_
(For updated information about Target's ongoing sports betting experiment, please go to the Sethbets website, or click here for an introduction to progressive betting, and here [20] and here [5] for current picks). You can also find a guide to the most basic Target strategy applied to more than 80,000 verifiable baccarat outcomes by visiting Google Docs.
I just posted a new page at Sethbets devoted entirely to the "flight plan" concept as applied to the 1,600 Zumma baccarat "real" shoes and the 2,000 Wizard of Bodog simulated shoes, with eye-popping charts that make it easy to see that flight is right, and no might about it.
Here's my conclusion after reviewing all the data:
"To anyone who responds to the charts and numbers on this page with a suggestion that I somehow fiddled or fudged the data to support my long-stated belief that the house edge is not invincible, there's not a whole lot I can say!
My time in the quirky, largely deluded world of Baccarat Forums taught me that the most vocal "contributors" are also the ones least likely to give a fair-minded hearing to anyone else's ideas, especially if they see a direct conflict with their own hallowed beliefs.
All of my worksheets are available for inspection and verification, except for those which contain algorithms that are my unique intellectual property (in which case, all output will be provided, but formulas will have been redacted, as the CIA likes to put it).
There can be no practical or material benefits from producing fraudulent data, and the only reason I mention that option at all is that on BF, the loudest voices were those with evident problems grasping the simplest principles of arithmetic. Good manners eluded them too, but that's really their problem, no one else's.
The Zumma helped/hurt and skip percentages (see above) were 60% and 32%.
Matching numbers from the WOB 8-deck 1,000 - to your left - were 64% and 32%, and for the WoB 6-deck sample (above) we get 60% and 25%.
Why does skipping, fleeing, dodging, evading or avoiding a losing streak that might get worse before it gets better greatly reduce the overall house edge?
The overall reduction for the samples on this page is from an average of 1.27% to an average of 0.24%, a drop in the overall HA of more than 80%.
I think that logic supports the results from this limited trial, and that the logic used to support the opposite view is therefore proven false.
The "flight plan" only kicks in when a worsening HA is probable but not certain (if we knew for sure, we'd be psychic and would find a quicker way to make money!).
Positive trends are NOT avoided, and since it is statistically certain that overall, the number of positive trends will exactly match the number of negative ones, if we only run away from negative ones but at the same time do not skip more than half of all possible bets, we will (logically) drive down the overall house edge. QED!"
Based upon what I have seen so far, I'm willing to predict that if I were to adjust the trigger sensitivity from -5 (meaning that the house gets five bets ahead in the current shoe or session) to a smaller value that resulted in half of all bets being skipped instead of less than 30%, the beneficial effects of the move would pretty much evaporate.
I'm relying on logic again: Right now, we've seen the effects of playing 70% of all dealt rounds and can conclude from the consistent 60-40 "helped" ratio that we have avoided slightly more negative trends than positive ones.
In the remaining 70% of all rounds, the number of negative and positive patterns will be about equal, while in the 30% we skipped, we have confirmation that there were more negatives than positives.
Add all that together, and you end up with significant downward pressure on the overall house edge by a value that's tiny in itself, but dramatic as a percentage of the overall negative expectation for the game of baccarat.
I don't have the means to produce tens or hundreds of thousands of simulated or real shoes in order to extend this test.
But there are plenty of people out there who do, and perhaps they will stumble on the flight plan concept and see fit to evaluate it fairly and accurately with their superior resources!
That's a naive hope, perhaps, since the great majority of people with those skills and resources seem to devote them exclusively to "proving" that the house edge is unbeatable in the long run.
But hope springs eternal, especially in gamblers...
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._
Friday, November 18, 2011
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Forget "exit strategy" and its Bush-wars connotation: My new rules modification is a "flight plan" and, by golly, it really works!
_
Continuing yesterday's topic about mathematical corroboration of the wisdom of running away from a persistent downturn, I am happy to report that new (to me) data supplied by the Wizard of Bodog backs the idea almost 100%.
Because I'm more of a blackjack person than a baccarat fan, although I play the Royal Fool's Game more often than I do roulette or craps, I didn't find out until yesterday that the Wiz's shoemaker simulator has cobbled together an additional 1,000 shoes for our delectation and delight.
The first lot were from an 8-deck simulation which supported Target's viability with or without the application of the "five behind" rule.
(For first-timers here, "five behind" refers to my suggestion that you should walk away from a shoe or session if the house gets five bets ahead of you - which does not necessarily mean an automatic bail-out after five losses in a row!)
The new baccarat data from the WoB is for six-deck shoes, which suits me just fine, even if it does mean shorter games (about 69,000 rounds in 1,000 shoes vs. almost 84,000 in the first data set).
The die-hard baccarat aficionados over at BF obsess about cuts and burns and penetration and other factors which in my experience have zero long-term effect on the odds.
My view is that if I were to take all the verifiable data from the Zumma sets (1,600 shoes) and the WoB sims (now 2,000 shoes) and process them through a Target template horizontally instead of vertically, or even diagonally, it would make little or no difference to the long-term success of the progressive strategy.
But we have to accept that all casino games are just variations of a process that's set up to part us from our money while convincing us that we have at least some chance of going home with more cash than we brought with us.
Some people prefer tomato soup, some like chicken noodle and others hanker after beef broth, but basically the different flavors are all just soup, hot and wet and tricked out to make us happy.
