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I have been doing this long enough to be more amused than insulted by comments such as "You are an innumerate fool" or "You're so stupid you couldn't find your ass in the dark with both hands, let alone a way to win at gambling."
Swimming upstream is always tougher than going with the flow, and if everyone made a habit of challenging the conventional wisdom, our world would be even more chaotic than it already is.
Still and all, I frown a little, then quickly get over it, when I am accused of somehow selling the gambling masses down the river by failing to come up with a means of beating the house with minimal risk.
When I started out on this "hopeless" odyssey a few decades ago, I did so with the conviction that if arithmetic makes the house advantage possible, then arithmetic must be the best weapon to use against it.
Countless hours of computer-enabled research coupled with extensive real play have confirmed that I was right. And so were all the wise men who have been saying since cavemen first rolled bones and bet on them that it takes money to make money.
Luck doesn't get the job done, and big bucks alone don't either, as many a high roller has discovered at great cost (let's hear another round of applause for the late Kerry Packer!).
The math is the math, so there is nothing I can do about the fact that the widest possible spread from your opening bet value to your maximum is the only viable antidote to losing.
It's not as if the gambling industry does not know this already. I have never claimed to be a brilliant thinker, just a stubborn plodder on a mission, and the spread limits in place in every casino on the planet confirm that spread matters more than bankroll.
Trouble is, like love and marriage, you can't have one without the other. If you plan to spread from $5 to $25,000 whenever a prolonged negative trend in the win-loss pattern demands it, you will not get far if a single "max" loss will wipe out your bankroll.
It is a sad fact that every attempt to get get around target betting's long-term bankroll requirement is likely to weaken the strategy to the point where it becomes even more dangerous than tossing our large bets at random and hoping to get lucky.
Academic mathematicians harp endlessly on their theme that analysis of past game results has nothing to tell us about the future. They are talking flat-out nonsense, of course, but they have a job to do and the gambling industry is grateful to them.
That said, I took all my BST blackjack outcomes (now more than 85,000 rounds) and plugged in a couple of major target betting modifications, knowing in advance what would probably happen.
First, I cut the permitted spread from 1 to 5,000 to 1 to 1,000, leaving the bankroll at a cool million bucks.
Then I reinstated the recommended spread, and instead cut the bankroll or "bust" limit by four fifths to $200,000.
The benchmark was a 1-5,000 spread and a $1 million BR using a target betting rules set that suffered a couple of busts in 85,000 rounds but still turned the house edge on its ear, delivering an AV of +1.02% against a net HA of 0.69%.
Reducing the spread by 80% increased the overall action from $62.8 million to $181.4 million, and blew away a win of $640,000 (+1.02%), replacing it with a LOSS of $1.9 million (-1.04%). The number of bets over $1,000 shot from 5,800 or 6.7% to 36,590 (42.6%), confirming that what might seem to be "conservative" play can often prove fatal.
When the bankroll was slashed by the same 80%, from $1m to $200,000, the blackjack models told a very different story. Action dropped from $62.8m to $32.3m and the overall win improved from $640,000 (+1.02%) to $1.58m (+4.9%). The number of $1,000-plus bets required fell from 5,800 (6.7%) to 4,600 (5.4%).
All of this is so much hot air, not because the academics are right when they dismiss prior outcomes as "anecdotal" and "irrelevant" but because most players will never be able to finance a 1 to 5,000 spread and a $1,000,000 BR.
Most emphatically, that does not mean that profitable target betting is forever beyond the reach of a "low" roller.
The only alternatives to progressive betting in response to a losing streak (omitting never making a bet at all as an option!) are flat or fixed-sum betting, or random betting. And neither of those non-tactics has a prayer against the house edge in the long run.
A while back I introduced the acronym WYNN for Watch Your Negative Numbers, and it's good advice that can help you overcome a persistent negative trend.
