_
(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._
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
When you tell the truth to some defenders of the conventional wisdom, and back it up with meticulous, accurate math, they can get very nasty indeed!
_
(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.
They say a soft answer turneth away wrath.
Well, that might have worked in Biblical times, but in this Internet age, telling the truth and proving it doesn't impress people who seem to have a vested interest in peddling the myth that there's no way to beat the house edge in the end.
Here's my Baccarat Forums response to an angry, intemperate and abusive chap who repeatedly refuses to look at the mathematical corroboration I provide every day while offering not one shred of his own:
Why progressive betting is the ONLY long-term winning strategy.
This new thread is concerned primarily with honesty, transparency and accurate math.
But I have to say up front that it is partially in response to one of the more abusive contributors to this curious cacophony who recently wrote: “I have given away thousands of systems to hundreds of people.”
That’s a boast that confirms that its author has spent many years cynically and deliberately distracting, misleading and misinforming gamblers all over the world, and aims to keep right on doing it.
I have in the past three weeks provided dozens of links to meticulously-checked proofs that my version of progressive betting (I call it Target, in case you’re new here) has prevailed against tens of thousands of shoes of baccarat contained in verifiable data sets that are in the public domain.
The guy who has “given away thousands of systems” knows, just as every casino operator knows, that progressive betting is the only real and credible long-term threat to the effects of the house advantage.
I stress the word effects because in any casino game of chance, the house advantage will always be there. It’s how it is neutralized and then reversed that is the “secret” behind progressive betting generally and Target particularly.
Target, of course, has not been kept secret. And neither has the proof that it works.
Unfortunately, a few people who post to this forum have made it their business to bombard the rest of us with drivel designed to hide the clear and honest truth that there is a way to win consistently in a casino.
Another quote from the source of thousands of systems (all of them worthless if they don’t have progressive betting at their core): “...your system is quite PRACTICAL! 5 000 units to win 1 unit, now THAT is wise advice!”
Those words echo what you’ll hear from a dealer or other pit critter if you attempt to apply progressive betting in any casino anywhere.
You will be singled out for kindhearted, concerned counsel about the harm you’re likely to be doing yourself, while all around you drunks and other idiots flush their money away without a compassionate word from casino personnel.
The reason for that is simple: You, along with the drunks and fools, are certain in the long run to lose more bets than you win, and if you bet fixed amounts or randomly, you are also certain to lose more money than you win.
But if you are consistently able to win back in one or two bets what you lost in three or four, you will not only neutralize the effect of the house edge – you will reverse it.
The proud systems donor keeps asking me for proof, proof, proof.
Every post I put up on BF includes links to detailed proof, proof, proof (including 83,640 lines of bets against 1,000 baccarat shoes that are available online for anyone to cross-check).
But Systems Giveaway Guy (SGG) ignores the proof time after time – as perhaps he should, because it makes nonsense of his every argument.
Meanwhile, the only “proof” he has offered is 70 or so lines of bets with a 49% house advantage against which he maliciously misapplied the rules of Target, at one point placing a wager of more than 100,000 units.
Given the harsh reality of all games of chance – the fact that over time, you will lose more bets than you win – know this: you will only make a long-term profit if you consistently bet in such a way that you win more money when you win than you lose when you lose.
That’s not an opinion, or even a revolutionary idea. It’s a cold, hard, mathematical truth.
Another cold, hard, mathematical truth is that from time, you will be required to place some very large bets in defense of your bankroll. Unpalatable, yes. Avoidable, no.
My posts have provided clear and irrefutable mathematical proof that time and time again, if you bet a 1 to 5,000 spread, you will in fact put less money in play (and therefore significantly reduce your overall exposure) than if you spread 1 to 50.
In some of the models I have posted (all of which use verifiable data sets from either Zumma Publishing or Bodog’s principal promoter, the Wizard of Odds) spreading 1 to 5,000 is actually less “dangerous” than a 1 to TEN spread.
I have also put up multiple summaries of play against verifiable outcomes that show that Target bets at low levels more than 95% of the time, and that the average recovery is achieved in six bets or less, often when the house has won four bets against Target’s two.
But SGG won’t acknowledge any truth that conflicts with his mission to mislead and mess up as many gamblers as he possibly can on as many gambling discussion groups as he can pollute.
SGG spreads his relentless disinformation all over the Internet. I have some of his other “handles” and have not checked his activities elsewhere. But it is a safe bet that his abusive, intemperate mischief is not confined to Baccarat Forums.
Back to facts: Nothing you can do can change the sad truth that when the dealing’s done, you will have lost more bets than you won. You can bob and weave and chase patterns and trends, you can randomly raise and lower your bets all you want, and over time, the house will have your hide.
If you don't bet progressively according to a consistent, disciplined plan, you will lose your money however smart and experienced you might believe yourself to be.
SGG is obsessed with the question of whether or not Banker wins more bets than Player in baccarat, and of course it does. I have never denied that.
But does betting Banker with Target – not all of the time, but just some of the time - win more money than betting Player all of the time with Target? Absolutely not.
Even flat betting Banker all the time will end in a loss, as SGG well knows, because the 5% commission on Banker wins is in place solely to offset any benefit derived from winning more often than you lose.
Again, not an opinion, but a demonstrable fact in support of which I have provided ample proof.
But SGG won’t see it, because it doesn’t suit whatever muddled and malicious agenda he brings to BF.
Another SGG quote: “Actually asshole, honesty is my middle name.”
Honesty requires us all to tell the truth, to examine facts presented in good faith, and to make an unbiased evaluation of an idea based on verifiable information rather than on bias or prejudice.
Sorry, SGG, you’re out of the running.
Lastly, the totally irrelevant question of my “true identity” – tossed into this discussion, along with all the other nonsense, to distract members and visitors from the only issue that matters (beating the house is generally accepted as the goal we all share).
Everyone posting to this board uses a handle that conceals his or her real name, not out of fear or shame or to be deceptive, but because we all value (and have a right to) our privacy.