My (newly-named) Flight Plan modification is more of a recommendation than a new Target rule, and has less to do with damage control than damage evasion.
Against the 8-deck Wizard of Bodog data set, flight at five behind cut the overall house edge (defined in baccarat as Player's disadvantage vs. Banker) from 1.31% to 0.19%.
In two large blocks of shoes, it actually wiped out the house edge entirely and replaced it with a "player's edge."
In the 6-deck WoB data set I found yesterday (although it's probably been out there for years!) the skip algorithm cut the overall house edge from 1.07% to 0.03%.
If applied to actual play, the plan would be that once the house got five bets ahead in any one shoe, you'd stop betting and either go off and find another table to resume play at the cut-off level, or lean back and take a nap until the next shuffle.
Baccarat simulations (or large data sets comprising actual shoes) are uniquely suited to exploring the effectiveness of the "skip" approach because there's a verifiable beginning and end to each game.
No one is allowed to log blackjack rounds between shuffles, pai-gow poker is such a rip-off that it's not worth looking at from any angle, and games such as roulette and craps that are wholly numbers-based are continuous, and so offer no natural breaks.
The two Zumma sets (600 and 1,000) also supported the viability of the skip concept, with house edge reductions from 1.36% to 0.55% in the Z600 and from 1.45% to 0.37% in the Z1000.
All of this in spite of the fact that the conventional wisdom states unequivocally that whatever you try to do to escape the house edge must in the long run prove fruitless.
The idea, endorsed by experts, is that you will jump from the frying pan into the fire as often as you manage to postpone the inevitable by running away.
And, worse yet, you are sure to miss as many winning opportunities as losing ones by refusing to man up and take your medicine, sucker.
Hogwash, of course - but hogwash is about all you get to hear or read when it comes to gambling!
Here's the Zumma summary again:
Charts, of course, are the most dramatic way of illustrating the benefits of taking a hike instead of sticking it out through a downturn, and I'll be posting a bunch of them on the Sethbets site as soon as I can.
In the meantime, here's just one example, from the "new" WoB data set:
Not all the WoB-based charts are as dramatic as the one above, but in not one case in all of the Zumma and WoB blocks was flight shown to be a worse idea than sticking around for a beating.
I get a particular kick out of the feedback from the Wizard of Bodog data, because Mike Shackleford (aka Shillford) is a casino man through and through and would no doubt do all he could to find a fatal flaw in my arithmetic if promoting online gambling didn't occupy all his time.
There is, of course, nothing I can say to people who claim without even looking at my data that I am fiddling or fudging my numbers to support a baseless argument.
Most of those skeptics can barely string a comprehensible English sentence together, never mind manage an open-minded evaluation of someone else's ideas - that's a lesson I learned from my highly instructive month on Baccarat Forums!
I have been saying for years that a Target player should never stick around for a thrashing when a prolonged downturn threatens his bankroll, or hesitate to suspend play for any other reason that might take his fancy.
I always knew that was good advice. Now I have proof!
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._
Continuing yesterday's topic about mathematical corroboration of the wisdom of running away from a persistent downturn, I am happy to report that new (to me) data supplied by the Wizard of Bodog backs the idea almost 100%.
Because I'm more of a blackjack person than a baccarat fan, although I play the Royal Fool's Game more often than I do roulette or craps, I didn't find out until yesterday that the Wiz's shoemaker simulator has cobbled together an additional 1,000 shoes for our delectation and delight.
The first lot were from an 8-deck simulation which supported Target's viability with or without the application of the "five behind" rule.
(For first-timers here, "five behind" refers to my suggestion that you should walk away from a shoe or session if the house gets five bets ahead of you - which does not necessarily mean an automatic bail-out after five losses in a row!)
The new baccarat data from the WoB is for six-deck shoes, which suits me just fine, even if it does mean shorter games (about 69,000 rounds in 1,000 shoes vs. almost 84,000 in the first data set).
The die-hard baccarat aficionados over at BF obsess about cuts and burns and penetration and other factors which in my experience have zero long-term effect on the odds.
My view is that if I were to take all the verifiable data from the Zumma sets (1,600 shoes) and the WoB sims (now 2,000 shoes) and process them through a Target template horizontally instead of vertically, or even diagonally, it would make little or no difference to the long-term success of the progressive strategy.
But we have to accept that all casino games are just variations of a process that's set up to part us from our money while convincing us that we have at least some chance of going home with more cash than we brought with us.
Some people prefer tomato soup, some like chicken noodle and others hanker after beef broth, but basically the different flavors are all just soup, hot and wet and tricked out to make us happy.
My (newly-named) Flight Plan modification is more of a recommendation than a new Target rule, and has less to do with damage control than damage evasion.
Against the 8-deck Wizard of Bodog data set, flight at five behind cut the overall house edge (defined in baccarat as Player's disadvantage vs. Banker) from 1.31% to 0.19%.
In two large blocks of shoes, it actually wiped out the house edge entirely and replaced it with a "player's edge."
In the 6-deck WoB data set I found yesterday (although it's probably been out there for years!) the skip algorithm cut the overall house edge from 1.07% to 0.03%.
If applied to actual play, the plan would be that once the house got five bets ahead in any one shoe, you'd stop betting and either go off and find another table to resume play at the cut-off level, or lean back and take a nap until the next shuffle.
Baccarat simulations (or large data sets comprising actual shoes) are uniquely suited to exploring the effectiveness of the "skip" approach because there's a verifiable beginning and end to each game.
