baccarat sources (80% of all the outcomes) are unconnected with me (they might even be hostile to me, since I have developed a betting method that is vastly superior to either of theirs!).
Anyone considering any form of investment in my method, whether using it in actual play without my involvement or participating in a syndicate like the (one) you propose, should understand that I do not offer success against my (expanding) data set as PROOF of anything.
What we get from applying different versions of the target betting strategy to such a large sample of outcomes is a powerful INDICATION of what works and what doesn't.
My critics often claim that I developed TA by tweaking the rules against a fixed data set until I stumbled on a combination that would beat that sample, and that sample alone.
Given that the strategy has been out in the open on the Internet since 1997 and the data set I am using today post-dates that publication, along with the fact that the TA rules are essentially the same, I believe I have earned the right to ignore the skeptics!
Potential investors are strongly advised to test the strategy rules for themselves against outcomes as yet "un-played" with the help of any of the countless online simulations of casino table games.
I use Ken Smith's blackjack strategy trainer (http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bst/bst.htm) because I know it never repeats the same card between shuffles. I have yet to find a similarly trustworthy baccarat app, but I am sure they are out there.
Properly applied, TA works very well for blackjack (of course!), baccarat, field bets at craps and even money bets at roulette, and I have had some great results against 3-card poker of all things.
What I am saying here is that no one should take my word for anything.
And as for the presentation you suggested, I would hope that the blog would do a good job of convincing a potential investor/winner that target betting the TA way offers a viable, reliable and exciting alternative to losing. This response to your suggestion should also be helpful, and you have my permission to pass it on if it will benefit your new idea.
The potential for TA is huge. But the backing for the strategy has to be real, not ephemeral.
Those who study and then apply the target betting method are always rewarded with confirmation that it is indeed possible to "win more when you win than you lose when you lose." More importantly, they learn that doing so is the only way to overcome the negative bias in casino table games, and flip the house edge into a player edge.
It does not take an Einstein to figure out that if you lose, say, 2% more bets than you win, but your average winning bet is 10% greater than your average losing bet, negative expectation becomes irrelevant and a positive end-of-game result is inevitable.
Blackjack is an easier game to beat than any of the alternatives, and it is not uncommon to see an AWB/ALB value of 130% or more. Given an overall house edge of 1.0% or less, an overall player win is a mathematical certainty.
You will see from the (blog data) that a max of $25,000 and a bankroll of $100,000 can succeed repeatedly. It is entirely possible that in real play, results would be even better than the baccarat and blackjack data sets indicate.
I would, however, be unable to confidently predict long-term success for an initial BR of $100,000.
The mathematical support for a higher BR to back the recommended max can be found in every model that indicates a serious threat. In order for a max bet to be reached in any series, the house edge must have run amok, which it does rarely but reliably. It then becomes inevitable that there will be an opposite win-loss pattern (WLP), or in Wall Street parlance, a "correction." Otherwise, it would not be possible for the overall house edge to average out at known negative expectation levels, which it always does.
The offset is very rarely equal to the downturn that preceded it, but it does not have to be. That's why TA works. And works, and works...
I have to fall back on my 'old faithful' analogy describing an oilfield survey that shows 99.999% of the black gold is at 5,000ft with occasional small pockets at shallower depths. If you keep on drilling 500ft wells, hoping to save money, you might see a little oil now and then. But the drilling costs will always outstrip your profits.
Better to drill one deep well and be done with it - that way, you will be swimming in oil for life!
As you know, games of chance are all about probability. If you know the numbers and have the confidence and resources to back what you know, those games can be consistently beaten. If you keep backing off and fiddling around with the strategy rules, they can't. That's the bottom line.
The thousands of summaries and analyses I have generated over the years are the antithesis of gambling. But that does not bother me one bit, because gambling, as most people define it, is the antithesis of winning. So why gamble?
The question that is unanswered by my control data set is the effect of a player responding to table conditions by suspending play before a recovery, and resuming betting elsewhere. The losses shown in the target betting summaries occurred because the house advantage reached and then exceeded 30% vs. the negative expectation of <1.0% for blackjack and <1.4% for baccarat.
Would you stay in your seat when the house has streaked that far ahead of you in a given series? Of course not!
And it would not just be a question of intuition, because it simply is not possible in real play to bet from $5 to $25,000 in one place (assuming you were crazy enough to want to!).
A player would have to back away from a prolonged recovery according to the dictates of common sense: perhaps $5-$200 would be an acceptable spread at the bottom level, but thereafter, it would be best to stick to a 1-5 spread in any one location. That tactic alone would make losses like those we see in the models far less likely.