Let's say that after ten rounds of blackjack, you are betting an average of $10 and you are $60 in the hole. It does not much matter that the house is currently enjoying a 60% edge in a 1.0% game. All that counts is that if you keep betting at the same level, you will need six wins just to break even and chances are, it won't happen.
If all you do as a step towards target betting is accurately track your loss to date (LTD) at all times, knowing that you need to win more when you win than you lose when you lose to offset the effect of losing more often, your game will improve.
The rule of thumb is to freeze your bet after a loss, just in case that loss is the first of several, then bump the bet in response to a win, in the hope (never the certainty) that the reverse is true.
Because of the house edge, your boosted bets will lose just a little more often than they win.
But that will not set you back in the long run because you will always know what your win target is, and will adjust your post-win bet values accordingly.
I have yet to tackle a casino table game with $25,000 bets and a million-dollar BR behind me, and because of that I have been told that everything I have been doing for the past 30 years is "an intellectual exercise" with no real-world relevance.
Not so. For one thing, my research has taught me that betting like almost everyone else does, spreading no wider than 1 to 10 and praying a lot, is a fool's game.
I know how to win, and I do it more often than I lose - and before you ask, the wins add up to more dough than the losses!
The trick is to use a weapon that is summarily excluded from all computer simulations, a handy-dandy little thing called intuition.
I don't stay in a game if things are not going my way, with the result that I probably spend more time on the hoof than I do with my butt in a chair.
I know very well that many of target betting's bells and whistles (OL, 2L, 3L, MSL and WP among them) depend on a fat BR to work their magic, and if I am playing on a budget, I have to set them aside and rely on my gut more than I would like.
The truth is that most of the time, the to-and-fro of a table game like blackjack is a gentle motion, with wins and losses fairly evenly distributed and the house edge exerting a slight tug south of the horizontal.
Guess what: winning streaks are a good thing and losing streaks are not. Obvious, right? Maybe, but when I watch other players, I am amazed at how few of them think to pull back or tread water in a downturn and press their bets when there is a prospect of a positive trend.
In routine play, I spread as wide as I can and carry a BR that is at least ten times my maximum bet.
But if I am a few hundred dollars ahead and a downturn hits, I am happy to abandon the recovery series and walk away a winner rather than follow the target betting rules to the letter and risk being wiped out.
I usually try to apply at least the LTD+ rule in response to a mid-series win, but sometimes I will reduce my potential risk by limiting the bet "bump" to one or more successive parlays.
I hate to do it, but gambling is (among many other things) about cutting your coat according to the available cloth!
Just remember, the longer you play, the more likely it is that you will succumb to the house edge and lose more bets than you win.
If you plan to come out ahead, you have no choice but to minimize losses and maximize wins.
Assuming you are not psychic, you must therefore treat each loss as the first of two or more losses, and each win as the opposite.
Again, you will be wrong just a little more often than you are right. But keep WYNN in mind, and you will be able to overcome the house edge and make a little money.
If you hope to make a lot of money, you are bound by the rule that decrees that you have to speculate to accumulate.
The less money you have, the less money you will make.
Most gamblers are done in by flat betting or self-imposed tight spreads.
The house does not want you to spread wide, hence the table limits.
Ask a pit boss, and he will tell you that table limits are there so that penny-ante players will not be intimidated by fat cats who make their bets look like chicken (scratch).
That is nonsense.
The idea is to monetarily "corral" players and discourage progressive betting that the casinos know will routinely defeat the house edge.
Limits also take advantage of the fact that recreational gamblers (there's an oxymoron for you!) don't like to move from table to table, especially once complimentary cocktails start doing their job.
And most players set their own upper limits, limiting their chances of overcoming a prolonged downturn.
It is rare for me to see a weekend punter betting wider than 1-5, unless he is in the death throes of a lousy run and is in a hurry to put himself out of his misery.
Think spread, spread, spread the way a realtor thinks location, location, location.
Do that, stay sober, and keep your head down and you are more likely to go home a winner than any of the players around you.
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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