No one is allowed to log blackjack rounds between shuffles, pai-gow poker is such a rip-off that it's not worth looking at from any angle, and games such as roulette and craps that are wholly numbers-based are continuous, and so offer no natural breaks.
The two Zumma sets (600 and 1,000) also supported the viability of the skip concept, with house edge reductions from 1.36% to 0.55% in the Z600 and from 1.45% to 0.37% in the Z1000.
All of this in spite of the fact that the conventional wisdom states unequivocally that whatever you try to do to escape the house edge must in the long run prove fruitless.
The idea, endorsed by experts, is that you will jump from the frying pan into the fire as often as you manage to postpone the inevitable by running away.
And, worse yet, you are sure to miss as many winning opportunities as losing ones by refusing to man up and take your medicine, sucker.
Hogwash, of course - but hogwash is about all you get to hear or read when it comes to gambling!
Here's the Zumma summary again:
Charts, of course, are the most dramatic way of illustrating the benefits of taking a hike instead of sticking it out through a downturn, and I'll be posting a bunch of them on the Sethbets site as soon as I can.
In the meantime, here's just one example, from the "new" WoB data set:
Not all the WoB-based charts are as dramatic as the one above, but in not one case in all of the Zumma and WoB blocks was flight shown to be a worse idea than sticking around for a beating.
I get a particular kick out of the feedback from the Wizard of Bodog data, because Mike Shackleford (aka Shillford) is a casino man through and through and would no doubt do all he could to find a fatal flaw in my arithmetic if promoting online gambling didn't occupy all his time.
There is, of course, nothing I can say to people who claim without even looking at my data that I am fiddling or fudging my numbers to support a baseless argument.
Most of those skeptics can barely string a comprehensible English sentence together, never mind manage an open-minded evaluation of someone else's ideas - that's a lesson I learned from my highly instructive month on Baccarat Forums!
I have been saying for years that a Target player should never stick around for a thrashing when a prolonged downturn threatens his bankroll, or hesitate to suspend play for any other reason that might take his fancy.
I always knew that was good advice. Now I have proof!
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._
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
After a month of daily abuse on a baccarat forum (Hey, I can take it!), the only rational conclusion is that most players want to lose!
_
I think I have probably rambled on enough about my experience on the Baccarat Forums website, but please bear with me for just a little longer, because I believe the way baccarat players see their game has something to tell all of us.
There is an absolute rejection of any kind of sustained progressive betting because it's crazy or too risky or unplayable, but a devotion to brainless ideas about streaks and trends and pattern prediction that defies belief.
Only one contributor to the forum saw fit to look into the mathematics of Target betting, and he chose to ignore all the rules but one, placing a theoretical bet that exceeded 100,000 units and then pronouncing the strategy (and along with it any and all variations on progressive betting) an "utter failure."
He then passed on the one-rule application to a friend who doesn't subscribe to BF but who runs a site of his own that minutely examines every measurable aspect of the game of baccarat using math and simulation skills that are truly impressive.
After failing to demonstrate that Target fails against the 1,600 "real" baccarat shoes put out by Zumma Publishing in two ancient books that seem to have attained almost scriptural status plus 1,000 more shoes placed on line by the Wizard of Bodog, he then created 10,000 shoes of his own.
When even his corrupted, partial application of the Target rules beat that sample (10,000 shoes being about a decade of play for the average baccarat punter) he added a zero to his sample size, then another, before claiming a crash-and-burn for my strategy against ONE MILLION shoes.
Knowing that the rules of Target actually do affect the end result against any large sample of outcomes (or even a small one, come to that!), I asked my rather prickly evaluator to let me see his line-by-line bets against the Zumma and Wizard sets, because those at least have been around for years and can be readily verified.
It took almost a month before he finally posted his output against the Wizard 1,000 set , which his pal on the baccarat forum claimed had blown Target to bits.
First to come out of the file (still available online here by clicking on the smaller of the two DOWNLOAD buttons) was confirmation that even with the recommended rules only partially applied, Target beat the Wizard shoes to the tune of 2.2% of its total action.
The file (and its author) claimed that a 1 to 10,000 spread limit had been applied - double Target's standard 1 to 5,000 - but close examination of the data confirmed dozens of bets in a total of 83,640 that had far exceeded the claimed limit.
I was left wondering why someone who can spend hours microscopically examining the effects of removing, say, all the 9s from an 8-deck baccarat shoe, could put his name on such a sloppy piece of work.
When I asked about that, I was dismissed as a paranoid lunatic with criminal tendencies and was told in no uncertain terms that Imspirit (in spite of the pretentious Wishing I were just motto in the title of his blog!) had no interest in correcting his mistakes or engaging in any further dialogue with me.
It turned out that my casual evaluator had put none of his considerable skills to work testing the ideas of a guy to whom he gives repeated plugs in his blog, a fellow who offers for sale (at $200 a pop) four strategies that claim to beat either baccarat or blackjack.
Hmmmm...
Of course, bet selection methods that rely on intuition and gut "readings" of shoes after only a few cards have been dealt are obviously impossible to evaluate mathematically without a few hundred thousand actual outcomes. And Imspirit understandably prefers simulations that spit out a lifetime's worth of rounds of baccarat in less than 10 seconds.
Similarly, math is powerless when it comes to reading minds or determining whether or not there is life after death.
