We're in a new slump, facing the same old question: Do we bet "cautiously" and go broke, or do we stick with the Target rules and turn things around?

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This just posted to the www.sethbets.com website:

With Thursday's relatively large loss (over $11,000), we are now in the middle of the fourth major slump to hit us since the real-time trial began last July 24.

Whenever our upward momentum slows and the roller-coaster takes us into a scary dip, the same people react the same way, with advice that we have to "protect the bankroll" and back off, perhaps by abandoning the line that is (for now) dragging all the other lines down.

The truth is that panic and an excess of caution are exactly what the bookies expect of us.

You cannot protect the bankroll by reducing bets to a level at which recovery becomes a mathematical impossibility.

And if you "spread the load" by relying on multiple bets to offset the losses, you will need to be very lucky indeed to avoid delaying recovery indefinitely.

The old Las Vegas cliche scared money never wins describes the dilemma perfectly. Abandoning a seemingly doomed line is always an option, but if you do it once you will be obliged to make a habit of it, and whatever profits you may have achieved will soon dribble away.

I often quote a good friend who I call "Peter Punter" and he recently supplied me with a perfect case history of a cautious but fatally flawed betting strategy that cost him winnings that took months to accumulate.

He thinks the Target Betting method is "too risky" but time and again, he sets aside a few thousand for a new assault on sports betting, wins for a while, then gets blitzed by precisely the kind of slump that we are in the middle of.

This time, he was sitting pretty until seven successive losses wiped him out. A day or two after his bankroll was annihilated, the handicapper who was the source of all his selections hit a three-bet winning streak.

If Pete had followed the Target method, he'd be at a new high right now. Instead, he's out of the game. Until next time, when he will probably repeat the process.

I feel particularly frustrated right now, because for the sake of partners who are almost as risk-averse as poor, broke Pete, I applied a conservative modification to the Target rules, running it alongside the regular rules in my daily bulletins.

Because of that, we missed a classic turnaround situation at the beginning of this week, and now we're headed south in a slump that will probably end soon (they usually do!) but will in any event have proved to be a much bigger threat to the BR than if I had refused to apply so-called protection.

It's no one's fault but mine: I could easily have said NO. But I'm not in this thing alone!

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._