SGG and Egalite both use that form of concealment, and do the same with their e-mail addresses, again as many of us do in defense of our privacy.
I am absolutely unashamed of the honest and fact-based contributions I have made in recent years to the ongoing quest to consistently beat casino games of chance.
But I also recognize that many people with whom I do business consider gambling to be the pursuit of fools, in spite of the fact that many of them risk (and have recently lost!) millions on the stock market.
So, I chose to exercise my right to my privacy, while making certain that every claim I make here, in my blog or elsewhere, is supported by verifiable data.
Because SGG and Egalite are more concerned with making mischief than making a useful contribution to this and other discussion groups, they chose to “out” me as Ian Harmer, creator of a long-established progressive betting method known as Turnaround.
Their motive matters more to me than any damage that might be done to me by their petty malice.
I can prove – and have proved – my fact-based ideas to more people than SGG has harmed and confused with his worthless “systems” and I will continue to state the truth and prove it on this forum for as long as I choose to do so.
One truth is that, unlike SGG and Egalite, I have allowed my approach to the house-beating challenge that concerns us all to evolve and improve over the years.
Turnaround was a worthy step on the way to Target, one that also up-ended the house edge consistently and profitably. But it was way too cluttered and complicated.
As computers evolved too, I was able to confirm against countless real and simulated bets that all that really threatens the house advantage in games of chance is the correct betting response to paired – or “twin” – wins.
Obviously, when the first win comes along in mid-recovery, you can’t know for sure that another win will immediately follow it. But the one-two combo happens so often, so reliably, that if all a player does is exploit that frequent occurrence, he will turn the house edge on its ear.
Casinos know that, and so do the people who try to commandeer this forum and twist it into the verbal equivalent of an infantile food fight.
All I can ask readers to do is to look at the facts and make an honest and unbiased judgment to the best of their ability. And in spite of it all, I have great faith in that ability!
Keep winning!
Seth T.
Blog
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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.
They say a soft answer turneth away wrath.
Well, that might have worked in Biblical times, but in this Internet age, telling the truth and proving it doesn't impress people who seem to have a vested interest in peddling the myth that there's no way to beat the house edge in the end.
Here's my Baccarat Forums response to an angry, intemperate and abusive chap who repeatedly refuses to look at the mathematical corroboration I provide every day while offering not one shred of his own:
Why progressive betting is the ONLY long-term winning strategy.
This new thread is concerned primarily with honesty, transparency and accurate math.
But I have to say up front that it is partially in response to one of the more abusive contributors to this curious cacophony who recently wrote: “I have given away thousands of systems to hundreds of people.”
That’s a boast that confirms that its author has spent many years cynically and deliberately distracting, misleading and misinforming gamblers all over the world, and aims to keep right on doing it.
I have in the past three weeks provided dozens of links to meticulously-checked proofs that my version of progressive betting (I call it Target, in case you’re new here) has prevailed against tens of thousands of shoes of baccarat contained in verifiable data sets that are in the public domain.
The guy who has “given away thousands of systems” knows, just as every casino operator knows, that progressive betting is the only real and credible long-term threat to the effects of the house advantage.
I stress the word effects because in any casino game of chance, the house advantage will always be there. It’s how it is neutralized and then reversed that is the “secret” behind progressive betting generally and Target particularly.
Target, of course, has not been kept secret. And neither has the proof that it works.
Unfortunately, a few people who post to this forum have made it their business to bombard the rest of us with drivel designed to hide the clear and honest truth that there is a way to win consistently in a casino.
Another quote from the source of thousands of systems (all of them worthless if they don’t have progressive betting at their core): “...your system is quite PRACTICAL! 5 000 units to win 1 unit, now THAT is wise advice!”
Those words echo what you’ll hear from a dealer or other pit critter if you attempt to apply progressive betting in any casino anywhere.
You will be singled out for kindhearted, concerned counsel about the harm you’re likely to be doing yourself, while all around you drunks and other idiots flush their money away without a compassionate word from casino personnel.
The reason for that is simple: You, along with the drunks and fools, are certain in the long run to lose more bets than you win, and if you bet fixed amounts or randomly, you are also certain to lose more money than you win.
But if you are consistently able to win back in one or two bets what you lost in three or four, you will not only neutralize the effect of the house edge – you will reverse it.
The proud systems donor keeps asking me for proof, proof, proof.
Every post I put up on BF includes links to detailed proof, proof, proof (including 83,640 lines of bets against 1,000 baccarat shoes that are available online for anyone to cross-check).
But Systems Giveaway Guy (SGG) ignores the proof time after time – as perhaps he should, because it makes nonsense of his every argument.
Meanwhile, the only “proof” he has offered is 70 or so lines of bets with a 49% house advantage against which he maliciously misapplied the rules of Target, at one point placing a wager of more than 100,000 units.
Given the harsh reality of all games of chance – the fact that over time, you will lose more bets than you win – know this: you will only make a long-term profit if you consistently bet in such a way that you win more money when you win than you lose when you lose.
That’s not an opinion, or even a revolutionary idea. It’s a cold, hard, mathematical truth.
Another cold, hard, mathematical truth is that from time, you will be required to place some very large bets in defense of your bankroll. Unpalatable, yes. Avoidable, no.
My posts have provided clear and irrefutable mathematical proof that time and time again, if you bet a 1 to 5,000 spread, you will in fact put less money in play (and therefore significantly reduce your overall exposure) than if you spread 1 to 50.
In some of the models I have posted (all of which use verifiable data sets from either Zumma Publishing or Bodog’s principal promoter, the Wizard of Odds) spreading 1 to 5,000 is actually less “dangerous” than a 1 to TEN spread.
I have also put up multiple summaries of play against verifiable outcomes that show that Target bets at low levels more than 95% of the time, and that the average recovery is achieved in six bets or less, often when the house has won four bets against Target’s two.