I mention all this because most of the chatter on the baccarat forum I visited hinges on deciding between bets on Banker or Player based either on the most recent outcome (FLD or follow last decision) or the one before that (WBL for win before last, or avant dernier in Monte Carlo).
Some contributors to the forum happily admit to using progressive betting - but to such a limited degree that it is demonstrably more dangerous than flat or fixed betting, and quite possibly riskier than flying by the seat of their pants.
I created numerous Sethbets web pages to show that over and over again, a 1 to 5,000 spread requires less action, and therefore less risk, than a 1-50 spread - and that frequently, it is even "safer" than spreading 1 to 10.
No takers on any of that info, according to my site hit counters . I needed the information for the book I'm working on, so no harm done and no time wasted - but I admit I am surprised that nobody was willing to suspend their knee-jerk disbelief for even the few minutes it took to click up and glance at the data.
Progressive betting in any form requires guts and confidence and, at times, a ton of cold hard cash - I have been saying that for years, often resorting to the credo, "If you can't afford to win, don't play."
But the kind of hocus-pocus that these guys on BF have devoted (in some cases) years of their life to discussing and endorsing day after day is much more dangerous and irresponsible than anything I have ever recommended.
On the one hand, they point to Target's failure against a million shoes as proof that progressive betting doesn't work.
Then they go right back to twittering about oddball chops and hops and jumps and trends and patterns and "predictiveness" that together belong in the same grab-bag as runes and chicken entrails.
The only prediction I'm willing to make when it comes to gambling is that if you don't bet progressively in response to a persistent downturn, you will lose, at best, a big chunk of your bankroll - and if you put any faith in patterns lasting longer than a round or two, you will likely lose ALL of it.
I did discover that walking away from a session or shoe if the dealer gets, say, five bets ahead of you will probably (but not certainly!) save you some grief down the road, but even that is hard to quantify.
I tried it by feeding "skipped" rounds into my Target models - all rounds in each shoe, that is, but with no money at risk when the bail-out limit was reached - and the results were very encouraging.
But the problem was that Target breaks shoes up into individual recovery series, and because it's routine for a series to end successfully in spite of more bets lost than won, a five-bet house advantage since a given shoe began does not necessarily line up with a serious threat to the bankroll.
For example, the first five series in a new shoe might each have turned around with four bets lost and three won, indicating five more losers than winners since the first round from the shoe was dealt, but Target would be feeling no pain at all.
Imspirit (a name even stranger than Seth Theobeau!) had a bad experience with a proponent of progressive betting before I came along, I should add before I close, and that may have disqualified him from a fair assessment of any betting strategy.
It might also explain his extraordinary claim that I have some criminal agenda in warning would-be punters that without progressive betting, they might as well empty their wallets into a big pot at the casino entrance and turn around for home.
He describes some of what happened on his blog, and the story underscores my constant warning that anyone who can't afford to fight fire with fire, meaning money vs. money in a gambling context, should never place a bet.
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._
I think I have probably rambled on enough about my experience on the Baccarat Forums website, but please bear with me for just a little longer, because I believe the way baccarat players see their game has something to tell all of us.
There is an absolute rejection of any kind of sustained progressive betting because it's crazy or too risky or unplayable, but a devotion to brainless ideas about streaks and trends and pattern prediction that defies belief.
Only one contributor to the forum saw fit to look into the mathematics of Target betting, and he chose to ignore all the rules but one, placing a theoretical bet that exceeded 100,000 units and then pronouncing the strategy (and along with it any and all variations on progressive betting) an "utter failure."
He then passed on the one-rule application to a friend who doesn't subscribe to BF but who runs a site of his own that minutely examines every measurable aspect of the game of baccarat using math and simulation skills that are truly impressive.
After failing to demonstrate that Target fails against the 1,600 "real" baccarat shoes put out by Zumma Publishing in two ancient books that seem to have attained almost scriptural status plus 1,000 more shoes placed on line by the Wizard of Bodog, he then created 10,000 shoes of his own.
When even his corrupted, partial application of the Target rules beat that sample (10,000 shoes being about a decade of play for the average baccarat punter) he added a zero to his sample size, then another, before claiming a crash-and-burn for my strategy against ONE MILLION shoes.
Knowing that the rules of Target actually do affect the end result against any large sample of outcomes (or even a small one, come to that!), I asked my rather prickly evaluator to let me see his line-by-line bets against the Zumma and Wizard sets, because those at least have been around for years and can be readily verified.
It took almost a month before he finally posted his output against the Wizard 1,000 set , which his pal on the baccarat forum claimed had blown Target to bits.
First to come out of the file (still available online here by clicking on the smaller of the two DOWNLOAD buttons) was confirmation that even with the recommended rules only partially applied, Target beat the Wizard shoes to the tune of 2.2% of its total action.
The file (and its author) claimed that a 1 to 10,000 spread limit had been applied - double Target's standard 1 to 5,000 - but close examination of the data confirmed dozens of bets in a total of 83,640 that had far exceeded the claimed limit.
I was left wondering why someone who can spend hours microscopically examining the effects of removing, say, all the 9s from an 8-deck baccarat shoe, could put his name on such a sloppy piece of work.
When I asked about that, I was dismissed as a paranoid lunatic with criminal tendencies and was told in no uncertain terms that Imspirit (in spite of the pretentious Wishing I were just motto in the title of his blog!) had no interest in correcting his mistakes or engaging in any further dialogue with me.