As always, the math supports what I am telling you. Target betting needs just two consecutive wins to turn a recovery series around, and in most (65%+) cases, a single win will do. WLPs without an early dual win are a 1 in 10 rarity, which means that every time a strategy player walks away from a potential threat, the odds are 10-1 in his favor that he will walk into a favorable pattern.
Last year, a cable channel ran a series called "Man Against Las Vegas" in which a disorganized, erratic egomaniac tried to recover claimed prior losses of $3,000,000 with a $1,000,000 bankroll and a TV camera crew at his elbow. It made me spit nails! I didn't watch the show for fear of fatal apoplexy, but I read all about it online and gnashed my teeth vicariously.
The MALV dingbat lost a big chunk of his money, as he deserved to, and the series was not renewed because his failure was an embarrassment to all concerned.
With TA/Target he would have cleaned up, dammit.
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.
_
Yesterday's e-mail brought a tentative suggestion that maybe a syndicate backing target betting to 1/10th of the recommended bankroll might stand a chance of making a profit.
It might, but it is not something I would be willing to support.
I sympathize with everyone who says that I have arbitrarily chosen a BR value that no one but the highest of high rollers (high in both senses of the word!) would dare to risk.
All I can do is point yet again to mathematical models that demonstrate that the widest possible spread and a BR to match together reduce long-term risk rather than increasing it.
Better yet, an optimum spread/BR combo promises greater profits at a faster pace, paying down an initial investment far more rapidly and building the strength of the bankroll so that threats are much less devastating.
And there will always be threats.
Win-loss patterns are broadly predictable, even if we can never know which way the very next bet is going to go.
And one of the things we can be sure of is that once in a while, we will have to work extra hard for our money.
My critics and I clash all the time over the question of whether or not a player can affect his long-term fate by relying on intuition and experience to apply judicious damage control when conditions get rough.
I am not interested in lectures about independence of trials and probability because I hear what they say and I have no quarrel with them.
A random bettor is just as likely to jump from the frying pan into the fire as he is to land in a safer haven.
Not so the target player, who only needs two consecutive wins to get out of trouble and more often than not will be saved by a single win.
With each fresh loss, the haphazard gambler becomes more likely to be a loser.
Without a plan that adjusts to every possible eventuality, luck is the only winning option, and anyone dumb enough to rely on luck had better be ready to pay a high price.
Both sides of the argument can go blue in the face repeating their conflicting mantras, but target betting at least is supported not just by past outcomes but ongoing tests against rounds as yet unplayed.
Here's my response to yesterday's query, followed by the latest BST set.
Interesting!
I have been posting baccarat-related data on the blog lately.
SPREAD is the critical factor, far more important than total bankroll, although of course the two are related (you can't have one without the other!).
To be more specific, a $1,000,000 bankroll is not in itself a guarantee of success with TA, any more than a $5,000,000 bankroll is sure to win without a PROVEN progressive money management method.
A spread of 1-5,000 ($5 to $25,000) and consistent application of the TA/Target rules, however, is a guarantee, assuming adequate funding.
I don't recommend a bankroll of less than 40xMax but have test data that suggests 20x might be adequate.
I have never posited viability for a $100,000 bankroll! I'll attach some numbers from my baccarat and blackjack data sets so you can see why.
The great frustration inherent in bucking the conventional wisdom is that any test outside of an actual casino environment must assume that a player would have no reaction whatever to a prolonged negative trend.
Sims fail if they are denied that unscientific "assumption of inertia," and so sims have little or nothing to tell us: they simply cannot recreate real play conditions, because they necessarily exclude the human element.
The data set I use has some of the problems associated with RNG-based sims, since each evaluation of minor changes in the strategy's parameters has to be applied to all 400,000-plus outcomes and that would be an impossible task in real time.
What's good about my data is that every outcome is derived from actual play and most are verifiably objective, since the two baccarat sources (80% of all the outcomes) are unconnected with me (they might even be hostile to me, since I have developed a betting method that is vastly superior to either of theirs!).
Anyone considering any form of investment in my method, whether using it in actual play without my involvement or participating in a syndicate like the (one) you propose, should understand that I do not offer success against my (expanding) data set as PROOF of anything.
What we get from applying different versions of the target betting strategy to such a large sample of outcomes is a powerful INDICATION of what works and what doesn't.
My critics often claim that I developed TA by tweaking the rules against a fixed data set until I stumbled on a combination that would beat that sample, and that sample alone.
Given that the strategy has been out in the open on the Internet since 1997 and the data set I am using today post-dates that publication, along with the fact that the TA rules are essentially the same, I believe I have earned the right to ignore the skeptics!