But SGG won’t acknowledge any truth that conflicts with his mission to mislead and mess up as many gamblers as he possibly can on as many gambling discussion groups as he can pollute.
SGG spreads his relentless disinformation all over the Internet. I have some of his other “handles” and have not checked his activities elsewhere. But it is a safe bet that his abusive, intemperate mischief is not confined to Baccarat Forums.
Back to facts: Nothing you can do can change the sad truth that when the dealing’s done, you will have lost more bets than you won. You can bob and weave and chase patterns and trends, you can randomly raise and lower your bets all you want, and over time, the house will have your hide.
If you don't bet progressively according to a consistent, disciplined plan, you will lose your money however smart and experienced you might believe yourself to be.
SGG is obsessed with the question of whether or not Banker wins more bets than Player in baccarat, and of course it does. I have never denied that.
But does betting Banker with Target – not all of the time, but just some of the time - win more money than betting Player all of the time with Target? Absolutely not.
Even flat betting Banker all the time will end in a loss, as SGG well knows, because the 5% commission on Banker wins is in place solely to offset any benefit derived from winning more often than you lose.
Again, not an opinion, but a demonstrable fact in support of which I have provided ample proof.
But SGG won’t see it, because it doesn’t suit whatever muddled and malicious agenda he brings to BF.
Another SGG quote: “Actually asshole, honesty is my middle name.”
Honesty requires us all to tell the truth, to examine facts presented in good faith, and to make an unbiased evaluation of an idea based on verifiable information rather than on bias or prejudice.
Sorry, SGG, you’re out of the running.
Lastly, the totally irrelevant question of my “true identity” – tossed into this discussion, along with all the other nonsense, to distract members and visitors from the only issue that matters (beating the house is generally accepted as the goal we all share).
Everyone posting to this board uses a handle that conceals his or her real name, not out of fear or shame or to be deceptive, but because we all value (and have a right to) our privacy.
SGG and Egalite both use that form of concealment, and do the same with their e-mail addresses, again as many of us do in defense of our privacy.
I am absolutely unashamed of the honest and fact-based contributions I have made in recent years to the ongoing quest to consistently beat casino games of chance.
But I also recognize that many people with whom I do business consider gambling to be the pursuit of fools, in spite of the fact that many of them risk (and have recently lost!) millions on the stock market.
So, I chose to exercise my right to my privacy, while making certain that every claim I make here, in my blog or elsewhere, is supported by verifiable data.
Because SGG and Egalite are more concerned with making mischief than making a useful contribution to this and other discussion groups, they chose to “out” me as Ian Harmer, creator of a long-established progressive betting method known as Turnaround.
Their motive matters more to me than any damage that might be done to me by their petty malice.
I can prove – and have proved – my fact-based ideas to more people than SGG has harmed and confused with his worthless “systems” and I will continue to state the truth and prove it on this forum for as long as I choose to do so.
One truth is that, unlike SGG and Egalite, I have allowed my approach to the house-beating challenge that concerns us all to evolve and improve over the years.
Turnaround was a worthy step on the way to Target, one that also up-ended the house edge consistently and profitably. But it was way too cluttered and complicated.
As computers evolved too, I was able to confirm against countless real and simulated bets that all that really threatens the house advantage in games of chance is the correct betting response to paired – or “twin” – wins.
Obviously, when the first win comes along in mid-recovery, you can’t know for sure that another win will immediately follow it. But the one-two combo happens so often, so reliably, that if all a player does is exploit that frequent occurrence, he will turn the house edge on its ear.
Casinos know that, and so do the people who try to commandeer this forum and twist it into the verbal equivalent of an infantile food fight.
All I can ask readers to do is to look at the facts and make an honest and unbiased judgment to the best of their ability. And in spite of it all, I have great faith in that ability!
Keep winning!
Seth T.
Blog
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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._
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Is it possible to reduce the house edge in a casino gambling game by ditching the "stop loss" concept and replacing it with a "stop play" trigger?
_
(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.
My fall foray into the murky world of Internet gambling forums has become a major distraction in recent days, and I have been neglecting the online platform that I care about the most: this one.
The good news is that the to-and-fro about Target on Baccarat Forums has brought me a very healthy number of new readers - I welcome them and would be very happy to hear from them.
The issue on BF, as everywhere with gambling as the sole topic of discussion, comes down to the same old same old: Is it possible to win consistently at games of chance without progressive betting?
And the answer is the same old same old: NO!
Baccarat players are as obsessed as anyone else with the smokescreens that casinos artfully build around the ways they have devised to part fools from their money.
There's talk about cuts and burns and penetration (sounds like an S & M forum!), and patterns and trends and "predictiveness" (whatever the hell that is) and it all sounds very serious and scientific.
Unfortunately, it is all irrelevant.
However much we might like to think we can change the end game with skillful bobbing and weaving, in the end, it's always going to come down to the same inescapable truth: We will lose more bets than we win.
And that being so, we have no option other than to bet in such a way that we win more when we win than we lose.
To do that, we must bet progressively according to a strict set of rules, so that we can recover in as few bets as possible losses that took many more hands or rounds to accrue.
Regular readers of this blog might at this point be saying, "Jeez, again with the 'win more' thing!" but my BF adventure has taught me that even people who consider themselves experts on just one game are somehow able to overlook the math and convince themselves that they can win while betting flat or randomly.
There's one guy on BF who keeps saying over and over again that because Banker always, over time, will win more bets than Player (45.86% vs. 44.62% according to the widely-accepted expectation percentages), Banker can be counted on to "lose less" and is therefore the superior proposition.
This such mind-blowing twaddle that I didn't feel it deserved a response - until I learned that many people on the forum(s) actually suck it up like mother's milk.
One response made good sense: "Dying more slowly is still dying!"
Beyond that, the argument always ignored the plain truth that as long as you bet flat/fixed amounts or bet randomly, winning more often will not help you win more money.
And if that's so, why bother backing Banker at all?
