(Please scroll down for updates for Thursday, September 23)
For almost a year now, the focus of this blog has shifted from casino table games such as blackjack and baccarat to a gambling platform that does not require you to inhale second-hand smoke or watch other people flush their money down the toilet.
Back in the summer of 2009, I had zero interest in sports betting, and so obviously had no idea that it would enable me to find a way to make steady money at gambling without going anywhere near a deck of cards.
Credit for my awakening goes in part to my old friend "Peter Punter" (who prefers to remain anonymous, especially when I am writing critically about his ideas).
Not that Pete was out to do me any favors.
He knew I am obsessive about the unbreakable link between mathematics and successful gambling, and was confident that if he bombarded me with enough e-mails, I would take the bait and look into his outrageous claims.
Pete is not a numbers man himself. He barely knows one end of a spreadsheet from another, and lacks the patience to thoroughly research a new betting method before putting actual money at risk.
He's a gambler - but not an entirely foolish one.
In all the years I have known Pete, the one thing we have had in common is the belief that math can be every bit as effective at beating the odds as it is at making losers out of more than 99% of all players.
But our approaches to the challenge are very different.
In July of 2009, Pete got the idea that since the most widely-marketed sports handicappers (known as "cappers" for short) claim year-round win rates of 65% to 85%, there had to be a way to exploit all those accurate predictions and make big bucks out of them.
My immediate response was that a 65% win rate is nothing to boast about if all of your "brilliant" selections pay a whole lot less than even money when your followers cash in their winning tickets.
It's just the numbers: A 50% WR from hundreds of selections paying even money, on average, means a long-term wash or break even if all your bet values are randomly determined.
Still assuming random bet values (because most gamblers bet random amounts), a 65% WR will make a profit only if paybacks average more 54 cents on the dollar or -185, a number that indicates that you must bet $185 to win $100.
In 100 bets at a fixed $100 each time, you would then win 65 bets at $54 ($3,510) and lose 35 bets at $100 apiece ($3,500), for a grand profit of $10, derived entirely from rounding your wagers up or down to keep things relatively simple.
Professional handicappers will often post picks at much better odds than -185, but you can be sure that the higher their verifiable long-term win rate, the shorter their odds on average.
(And it should not come as a surprise to anyone that the shorter the odds on a given team, the more likely they are to win - unless the bookies know something they're not telling us! It's also no surprise that when cappers list their successful picks, they never detail paybacks, just WIN!!! or, shhhhh, lose).
Early on, I advised Peter Punter that betting odds shorter than even money (+100) was a sure way to kiss his bankroll goodbye. S-l-o-w-l-y, maybe, but surely.
Instead, I recommended backing underdogs, never favorites, as a matter of policy, while capping acceptable or qualifying odds at +180 to keep the dog win rate (DWR) as close as possible to 45%.
On a season-to-season basis in all bettable sports (which covers pretty much everything, including tiddly-winks), underdogs do in fact win 40-45% of all games, enabling bookies to make a sizable profit that would not be achievable if favorites won more than 55-60% of the time.
The most important advice I gave Pete was that he should apply the target betting rules he knew from baccarat to his sports bets, creating series, or lines, of wagers in which the first bet on one day would be linked to the first bet the next day, the second to the second, and so on.
There could be no cross-pollination whatsoever, no switching large bets from one series to another, no reduction in bet values to "reduce risk," no deviation from the simple but strict set of rules.
Too risky, said Pete. And he embarked on a cancellation system that cost him thousands of dollars...before he stopped sending me his daily betting records.
I have no way of knowing how much Pete has won or lost since he cut me out of the loop at the end of September last year. I hope he's a long way ahead. But I doubt it.
One of the greatest strengths of target betting, other than its proven long-term profitability, is that it enables the player to bet by the numbers, meaning without any subjective or emotional involvement.
Bet values are set by the rules, which never waver. Unless, of course, the player wavers.
When betting on sports events, all that matters is the information the bookies give us - odds being the final arbiter of which teams are worth a bet and which are not.
Forget team stats, individual player performances, weather conditions or any of that tedious stuff: It might make the process marginally more involving for a true sports aficionado, but it won't win money in the long run.
I learned from the nine-month "Seven-dog Trial" that played out in this blog day after day from November 1, 2009, to July 31 this year, that +180 is too high a "cap" on qualifying dogs, and since then I have lowered the ceiling and raised the floor.
Thanks to Pete and another of his brief enthusiasms, I have also learned that so-called "added value" bets (run- or puck-line, spreads and over/under bets) can increase the overall win rate and make it just a little easier for target betting to make money over the long haul.
The "floor" limit for all those bets is the same as always - even money, not a penny less - while the upper limit is a tad lower than it is for straight money-line or "sides" bets.
As I write this, target betting is 60 days and 702 bets into the current two-month real-time trial set to end this week, and its win of $18,160 on top of its opening bankroll of $5,000 represents almost 13% of total action ($142,050 churned so far, giving an average bet value of $202).
Other important numbers show an average win value ($281) that is 59% more than the average loss value ($177), enabling me to smile yet again at the memory of the target betting critics who used to scoff, "Yeah, we get it, you have to bet more when you know you're going to win than you do when you know you're gonna lose!"
As I remarked at the top of this blog, target betting does not require psychic ability - just guts and discipline. Oh, and a little money...
The risk or exposure for target betting in the current trial is, at $285, far less than I would expect and perhaps the result of our old friend blind luck.
But it happens to be a demonstrable fact that more often than not, a betting method that seems to be less "aggressive" than target betting will actually increase risk.
That's because when bet values are capped too low, potential recovery or turnaround opportunities are inadequately exploited, causing battles to get "out of the hole" that drag on far longer at much greater cost in the end.
Right now, we stand at 34 winning days and 26 losing days, and I believe the credit for that goes to the revised selection rules I mentioned earlier.
All in all, I am more than happy with the way the sports book experiment has turned out, and relieved that from now on, I won't have to spend as much time in casinos to make money out of beating the odds.
Naturally, not every day will be a walk in the park!
Yesterday (Tuesday, September 21, 2010), for example, I managed an unprecedented win rate of 0-10.
The only positive comment to be made about a day like that is that things can't get much worse.
And to be fair, target betting has delivered some pretty spectacular successes in the last few weeks.
My critics like to quote something they call the Law of Large Numbers, which states in essence that individually and in small groups or samples, outcomes are always unpredictable.
Given that unpredictability, the L of LN comes down to three little words: You Can't Win.
That's what every casino and every bookmaker needs you to believe. And happily for them, most gamblers subscribe to the conventional wisdom.
Target betting proves otherwise, again and again.
But it is never likely to catch on in a big way because, according to many punters, it drains all the "fun" out of gambling.
It rejects the comforting notion that inside knowledge or expertise that took years to develop is the most effective antidote to losing.
Instead, it tells you to bet strictly by the numbers, banishing ego, emotion or anything else remotely subjective from the gambling experience.
To me, it's a small price to pay for long-term profitability, because in my book, losing is no "fun" at all. And losing is the fate of most gamblers.
Today's updates:
Thursday, September 23 at 9:35am
Another skinny day at the salt mines - although yesterday's short list brought in some decent money, so I shouldn't complain!
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. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bodog, spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this._
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