I have just wrapped up my marathon blackjack session against Bodog's freebie game and things went pretty much as I expected.
As in baccarat, the house limit ($1 to $500 vs. $1 to $250 for the game invented to amuse a French royal idiot!) made it tough for me to win.
And also as in baccarat, once all the rounds were punched in to a conditional spreadsheet and more realistic table limits were applied, Target beat the same pattern of wins and losses with consummate ease - although not without risk.
I have provided links to those Bodog games not because I am a shill for an online casino that experience tells me cheats without a conscience, but because I'd be grateful if a few readers would give the funny-munny games a try and provide me with some feedback.
The most important thing to notice when you're sliding down the slippery slope is how often the Target rules would have been able to conquer a negative trend if only the table limits had been higher.
I get flak from time to time about the big bets that progressive betting sometimes requires, but all I can ever say in response is that without them, there's no way to win in the long run.
And what most people don't realize is that a narrow betting spread will very often result in greater risk (or exposure) than what seems on the face of it to be a much more aggressive approach.
My baccarat session provided a handy illustration of this:
Target's total action was only 30% greater with a much wider spread than it was with Bodog's $250 bet cap in place - but unfettered progressive betting turned a 3.0% loss until an almost 8.0% win.
It's easy enough to see why.
Given, say, a loss to date of $1,500 and a $250 table limit, you're likely to be stuck making an awful lot of $250 bets until you can get out of the hole, if it ever happens (and the table limit is there precisely to hinder your chances of ever getting out of trouble).
All Target needs is two successive wins to cover the LTD and drop back to a minimum bet, starting a new series.
And a single successful turnaround bet at $1,525 (or whatever) requires a hell of a lot less risk than 50 or more successive wagers at $250 a pop.
Of course, in real play, no one in his or her right mind would keep plugging away at the table limit.
The right response to reaching the table cap is to get the hell out of there and move to a layout where a higher limit makes the current LTD an achievable goal.
The simplest rule of thumb is to step back if two successive wins will not recover the chips you have temporarily lent the casino.
If that's so, then you are in the wrong place, and suspending play will not hurt (or, arguably, help) your chances one iota.
The big difference is that when an opportunity presents itself, you need to be able to make the right bet.
The house expects you to dig in and tough it out, surrendering your bankroll the way you're supposed to.
Never be afraid to act like someone who's in the game to win.
I often can't make headway at my "local," where a $300 table limit applies - but just 20 minutes away are three big casinos with limits up to $15,000.
An hour away are more stores with even looser limits (and if I time it right, I can be in Las Vegas in three hours or less!).
Here are some numbers.
As you can see, blackjack at $1 to $500 was much harder to beat than baccarat at half that cap, and that's no surprise.
Blackjack is an infinitely more complex game than baccarat, and a whole lot less tedious. It's also potentially more dangerous, without a doubt.
It didn't turn out that way for me - I got my butt basted at baccarat and did only marginally better at my favorite game because of those table limits.
The blackjack game had the most dramatic fall from profit to penury, after over 2,000 rounds in which I kept on and on winning more hands than I lost, as if Bodog was trying to tempt me to stop fooling around and open a real-money account.
The final slide was truly horrendous - but turnaround would have been achieved at least 18 times along the way if I had not persisted with the $500 table limit just to prove my point.
That means, of course, that there were 18 sets of twinned wins, many of which included doubledowns and naturals, and some of which were the openers in winning streaks that went way past two in a row.
They were no help until real-world table limits took over - and a frustrating loss became a very impressive win worth more than 15% of total action.
I'm hoping the charts above explain themselves.
The numbers on the left hand side apply to the actual outcomes of the Bodog sessions, and those on the right show what "woulda, coulda, shoulda" happened if Target had been permitted free rein (which is a whole lot different than the free reign that the casinos claim for themselves!).
Disinformation about the efficacy of progressive betting is everywhere, but it is hardly surprising that the gambling - sorry, "gaming" - industry so aggressively attacks anyone who questions its government-endorsed right to empty its customers' wallets.
As I keep saying, blind luck is the only winning alternative to progressive betting (which some people prefer to call "money management").
Like all of my conditional spreadsheets, those that analyzed the Bodog sessions allow a what-if set of scenario switches that can make Target less aggressive or more so.
The rules I used against Bodog's games were pretty ballsy, which it's much easier to be when no actual cash is at risk!
Here are some more numbers:
And the rules I used:
I'll say it again: the only Target rule that cannot be compromised is the "LTD-plus" bet after a mid-recovery win.
Your chances of winning that bet are no better (or worse) than for any other wager in the game.
But as happened in my virtual descent into blackjack hell courtesy of Bodog, twinned wins kept coming up over and over again, just as statistical probability demands that they will.
If you can't afford to win, why bother to play at all?
Just remember that table limits exist solely to thwart progressive bettors.
Do you really believe that the gambling industry would go to all that trouble if progressive betting was not a serious threat?
On a different tack, I have been so fired up with my Bodog project that I have neglected to keep readers up to date with what's happening on the sports betting front.
This past week, Target pulled out of its most recent slump in the real time, real money trial, and set a new high above $150,000 in profits since the experiment began over a year ago (on July 24, 2010).
No big thrills, no spills, no surprises - just further confirmation that the rules of Target can be very successfully applied to sports betting.
And that's one game in which online casinos can't cheat (although, as I have been repeatedly reminded, they will do all they can to hang on to your money when it's payout time, hoping you'll lose it before they have to cut the check!).
You'll find current data at the Sethbets website.
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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