"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."

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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.
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