It turned out that my casual evaluator had put none of his considerable skills to work testing the ideas of a guy to whom he gives repeated plugs in his blog, a fellow who offers for sale (at $200 a pop) four strategies that claim to beat either baccarat or blackjack.
Hmmmm...
Of course, bet selection methods that rely on intuition and gut "readings" of shoes after only a few cards have been dealt are obviously impossible to evaluate mathematically without a few hundred thousand actual outcomes. And Imspirit understandably prefers simulations that spit out a lifetime's worth of rounds of baccarat in less than 10 seconds.
Similarly, math is powerless when it comes to reading minds or determining whether or not there is life after death.
I mention all this because most of the chatter on the baccarat forum I visited hinges on deciding between bets on Banker or Player based either on the most recent outcome (FLD or follow last decision) or the one before that (WBL for win before last, or avant dernier in Monte Carlo).
Some contributors to the forum happily admit to using progressive betting - but to such a limited degree that it is demonstrably more dangerous than flat or fixed betting, and quite possibly riskier than flying by the seat of their pants.
I created numerous Sethbets web pages to show that over and over again, a 1 to 5,000 spread requires less action, and therefore less risk, than a 1-50 spread - and that frequently, it is even "safer" than spreading 1 to 10.
No takers on any of that info, according to my site hit counters . I needed the information for the book I'm working on, so no harm done and no time wasted - but I admit I am surprised that nobody was willing to suspend their knee-jerk disbelief for even the few minutes it took to click up and glance at the data.
Progressive betting in any form requires guts and confidence and, at times, a ton of cold hard cash - I have been saying that for years, often resorting to the credo, "If you can't afford to win, don't play."
But the kind of hocus-pocus that these guys on BF have devoted (in some cases) years of their life to discussing and endorsing day after day is much more dangerous and irresponsible than anything I have ever recommended.
On the one hand, they point to Target's failure against a million shoes as proof that progressive betting doesn't work.
Then they go right back to twittering about oddball chops and hops and jumps and trends and patterns and "predictiveness" that together belong in the same grab-bag as runes and chicken entrails.
The only prediction I'm willing to make when it comes to gambling is that if you don't bet progressively in response to a persistent downturn, you will lose, at best, a big chunk of your bankroll - and if you put any faith in patterns lasting longer than a round or two, you will likely lose ALL of it.
I did discover that walking away from a session or shoe if the dealer gets, say, five bets ahead of you will probably (but not certainly!) save you some grief down the road, but even that is hard to quantify.
I tried it by feeding "skipped" rounds into my Target models - all rounds in each shoe, that is, but with no money at risk when the bail-out limit was reached - and the results were very encouraging.
But the problem was that Target breaks shoes up into individual recovery series, and because it's routine for a series to end successfully in spite of more bets lost than won, a five-bet house advantage since a given shoe began does not necessarily line up with a serious threat to the bankroll.
For example, the first five series in a new shoe might each have turned around with four bets lost and three won, indicating five more losers than winners since the first round from the shoe was dealt, but Target would be feeling no pain at all.
Imspirit (a name even stranger than Seth Theobeau!) had a bad experience with a proponent of progressive betting before I came along, I should add before I close, and that may have disqualified him from a fair assessment of any betting strategy.
It might also explain his extraordinary claim that I have some criminal agenda in warning would-be punters that without progressive betting, they might as well empty their wallets into a big pot at the casino entrance and turn around for home.
He describes some of what happened on his blog, and the story underscores my constant warning that anyone who can't afford to fight fire with fire, meaning money vs. money in a gambling context, should never place a bet.
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._
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Don't even think about going into battle if you don't believe you can win the war! It's a lesson nations never learn, but all gamblers should.
_
(For updated information about Target's ongoing sports betting experiment, please go to the Sethbets website, or click here for an introduction to progressive betting, and here [20] and here [5] for current picks). You can also find a guide to the most basic Target strategy applied to more than 80,000 verifiable baccarat outcomes by visiting Google Docs.
October was beginning to look like it was destined to become only the fourth "red" month since we started this transparent sports betting trial way back at the end of July, 2010.
But a one-goal win by the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday (the 29th!) pulled us smartly out of the hole, just as it was meant to, and we're now back on top and looking back at well over 4,000 bets and more than $2 million in total action.
What matters most is that against a persistent "bookies' edge" of 10%, we have managed to win (meaning hold on to!) 8% of that enormous seven-figure churn.
The odds we have overcome are far greater than the house edge in casino table games, where roulette's 5.26% is about as punishing a HA as you're likely to encounter.
Blackjack is about a -1.0% proposition and baccarat is somewhere between -1.24% and -1.35% but I always believed that sports was an ideal proving ground for the Target method.
What's funny is that progressive betting as a concept is about as new-fangled as gambling itself. I can imagine cavemen rolling actual bones, and one of them thinking, "If I double my bet each time I lose, when I win I'll be back where I started."
The simple Martingale (-1, -2, -4, -8, -16, -32, +64) has great appeal from a speed and efficiency standpoint, but I believe that in the long run, it pushes bets way too high and can only prevail if there are no house limits in effect.
That's not how it is in the real world, so Target, with its bells and whistles now greatly streamlined, is simply a practical compromise.
Instead of one win we're looking for two ("twins"!), and that makes it a very easy strategy to learn.
In sports, I do play a "Marty" for a limited number of losses (I stole the nickname from a contributor to Baccarat Forums!) but the only two situations in which doubling the bet is critical, I believe, are after an opening loss, and after a first turnaround attempt in a recovery series goes down the tubes.