I admit I took pleasure in playing Devil's Advocate and recommending a total ban on Banker bets - and it wasn't serious mischief, because that's the way I play on the rare occasions when I desert blackjack for a game that I find comparatively tedious and unrewarding.
On the BF board, the phrase "bet selection" is taken by the majority to mean the choice between Banker and Player (Tie, too, if you really want to lose your bankroll quickly).
What it should mean is selecting the amount you bet, not where you pile your chips.
In the last couple of weeks, I was directed to a "thousand shoe" sim output page put up by the Wizard of Odds (OK, I have mentioned this before, but bear with me!) and it gave me a wonderful opportunity to lay out some truths not just as I see them but as they demonstrably are.
Those 1,000 shoes were the product of a simulation, and I have consistently railed against simulations in this space and questioned their relevance to real play in real time for real money.
But in this instance, all that concerns me is that the 83,640 bets were published by someone who is a widely-known advocate for the gambling industry, so it can be assumed that there is nothing "soft" about them.
Just as important is that I'm not the source of the data - whatever I say about the "WOO" shoes can be readily checked and verified at the link I have already provided.
One of the many, many factoids that came out of the Target processing of the WOO shoes is that although the strategy lost 1.24% more bets than it won, it came out ahead by a little less than 2.0%
The "win" (in quotes because no money changed hands) worked out at about $90 an hour for about 1.2 years of continuous play, which sounds like slave labor to me, given how much I enjoy the watching-paint-dry nature of baccarat compared to blackjack.
But what's important is that against data over which I had (and have) no control, the Target version of progressive betting successfully overcame negative expectation and delivered a profit.
Along the way, I was provided with a full digital version of the 1,600 shoes from two "real shoes" sets put out last century by Zumma Publishing.
As some of you will remember, I tested the Zumma shoes against Target years ago, then repeated the tests using the same data a few weeks back, getting this result:
The only difference between this run-through (a "player's edge" above 4.0% against a house advantage of 1.29%!) is that I allowed the next bet (NB) value to go as high as 10x the value of the previous bet (PB) rather than 4x for the WOO shoes.
I'm happy to have the Zumma shoes in their original form, not because the line by line results are any different (they aren't) but because I had stripped out ties and shuffle breaks because they are meaningless to Target.
With this method, if a shoe ends in mid-series, you keep on betting at the required level after the shuffle and cut (both of which are also meaningless) until the series has been recovered, and the beat goes on per the Target rules.
Everything I did was strictly above-board and triple-checked as always, but this time I was able to provide data about individual shoes for anyone to check against the Zumma data sets.
Now, it happens on bulletin boards like BF that when you put up data that contradicts the conventional wisdom, some members start out dismissive, then become angry, and end up astonishingly abusive.
You might assume that these gambling discussion groups are there to enable like-minded people to share their betting experience, and help each other become better players.
That's true.
But they also provide a platform for cynical, seasoned pros to do their part on behalf of the gambling industry, and dump all over anyone who dares suggest that there is a way to consistently beat the house advantage at games of chance.
Am I a conspiracy theory nut? Not usually - but my experience with BF reinforces my belief that the gambling industry monitors all relevant online activity and sticks its oar in to stir things up whenever it sees an opportunity.
It can't do it with messages that start out, "Hey, this is Charlie over at Wynn Las Vegas, and you're full of (bleep)" so instead it creates accounts under a variety of names, and hurls childish abuse at any threat to the status quo until sober and sensible board members tire of all the nonsense and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It's a clever plan, as far as it goes. And unless the target of the abuse is very persistent, it works.
So, now I have wandered some distance from the question at the top of this article, and it's time to get back to it.
Let's first revisit the conventional wisdom, which says that any damage control a player may apply, by reducing or increasing his bet values or by walking away from a series that has turned dangerously negative, must be in the grand scheme of things a waste of time.
The CW insists that no player in any gambling game can escape his ultimate destiny, which is to LOSE.
Back when computers were steam-driven and achingly s-l-o-w, I devised a model which asked a simple question: "What would happen if I were to walk away from any shoe or session in which the house got more than five bets ahead of me?"
By "skipping" a potentially deadly downturn, would I be more or less likely to walk right into another one - jumping from the frying pan into the fire, in other words?
And by extension, how often would things have improved if I had stayed put and waited out a prolonged negative trend?
The old model didn't have shoe markers and shuffle breaks, so I had to set a series length (say, 50 rounds) as well as a "skip trigger" (say, -5).
I got some promising, consistently positive answers after my old Gateway had huffed and puffed for hours, but I moved on because I didn't feel the results could be said to be in any way definitive.
Now, I have a system with 6GB of RAM vs. maybe 2MB before, plus dual processors and a clock-speed that, in the words of one BF seeker after truth and wisdom, "I don't know and don't care."
Better yet, I have the WOO 1,000 shoes and the Zumma 1,600 with breaks where they are supposed to be, enabling me to drag out the old model, dust it off, and teach it some new skills courtesy of Excel 2010.
The algorithm was as simple as it would need to be in real play: If the house gets five bets ahead, sit out the rest of the shoe, then resume betting after the shuffle.
My results: the overall AV/HA (actual value of the house advantage) for the WOO 1,000 was cut from -1.20% to -0.11%, and for the Zumma 600 + 1,000 it dropped from -1.21% to -0.46%.
Some snips:
What you get over on BF when you post data like this is abuse from the voluble defenders of the casinos' You can't win in the end, so learn to love losing party line, sometimes including a confession that they haven't even looked at the material because it must be garbage.
The methodology snip comes from a model which runs an RNG for either 30,000 or 150,000 lines at a time, recording the comparative results from each iteration.
There's useful data there, which is more than you'll get from "testers" who will publish summaries like this without a word of explanation covering methodology or rules applied.
Imspirit includes in his dazzling array of numbers and charts a reference to Target Betting Flat-betting 1u...an impossibility, given that Target never, ever flat-bets 1u or 1,000,000u because flat-betting is always going to fall foul of negative expectation.