Potential investors are strongly advised to test the strategy rules for themselves against outcomes as yet "un-played" with the help of any of the countless online simulations of casino table games.
I use Ken Smith's blackjack strategy trainer (http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bst/bst.htm) because I know it never repeats the same card between shuffles. I have yet to find a similarly trustworthy baccarat app, but I am sure they are out there.
Properly applied, TA works very well for blackjack (of course!), baccarat, field bets at craps and even money bets at roulette, and I have had some great results against 3-card poker of all things.
What I am saying here is that no one should take my word for anything.
And as for the presentation you suggested, I would hope that the blog would do a good job of convincing a potential investor/winner that target betting the TA way offers a viable, reliable and exciting alternative to losing. This response to your suggestion should also be helpful, and you have my permission to pass it on if it will benefit your new idea.
The potential for TA is huge. But the backing for the strategy has to be real, not ephemeral.
Those who study and then apply the target betting method are always rewarded with confirmation that it is indeed possible to "win more when you win than you lose when you lose." More importantly, they learn that doing so is the only way to overcome the negative bias in casino table games, and flip the house edge into a player edge.
It does not take an Einstein to figure out that if you lose, say, 2% more bets than you win, but your average winning bet is 10% greater than your average losing bet, negative expectation becomes irrelevant and a positive end-of-game result is inevitable.
Blackjack is an easier game to beat than any of the alternatives, and it is not uncommon to see an AWB/ALB value of 130% or more. Given an overall house edge of 1.0% or less, an overall player win is a mathematical certainty.
You will see from the (blog data) that a max of $25,000 and a bankroll of $100,000 can succeed repeatedly. It is entirely possible that in real play, results would be even better than the baccarat and blackjack data sets indicate.
I would, however, be unable to confidently predict long-term success for an initial BR of $100,000.
The mathematical support for a higher BR to back the recommended max can be found in every model that indicates a serious threat. In order for a max bet to be reached in any series, the house edge must have run amok, which it does rarely but reliably. It then becomes inevitable that there will be an opposite win-loss pattern (WLP), or in Wall Street parlance, a "correction." Otherwise, it would not be possible for the overall house edge to average out at known negative expectation levels, which it always does.
The offset is very rarely equal to the downturn that preceded it, but it does not have to be. That's why TA works. And works, and works...
I have to fall back on my 'old faithful' analogy describing an oilfield survey that shows 99.999% of the black gold is at 5,000ft with occasional small pockets at shallower depths. If you keep on drilling 500ft wells, hoping to save money, you might see a little oil now and then. But the drilling costs will always outstrip your profits.
Better to drill one deep well and be done with it - that way, you will be swimming in oil for life!
As you know, games of chance are all about probability. If you know the numbers and have the confidence and resources to back what you know, those games can be consistently beaten. If you keep backing off and fiddling around with the strategy rules, they can't. That's the bottom line.
The thousands of summaries and analyses I have generated over the years are the antithesis of gambling. But that does not bother me one bit, because gambling, as most people define it, is the antithesis of winning. So why gamble?
The question that is unanswered by my control data set is the effect of a player responding to table conditions by suspending play before a recovery, and resuming betting elsewhere. The losses shown in the target betting summaries occurred because the house advantage reached and then exceeded 30% vs. the negative expectation of <1.0% for blackjack and <1.4% for baccarat.
Would you stay in your seat when the house has streaked that far ahead of you in a given series? Of course not!
And it would not just be a question of intuition, because it simply is not possible in real play to bet from $5 to $25,000 in one place (assuming you were crazy enough to want to!).
A player would have to back away from a prolonged recovery according to the dictates of common sense: perhaps $5-$200 would be an acceptable spread at the bottom level, but thereafter, it would be best to stick to a 1-5 spread in any one location. That tactic alone would make losses like those we see in the models far less likely.
As always, the math supports what I am telling you. Target betting needs just two consecutive wins to turn a recovery series around, and in most (65%+) cases, a single win will do. WLPs without an early dual win are a 1 in 10 rarity, which means that every time a strategy player walks away from a potential threat, the odds are 10-1 in his favor that he will walk into a favorable pattern.
Last year, a cable channel ran a series called "Man Against Las Vegas" in which a disorganized, erratic egomaniac tried to recover claimed prior losses of $3,000,000 with a $1,000,000 bankroll and a TV camera crew at his elbow. It made me spit nails! I didn't watch the show for fear of fatal apoplexy, but I read all about it online and gnashed my teeth vicariously.
The MALV dingbat lost a big chunk of his money, as he deserved to, and the series was not renewed because his failure was an embarrassment to all concerned.
With TA/Target he would have cleaned up, dammit.
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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