Sports is a bit more of a challenge than other games of chance because of the double-digit negative expectation percentage, so it's not quite as safe to assume that a "house" win is likely to be followed by a house loss, or vice versa.
Still and all, the principles are not much different, and the greatest advantage of sports betting is that it's safe to do it online.
"Virtual casinos" can and do cheat when it comes to blackjack, baccarat and so on, but sports results are a matter of widespread public record, and stacking the deck is an impossibility.
So far, I'm very impressed with the efficiency of web-based sports books and the speed of their payouts.
The one thing to be leery of is the sign-up bonuses they offer: a 5x churn isn't unusual, and that means that if you accept a $300 bonus for a $1,500 buy-in, you won't be able to cash out one cent (not even a part of your original stake) until you have generated $9,000 in action.
The whole progressive betting advantage boils down to the Target mantra, winning more when you win than you lose when you lose.
Right now, the 20-line (almost) daily game chart stands at an average win of $640 and an average loss of $454.
That's a 41% W/L surplus, which alone accounts for us being almost $170,000 ahead after 15 months. That's $11,330 a month!
The 5-line parallel trial hasn't been running as long, but there we're looking at a 12.0% "bookies' edge" and a 51.0% W/L surplus.
Bookies the world over should be trembling in their boots, you might think.
But of course they're not.
For every steady winner there are at least a dozen reliable losers, and our success (even when we step up the action and move into the big leagues) is just a very small part of the cost of doing business for them.
So, what does our sports betting success have to do with the headline on this entry?
Good question, and the answer lies with the three weeks I have spent exploring the Baccarat Forums and learning a little more than I need to know about the philosophy of the average (losing) gambler.
Like most of these bulletin boards, BF tends to be monopolized by a noisy few, and I became one of those, putting up an average of almost five posts a day as I sought to get across the perfectly logical - and provable - point that ultimately, only progressive betting can beat the game.
Two BF members in particular, whom I will refer to here as Bitter and Twisted to avoid heaping even more embarrassment on top of the damage they do to themselves with each new post, took exception to the very idea of Target.
They both claimed they couldn't get a handle on the idea that when you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, you end up with an average win value that exceeds your average loss value by a percentage substantially greater than the actual house edge.
(It's usual to refer to the house edge for a given recorded set of outcomes as the AV or actual value, and to use HA to describe the known house advantage for the game as a whole).
When I said - and proved - that in over 200,000 rounds of verifiable outcomes, all of them accessible online, Target delivered an AWB that beat the ALB by a minimum of 10%, what kept coming back was: "Tell me where there's a casino that pays 1.10:1 on winning Player bets!"
It was like being back in a schoolyard with a couple of bullies too dense to see sense and more intent on inflicting damage on others than on learning something that might just be helpful to them.
As I have said before, when you see irrational, spiteful behavior like that, you have to wonder what motivates it!
Both Bitter and Twisted have been posting on multiple gambling discussion groups for years, spending most of their time hurling insults at others while posing as baccarat savants, so the other topic of wonder is the quality of their sad little lives.
Most of the posts to BF have to do with how to make the right choice between baccarat's two main options, Banker and Player, and woe betide anyone who dares suggest that in the long run it really doesn't make any difference.
My position has always been that it's best to stick with Player only, primarily because there's no "5%" commission on winning bets.
The other factor has to do with the hazard of two options piled on top of the need to place the right bet - the right amount - at the right time.
Having to deal with Which? as well as How much? doubles the danger that you're going to zig when the shoe or deck zags and vice versa - clearly it makes much more sense to pick a contender and stick with it through thick and thin.
I went to a lot of trouble to demonstrate that although the primary criticism of Target (or any form of progressive betting) is that it's "too risky," it in fact often requires less overall risk than betting methods that seem on the face of it to be more conservative or cautious.
Bitter and Twisted would have none of it, and their constant abusive and infantile responses in a setting which is supposed to encourage discussion and mutual support drowned out everyone else, and probably drove countless potential contributors away.
My biggest disappointment, I have to say, was with a guy who wisely finds better things to do with his time than log in to BF, but whose math skills make him the go-to guru for strategy analysis.
As I have said here before, he took just one of Target's rules - the LTD+ response to a mid-recovery win - and used that to "prove" that my progressive betting variation "failed" against more than a million shoes of baccarat.
I wouldn't take that much to heart but for the fact that "Imspirit" went further and said that Target was beaten by the Zumma baccarat sets and by the WOO 1,000, all of which were in truth soundly thrashed by the method, with detailed online proof provided.
Imspirit argues, in essence, that whatever the rules applied, progressive betting can never work in the long run, so why bother to test the method accurately?
He has one hilarious howler in his report about the tests, a chart that claims to show that both Banker and Player came out ahead in 1 million shoes with no house limits applied, and that Banker did substantially better than Player using the one and only Target rule he selected.
It doesn't take a million-shoe trial to demonstrate what preposterous nonsense this is (although it was greeted with wild applause by the dummies on BF who fall for the house line that Banker is always the better bet at baccarat).
It cheers me no end, though, because it confirms that in spite of all the flash and pizazz that makes Imspirit's blog a whole lot prettier than this one, the poor guy has his head wedged firmly up his bum!
When ALL of the Target rules were accurately applied, Player routinely topped Banker's win against the same outcomes for endless thousands of rounds - although both sides did very nicely, because that's what progressive betting does, folks.