He's also given Target a spread of 1-10,000 instead of the recommended 1-5,000.
Doubling the spread may not matter much, but it does show a disregard for the strategy rules and suggests a deliberate hatchet job.
I say that because my WOO tests - and soon the Zumma 600+1,000 - have been posted online for anyone to examine line by line and verify against the original data sets, both of which have been in the pubic domain for years.
I'll put up the Skip Test RNG files as soon as I can so anyone can run it, although it's possible that files converted to to Google Docs won't accept Excel macros. If that happens, I'll send the file to anyone who requests it.
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.
My fall foray into the murky world of Internet gambling forums has become a major distraction in recent days, and I have been neglecting the online platform that I care about the most: this one.
The good news is that the to-and-fro about Target on Baccarat Forums has brought me a very healthy number of new readers - I welcome them and would be very happy to hear from them.
The issue on BF, as everywhere with gambling as the sole topic of discussion, comes down to the same old same old: Is it possible to win consistently at games of chance without progressive betting?
And the answer is the same old same old: NO!
Baccarat players are as obsessed as anyone else with the smokescreens that casinos artfully build around the ways they have devised to part fools from their money.
There's talk about cuts and burns and penetration (sounds like an S & M forum!), and patterns and trends and "predictiveness" (whatever the hell that is) and it all sounds very serious and scientific.
Unfortunately, it is all irrelevant.
However much we might like to think we can change the end game with skillful bobbing and weaving, in the end, it's always going to come down to the same inescapable truth: We will lose more bets than we win.
And that being so, we have no option other than to bet in such a way that we win more when we win than we lose.
To do that, we must bet progressively according to a strict set of rules, so that we can recover in as few bets as possible losses that took many more hands or rounds to accrue.
Regular readers of this blog might at this point be saying, "Jeez, again with the 'win more' thing!" but my BF adventure has taught me that even people who consider themselves experts on just one game are somehow able to overlook the math and convince themselves that they can win while betting flat or randomly.
There's one guy on BF who keeps saying over and over again that because Banker always, over time, will win more bets than Player (45.86% vs. 44.62% according to the widely-accepted expectation percentages), Banker can be counted on to "lose less" and is therefore the superior proposition.
This such mind-blowing twaddle that I didn't feel it deserved a response - until I learned that many people on the forum(s) actually suck it up like mother's milk.
One response made good sense: "Dying more slowly is still dying!"
Beyond that, the argument always ignored the plain truth that as long as you bet flat/fixed amounts or bet randomly, winning more often will not help you win more money.
And if that's so, why bother backing Banker at all?
I admit I took pleasure in playing Devil's Advocate and recommending a total ban on Banker bets - and it wasn't serious mischief, because that's the way I play on the rare occasions when I desert blackjack for a game that I find comparatively tedious and unrewarding.
On the BF board, the phrase "bet selection" is taken by the majority to mean the choice between Banker and Player (Tie, too, if you really want to lose your bankroll quickly).
What it should mean is selecting the amount you bet, not where you pile your chips.
In the last couple of weeks, I was directed to a "thousand shoe" sim output page put up by the Wizard of Odds (OK, I have mentioned this before, but bear with me!) and it gave me a wonderful opportunity to lay out some truths not just as I see them but as they demonstrably are.
Those 1,000 shoes were the product of a simulation, and I have consistently railed against simulations in this space and questioned their relevance to real play in real time for real money.
But in this instance, all that concerns me is that the 83,640 bets were published by someone who is a widely-known advocate for the gambling industry, so it can be assumed that there is nothing "soft" about them.
Just as important is that I'm not the source of the data - whatever I say about the "WOO" shoes can be readily checked and verified at the link I have already provided.
One of the many, many factoids that came out of the Target processing of the WOO shoes is that although the strategy lost 1.24% more bets than it won, it came out ahead by a little less than 2.0%
The "win" (in quotes because no money changed hands) worked out at about $90 an hour for about 1.2 years of continuous play, which sounds like slave labor to me, given how much I enjoy the watching-paint-dry nature of baccarat compared to blackjack.
But what's important is that against data over which I had (and have) no control, the Target version of progressive betting successfully overcame negative expectation and delivered a profit.
Along the way, I was provided with a full digital version of the 1,600 shoes from two "real shoes" sets put out last century by Zumma Publishing.
As some of you will remember, I tested the Zumma shoes against Target years ago, then repeated the tests using the same data a few weeks back, getting this result:
The only difference between this run-through (a "player's edge" above 4.0% against a house advantage of 1.29%!) is that I allowed the next bet (NB) value to go as high as 10x the value of the previous bet (PB) rather than 4x for the WOO shoes.
I'm happy to have the Zumma shoes in their original form, not because the line by line results are any different (they aren't) but because I had stripped out ties and shuffle breaks because they are meaningless to Target.
With this method, if a shoe ends in mid-series, you keep on betting at the required level after the shuffle and cut (both of which are also meaningless) until the series has been recovered, and the beat goes on per the Target rules.
Everything I did was strictly above-board and triple-checked as always, but this time I was able to provide data about individual shoes for anyone to check against the Zumma data sets.
Now, it happens on bulletin boards like BF that when you put up data that contradicts the conventional wisdom, some members start out dismissive, then become angry, and end up astonishingly abusive.
You might assume that these gambling discussion groups are there to enable like-minded people to share their betting experience, and help each other become better players.
That's true.
But they also provide a platform for cynical, seasoned pros to do their part on behalf of the gambling industry, and dump all over anyone who dares suggest that there is a way to consistently beat the house advantage at games of chance.
Am I a conspiracy theory nut? Not usually - but my experience with BF reinforces my belief that the gambling industry monitors all relevant online activity and sticks its oar in to stir things up whenever it sees an opportunity.
