"Your methodology is a mess and your alleged strategy is too complicated for anyone else to understand. This isn't math, it's madness!"

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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.
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