I dedicated a recent Sethbets page to demonstrating for Bitter's benefit that the so-called 5% commission will routinely hand Player more profit than Banker against the same sample of outcomes.
But I learned that in those circles (the rarefied forums where folks talk gambling every day but hardly ever actually do it, for the most part) anyone who challenges the conventional wisdom in any way quickly becomes a pariah.
Here's a math-based assessment of Imspirit's crazy chart above:
As for Imspirit, it's intriguing to discover that while taking a hard-line (but wholly uncorroborated) stance against progressive betting in any form, beating Target to a pulp with a million shoes without showing any actual bets, he's in fact in thrall to methods of play that have zero basis in mathematics!
His impressive blog devotes page after page to tables and charts that would have boggled Einstein's mind, assessing, for example, the effect of the removal of certain cards from a baccarat shoe.
Truth is that unless all that hocus-pocus can tell us what's coming out of the shoe or deck before we place a bet, it ain't worth a hill of beans.
Target, like any progressive betting method, doesn't pretend to predict: it reacts.
We can never know ahead of the deal or spin or roll that we'll see the two wins in a row we hope for when a recovery opportunity arises. But we can always be certain that IF it happens (and it happens a lot!) we'll have the right bet on the table at the right time.
The point I was making at the top of this essay is that there is no way to win without risk. Gambling is in its very essence a risky business. And the less you are willing to risk, the more likely you are to lose.
That's a mathematical fact. Cuts and burns and trends and biases, patterns and predictability, neutrals and opposites are not quantifiable or measurable, much as we'd like them to be.
There's just one thing Imspirit and I just might be able to agree on: intuition.
And since his mindless sims specifically banish intuition, along with every other human aspect of gambling, I have to wonder why he bothers.
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._
(For updated information about Target's ongoing sports betting experiment, please go to the Sethbets website, or click here for an introduction to progressive betting, and here [20] and here [5] for current picks). You can also find a guide to the most basic Target strategy applied to more than 80,000 verifiable baccarat outcomes by visiting Google Docs.
October was beginning to look like it was destined to become only the fourth "red" month since we started this transparent sports betting trial way back at the end of July, 2010.
But a one-goal win by the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday (the 29th!) pulled us smartly out of the hole, just as it was meant to, and we're now back on top and looking back at well over 4,000 bets and more than $2 million in total action.
What matters most is that against a persistent "bookies' edge" of 10%, we have managed to win (meaning hold on to!) 8% of that enormous seven-figure churn.
The odds we have overcome are far greater than the house edge in casino table games, where roulette's 5.26% is about as punishing a HA as you're likely to encounter.
Blackjack is about a -1.0% proposition and baccarat is somewhere between -1.24% and -1.35% but I always believed that sports was an ideal proving ground for the Target method.
What's funny is that progressive betting as a concept is about as new-fangled as gambling itself. I can imagine cavemen rolling actual bones, and one of them thinking, "If I double my bet each time I lose, when I win I'll be back where I started."
The simple Martingale (-1, -2, -4, -8, -16, -32, +64) has great appeal from a speed and efficiency standpoint, but I believe that in the long run, it pushes bets way too high and can only prevail if there are no house limits in effect.
That's not how it is in the real world, so Target, with its bells and whistles now greatly streamlined, is simply a practical compromise.
Instead of one win we're looking for two ("twins"!), and that makes it a very easy strategy to learn.
In sports, I do play a "Marty" for a limited number of losses (I stole the nickname from a contributor to Baccarat Forums!) but the only two situations in which doubling the bet is critical, I believe, are after an opening loss, and after a first turnaround attempt in a recovery series goes down the tubes.
Sports is a bit more of a challenge than other games of chance because of the double-digit negative expectation percentage, so it's not quite as safe to assume that a "house" win is likely to be followed by a house loss, or vice versa.
Still and all, the principles are not much different, and the greatest advantage of sports betting is that it's safe to do it online.
"Virtual casinos" can and do cheat when it comes to blackjack, baccarat and so on, but sports results are a matter of widespread public record, and stacking the deck is an impossibility.
So far, I'm very impressed with the efficiency of web-based sports books and the speed of their payouts.
The one thing to be leery of is the sign-up bonuses they offer: a 5x churn isn't unusual, and that means that if you accept a $300 bonus for a $1,500 buy-in, you won't be able to cash out one cent (not even a part of your original stake) until you have generated $9,000 in action.
The whole progressive betting advantage boils down to the Target mantra, winning more when you win than you lose when you lose.
Right now, the 20-line (almost) daily game chart stands at an average win of $640 and an average loss of $454.
That's a 41% W/L surplus, which alone accounts for us being almost $170,000 ahead after 15 months. That's $11,330 a month!
The 5-line parallel trial hasn't been running as long, but there we're looking at a 12.0% "bookies' edge" and a 51.0% W/L surplus.
Bookies the world over should be trembling in their boots, you might think.
But of course they're not.
For every steady winner there are at least a dozen reliable losers, and our success (even when we step up the action and move into the big leagues) is just a very small part of the cost of doing business for them.
So, what does our sports betting success have to do with the headline on this entry?
Good question, and the answer lies with the three weeks I have spent exploring the Baccarat Forums and learning a little more than I need to know about the philosophy of the average (losing) gambler.