It can't do it with messages that start out, "Hey, this is Charlie over at Wynn Las Vegas, and you're full of (bleep)" so instead it creates accounts under a variety of names, and hurls childish abuse at any threat to the status quo until sober and sensible board members tire of all the nonsense and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It's a clever plan, as far as it goes. And unless the target of the abuse is very persistent, it works.
So, now I have wandered some distance from the question at the top of this article, and it's time to get back to it.
Let's first revisit the conventional wisdom, which says that any damage control a player may apply, by reducing or increasing his bet values or by walking away from a series that has turned dangerously negative, must be in the grand scheme of things a waste of time.
The CW insists that no player in any gambling game can escape his ultimate destiny, which is to LOSE.
Back when computers were steam-driven and achingly s-l-o-w, I devised a model which asked a simple question: "What would happen if I were to walk away from any shoe or session in which the house got more than five bets ahead of me?"
By "skipping" a potentially deadly downturn, would I be more or less likely to walk right into another one - jumping from the frying pan into the fire, in other words?
And by extension, how often would things have improved if I had stayed put and waited out a prolonged negative trend?
The old model didn't have shoe markers and shuffle breaks, so I had to set a series length (say, 50 rounds) as well as a "skip trigger" (say, -5).
I got some promising, consistently positive answers after my old Gateway had huffed and puffed for hours, but I moved on because I didn't feel the results could be said to be in any way definitive.
Now, I have a system with 6GB of RAM vs. maybe 2MB before, plus dual processors and a clock-speed that, in the words of one BF seeker after truth and wisdom, "I don't know and don't care."
Better yet, I have the WOO 1,000 shoes and the Zumma 1,600 with breaks where they are supposed to be, enabling me to drag out the old model, dust it off, and teach it some new skills courtesy of Excel 2010.
The algorithm was as simple as it would need to be in real play: If the house gets five bets ahead, sit out the rest of the shoe, then resume betting after the shuffle.
My results: the overall AV/HA (actual value of the house advantage) for the WOO 1,000 was cut from -1.20% to -0.11%, and for the Zumma 600 + 1,000 it dropped from -1.21% to -0.46%.
Some snips:
What you get over on BF when you post data like this is abuse from the voluble defenders of the casinos' You can't win in the end, so learn to love losing party line, sometimes including a confession that they haven't even looked at the material because it must be garbage.
The methodology snip comes from a model which runs an RNG for either 30,000 or 150,000 lines at a time, recording the comparative results from each iteration.
There's useful data there, which is more than you'll get from "testers" who will publish summaries like this without a word of explanation covering methodology or rules applied.
Imspirit includes in his dazzling array of numbers and charts a reference to Target Betting Flat-betting 1u...an impossibility, given that Target never, ever flat-bets 1u or 1,000,000u because flat-betting is always going to fall foul of negative expectation.
He's also given Target a spread of 1-10,000 instead of the recommended 1-5,000.
Doubling the spread may not matter much, but it does show a disregard for the strategy rules and suggests a deliberate hatchet job.
I say that because my WOO tests - and soon the Zumma 600+1,000 - have been posted online for anyone to examine line by line and verify against the original data sets, both of which have been in the pubic domain for years.
I'll put up the Skip Test RNG files as soon as I can so anyone can run it, although it's possible that files converted to to Google Docs won't accept Excel macros. If that happens, I'll send the file to anyone who requests it.
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, October 11, 2011
Casinos despise - and fear - progressive betting because it encourages players to break free from the herd and play a different game.
_
(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)
I have been having an interesting time for the past few days, signing on with a baccarat forum and discovering once again how worked up some people can become when the status quo is threatened.
I am particularly entertained by a house defender who picked a small sample of outcomes with a 49% plus house advantage, then "played" Target Betting until his bets exceeded 100,000 units.
That would be a million bucks in today's Las Vegas, where it's almost impossible to find minimums below $10.
All anyone has to do to test the gambling industry's attitude to progressive betting is to sit down at a blackjack or baccarat table and play a Martingale or double-up, the easiest and most dangerous betting strategy ever invented.
Within a few minutes, a Martingale punter will be singled out for a special chat, usually with the dealer offering friendly advice first, then with a pit boss stepping up to say hello.
This is a standard response, as is the facile argument that once a table limit is reached, the Martingale bettor is in big trouble.
From a $10 start, it takes seven consecutive losses to get to $640 and be in a situation where if the bet loses, the next required bet ($1,280) will probably exceed the table limit.
No problem. Double-up players have to carry large bankrolls, and as long as the casino isn't standing alone in Podunk, ID or wherever, it's easy enough to move to a richer layout where the next bet will be accepted.
If the casino you're in doesn't offer higher limits at other tables, the joint next door or across the street probably will (hence my reference to isolated operations that have no nearby competition and can do what they darn well choose!).
Tough talk, perhaps, but progressive betting wins frequently and builds an ever-stronger bankroll really fast.
And that, of course, is why casinos hate it, and spend a lot of time and money deriding it in any public forum available to them, from the table where you sit to every online gambling discussion group in the world.
Double-up players generally don't sit still for more than a couple of consecutive losses anyway, because they don't want to have to keep dealing with "friendly advice" and other time-wasting interference.
I have been through this rigmarole more times than I can remember, just for the fun of it.
And the really fun part is that the pit staff you encounter will always tell you that their advice is for your own good, not the house's.
Meanwhile, drunks and other fools who don't know better are losing money all around you, and no one in a smart suit steps up to offer them "advice"!
Let me repeat that I don't endorse double-up. It really is a dangerous play at times.
But I have been watching "Martingalers" for years, and can understand why they particularly like blackjack and craps.
A winning bet recovers all prior losses in a series, plus one unit - but it does much better if a 3-2 natural or a field number paying 2x or 3x comes good on a big-bucks bet.
Most people don't (or won't) accept that how you play any game matters a lot less than how you bet, and so a guy who bellies up to a blackjack table, loses two bets in a row, then moves on, is resented as an unwelcome interruption to some mythical pattern.
I get that. Blackjack players in particular like to delude themselves that their ultimate fate depends on their hit or stand decisions and that's OK, of course.
It's wrong, but it's OK.
The beauty of progressive betting (and of course I'm going to add especially with Target) is that you can happily bounce from table to table and game to game without giving a thought to perceived trends.
You need two winning bets in a row to make money - that's all. And those paired or twinned wins are very common indeed.
Far more so than 7 consecutive losses, that's for sure.
Some numbers: In a -1% game (blackjack), you have a 49.5% chance of winning one hand, and a 24.8% chance of winning twice; on the obverse, you have a 50.5% of losing, a 25.25% chance of losing twice, and the number for seven losses in succession is...0.008% or 125 to 1 in your favor.
Longer losing streaks than that happen all the time, of course. And that's why Target freezes bets after a certain point, and in some modifications may even halve them.
(I can predict that as always, someone will step forward to lecture me about how the cards, dice, wheel etc. have no memory, and the odds of winning any one bet at any one time are always the same as the bet before and the one coming up. That's only a relevant factor for the 99% of gamblers who bet fixed amounts or apply a limited spread, and those who bet randomly. Progressive players are thinking in terms of groups or series of bets and are concerned with pairs or streaks either way).
There's a wonderful sense of freedom that comes with Target Betting, or progressive betting, or money management or whatever name you choose to give your preferred method of winning consistently.
You don't have to sit still when a table or a shoe suddenly turns unfriendly.
You don't have to achieve recovery hereandnowinagreatbigrush either - you can afford to take your time.
The best approach is to be a perennial loser in some casinos, where tight table limits apply, and to be as low-key as possible in fancier joints where you recover your losses time and time again.
My "local" maxes out at $300, so as a rule I'll play until I'm $200 or so in the hole, then shelve my red numbers (LTD for loss to date and NB for next bet) until I can bet at a higher level elsewhere without raising eyebrows.
Hey, sometimes I actually win at the cheap joint in town, and can enjoy the company of the friends I have made there over the years without feeling guilty.
Am I a zillionaire? Nope, because just like most of my readers, I have a limited budget and bills to play that have a nasty habit of eroding my BR week by week so I have to work to build it back up again.
But progressive betting, Target-style, is a game-changer for anybody with a sensible amount behind them (I'd say $5,000 minimum) and the discipline to follow a simple set of rules.
And the game changes from a losing one to a winning one, over and over again.
In this space - and more recently, in the baccarat forum - I have posted countless examples of how a very wide betting spread will time and again demand a smaller average bet than sticking within a tight betting range, as most people do.
My models have shown that it's not at all unusual for a 1-5,000 spread to require less overall action than a 1-50 range, and sometimes it's "safer" than a 1-10 spread.
That's because the lower your max, the quicker you'll get there, and the longer you will have to keep betting at that level until you either recover your prior losses or (more likely) bust out.
There's nothing sinister going on here. Just arithmetic.
In case anyone's interested, the back-and-forth on the baccarat forum prompted me to create two new web pages, one devoted to that sample with a 49% house edge, and the other dealing with a flip from betting Player all the time to betting Banker only.
Baccarat's not my favorite game - slow, pretentious, mind-numbing - but it's where the big money is, and I have to partake from time to time.
One regular BP poster went so far as to accuse me of "reverse engineering" 270,000 verifiable baccarat outcomes (from Zumma Publishing and the Wizard of Odds) to create Target Betting, totally ignoring the fact that Target has been available on the Internet since 1997 and on this website since early in 2009.
Oh well. There are zealots out there who are very protective of the mythical magic of the house advantage, pursuing some mysterious agenda by taking potshots that ignore both truth and common sense (accuracy, too!).
But it's a free country, and people who don't want to be right have the right to be wrong, defending their stand by whatever means they choose.
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)
I have been having an interesting time for the past few days, signing on with a baccarat forum and discovering once again how worked up some people can become when the status quo is threatened.
I am particularly entertained by a house defender who picked a small sample of outcomes with a 49% plus house advantage, then "played" Target Betting until his bets exceeded 100,000 units.
That would be a million bucks in today's Las Vegas, where it's almost impossible to find minimums below $10.
All anyone has to do to test the gambling industry's attitude to progressive betting is to sit down at a blackjack or baccarat table and play a Martingale or double-up, the easiest and most dangerous betting strategy ever invented.
Within a few minutes, a Martingale punter will be singled out for a special chat, usually with the dealer offering friendly advice first, then with a pit boss stepping up to say hello.
This is a standard response, as is the facile argument that once a table limit is reached, the Martingale bettor is in big trouble.
From a $10 start, it takes seven consecutive losses to get to $640 and be in a situation where if the bet loses, the next required bet ($1,280) will probably exceed the table limit.
No problem. Double-up players have to carry large bankrolls, and as long as the casino isn't standing alone in Podunk, ID or wherever, it's easy enough to move to a richer layout where the next bet will be accepted.
If the casino you're in doesn't offer higher limits at other tables, the joint next door or across the street probably will (hence my reference to isolated operations that have no nearby competition and can do what they darn well choose!).
Tough talk, perhaps, but progressive betting wins frequently and builds an ever-stronger bankroll really fast.
And that, of course, is why casinos hate it, and spend a lot of time and money deriding it in any public forum available to them, from the table where you sit to every online gambling discussion group in the world.
Double-up players generally don't sit still for more than a couple of consecutive losses anyway, because they don't want to have to keep dealing with "friendly advice" and other time-wasting interference.
I have been through this rigmarole more times than I can remember, just for the fun of it.
And the really fun part is that the pit staff you encounter will always tell you that their advice is for your own good, not the house's.
Meanwhile, drunks and other fools who don't know better are losing money all around you, and no one in a smart suit steps up to offer them "advice"!
Let me repeat that I don't endorse double-up. It really is a dangerous play at times.
But I have been watching "Martingalers" for years, and can understand why they particularly like blackjack and craps.