Like most of these bulletin boards, BF tends to be monopolized by a noisy few, and I became one of those, putting up an average of almost five posts a day as I sought to get across the perfectly logical - and provable - point that ultimately, only progressive betting can beat the game.
Two BF members in particular, whom I will refer to here as Bitter and Twisted to avoid heaping even more embarrassment on top of the damage they do to themselves with each new post, took exception to the very idea of Target.
They both claimed they couldn't get a handle on the idea that when you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, you end up with an average win value that exceeds your average loss value by a percentage substantially greater than the actual house edge.
(It's usual to refer to the house edge for a given recorded set of outcomes as the AV or actual value, and to use HA to describe the known house advantage for the game as a whole).
When I said - and proved - that in over 200,000 rounds of verifiable outcomes, all of them accessible online, Target delivered an AWB that beat the ALB by a minimum of 10%, what kept coming back was: "Tell me where there's a casino that pays 1.10:1 on winning Player bets!"
It was like being back in a schoolyard with a couple of bullies too dense to see sense and more intent on inflicting damage on others than on learning something that might just be helpful to them.
As I have said before, when you see irrational, spiteful behavior like that, you have to wonder what motivates it!
Both Bitter and Twisted have been posting on multiple gambling discussion groups for years, spending most of their time hurling insults at others while posing as baccarat savants, so the other topic of wonder is the quality of their sad little lives.
Most of the posts to BF have to do with how to make the right choice between baccarat's two main options, Banker and Player, and woe betide anyone who dares suggest that in the long run it really doesn't make any difference.
My position has always been that it's best to stick with Player only, primarily because there's no "5%" commission on winning bets.
The other factor has to do with the hazard of two options piled on top of the need to place the right bet - the right amount - at the right time.
Having to deal with Which? as well as How much? doubles the danger that you're going to zig when the shoe or deck zags and vice versa - clearly it makes much more sense to pick a contender and stick with it through thick and thin.
I went to a lot of trouble to demonstrate that although the primary criticism of Target (or any form of progressive betting) is that it's "too risky," it in fact often requires less overall risk than betting methods that seem on the face of it to be more conservative or cautious.
Bitter and Twisted would have none of it, and their constant abusive and infantile responses in a setting which is supposed to encourage discussion and mutual support drowned out everyone else, and probably drove countless potential contributors away.
My biggest disappointment, I have to say, was with a guy who wisely finds better things to do with his time than log in to BF, but whose math skills make him the go-to guru for strategy analysis.
As I have said here before, he took just one of Target's rules - the LTD+ response to a mid-recovery win - and used that to "prove" that my progressive betting variation "failed" against more than a million shoes of baccarat.
I wouldn't take that much to heart but for the fact that "Imspirit" went further and said that Target was beaten by the Zumma baccarat sets and by the WOO 1,000, all of which were in truth soundly thrashed by the method, with detailed online proof provided.
Imspirit argues, in essence, that whatever the rules applied, progressive betting can never work in the long run, so why bother to test the method accurately?
He has one hilarious howler in his report about the tests, a chart that claims to show that both Banker and Player came out ahead in 1 million shoes with no house limits applied, and that Banker did substantially better than Player using the one and only Target rule he selected.
It doesn't take a million-shoe trial to demonstrate what preposterous nonsense this is (although it was greeted with wild applause by the dummies on BF who fall for the house line that Banker is always the better bet at baccarat).
It cheers me no end, though, because it confirms that in spite of all the flash and pizazz that makes Imspirit's blog a whole lot prettier than this one, the poor guy has his head wedged firmly up his bum!
When ALL of the Target rules were accurately applied, Player routinely topped Banker's win against the same outcomes for endless thousands of rounds - although both sides did very nicely, because that's what progressive betting does, folks.
I dedicated a recent Sethbets page to demonstrating for Bitter's benefit that the so-called 5% commission will routinely hand Player more profit than Banker against the same sample of outcomes.
But I learned that in those circles (the rarefied forums where folks talk gambling every day but hardly ever actually do it, for the most part) anyone who challenges the conventional wisdom in any way quickly becomes a pariah.
Here's a math-based assessment of Imspirit's crazy chart above:
As for Imspirit, it's intriguing to discover that while taking a hard-line (but wholly uncorroborated) stance against progressive betting in any form, beating Target to a pulp with a million shoes without showing any actual bets, he's in fact in thrall to methods of play that have zero basis in mathematics!
His impressive blog devotes page after page to tables and charts that would have boggled Einstein's mind, assessing, for example, the effect of the removal of certain cards from a baccarat shoe.
Truth is that unless all that hocus-pocus can tell us what's coming out of the shoe or deck before we place a bet, it ain't worth a hill of beans.
Target, like any progressive betting method, doesn't pretend to predict: it reacts.
We can never know ahead of the deal or spin or roll that we'll see the two wins in a row we hope for when a recovery opportunity arises. But we can always be certain that IF it happens (and it happens a lot!) we'll have the right bet on the table at the right time.
The point I was making at the top of this essay is that there is no way to win without risk. Gambling is in its very essence a risky business. And the less you are willing to risk, the more likely you are to lose.
That's a mathematical fact. Cuts and burns and trends and biases, patterns and predictability, neutrals and opposites are not quantifiable or measurable, much as we'd like them to be.
There's just one thing Imspirit and I just might be able to agree on: intuition.
And since his mindless sims specifically banish intuition, along with every other human aspect of gambling, I have to wonder why he bothers.
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._