A winning bet recovers all prior losses in a series, plus one unit - but it does much better if a 3-2 natural or a field number paying 2x or 3x comes good on a big-bucks bet.
Most people don't (or won't) accept that how you play any game matters a lot less than how you bet, and so a guy who bellies up to a blackjack table, loses two bets in a row, then moves on, is resented as an unwelcome interruption to some mythical pattern.
I get that. Blackjack players in particular like to delude themselves that their ultimate fate depends on their hit or stand decisions and that's OK, of course.
It's wrong, but it's OK.
The beauty of progressive betting (and of course I'm going to add especially with Target) is that you can happily bounce from table to table and game to game without giving a thought to perceived trends.
You need two winning bets in a row to make money - that's all. And those paired or twinned wins are very common indeed.
Far more so than 7 consecutive losses, that's for sure.
Some numbers: In a -1% game (blackjack), you have a 49.5% chance of winning one hand, and a 24.8% chance of winning twice; on the obverse, you have a 50.5% of losing, a 25.25% chance of losing twice, and the number for seven losses in succession is...0.008% or 125 to 1 in your favor.
Longer losing streaks than that happen all the time, of course. And that's why Target freezes bets after a certain point, and in some modifications may even halve them.
(I can predict that as always, someone will step forward to lecture me about how the cards, dice, wheel etc. have no memory, and the odds of winning any one bet at any one time are always the same as the bet before and the one coming up. That's only a relevant factor for the 99% of gamblers who bet fixed amounts or apply a limited spread, and those who bet randomly. Progressive players are thinking in terms of groups or series of bets and are concerned with pairs or streaks either way).
There's a wonderful sense of freedom that comes with Target Betting, or progressive betting, or money management or whatever name you choose to give your preferred method of winning consistently.
You don't have to sit still when a table or a shoe suddenly turns unfriendly.
You don't have to achieve recovery hereandnowinagreatbigrush either - you can afford to take your time.
The best approach is to be a perennial loser in some casinos, where tight table limits apply, and to be as low-key as possible in fancier joints where you recover your losses time and time again.
My "local" maxes out at $300, so as a rule I'll play until I'm $200 or so in the hole, then shelve my red numbers (LTD for loss to date and NB for next bet) until I can bet at a higher level elsewhere without raising eyebrows.
Hey, sometimes I actually win at the cheap joint in town, and can enjoy the company of the friends I have made there over the years without feeling guilty.
Am I a zillionaire? Nope, because just like most of my readers, I have a limited budget and bills to play that have a nasty habit of eroding my BR week by week so I have to work to build it back up again.
But progressive betting, Target-style, is a game-changer for anybody with a sensible amount behind them (I'd say $5,000 minimum) and the discipline to follow a simple set of rules.
And the game changes from a losing one to a winning one, over and over again.
In this space - and more recently, in the baccarat forum - I have posted countless examples of how a very wide betting spread will time and again demand a smaller average bet than sticking within a tight betting range, as most people do.
My models have shown that it's not at all unusual for a 1-5,000 spread to require less overall action than a 1-50 range, and sometimes it's "safer" than a 1-10 spread.
That's because the lower your max, the quicker you'll get there, and the longer you will have to keep betting at that level until you either recover your prior losses or (more likely) bust out.
There's nothing sinister going on here. Just arithmetic.
In case anyone's interested, the back-and-forth on the baccarat forum prompted me to create two new web pages, one devoted to that sample with a 49% house edge, and the other dealing with a flip from betting Player all the time to betting Banker only.
Baccarat's not my favorite game - slow, pretentious, mind-numbing - but it's where the big money is, and I have to partake from time to time.
One regular BP poster went so far as to accuse me of "reverse engineering" 270,000 verifiable baccarat outcomes (from Zumma Publishing and the Wizard of Odds) to create Target Betting, totally ignoring the fact that Target has been available on the Internet since 1997 and on this website since early in 2009.
Oh well. There are zealots out there who are very protective of the mythical magic of the house advantage, pursuing some mysterious agenda by taking potshots that ignore both truth and common sense (accuracy, too!).
But it's a free country, and people who don't want to be right have the right to be wrong, defending their stand by whatever means they choose.
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, October 4, 2011
If I were trying to sell you something, I wouldn't tell you this: Any progressive betting method is better than none at all.
_
(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)
I once read a sarcastic response to a new betting strategy in which the author of the post claimed he had come up with what he called the "1-Minute System."
I'm not sure if the method got its name because it took one minute to devise it, or because it only needed one minute to win.
Either way, it was a pathetic failure that couldn't beat a mere 100 outcomes from a simple RNG, and the poster said that was the whole point - no betting strategy could ever win.
He was one of those interested parties I talked about last time, a software salesman pitching the ridiculous notion that the only way to win at blackjack was to learn to count cards using a tutorial that he could provide for $600 or so.
On a trip to Las Vegas, I spent an entertaining evening with an avid card counter who used a wonderfully uncomplicated method: When the deck was "rich" in high cards, he bet $50, and when it wasn't, he bet $25.
He also played the fool, acting just a little bit drunk and a little bit more ignorant.
To me, the greatest drawback to card counting (other than the fact that it is unreliable in the long term) is that it often tells you to stand on a "stiff" - a hand that can be busted - against a strong dealer "up" card.
And if most of the time, you play perfect basic strategy, it gets noticed when all of a sudden you depart from the blackjack bible.
My Las Vegas companion (call him George) pretended he was a novice, constantly asking for advice, and reacting to the stiff/rich dilemma by saying, "I don't think you've got a hand, dealer" or "I'm betting you're gonna bust."
As it happens, George did very well that evening, winning quite a bit more than I did (although I wasn't complaining).
Seems to me counting's just fine for players with the patience to learn it and follow it.
But shuffle-tracking and ace predicting and hi-lo charts and 1001 other frilly add-ons to the old method that Ed Thorp marketed as brand new and all his own back in the '60s are all reminders that in the long run, card counting doesn't work.
The stiff/rich dilemma sums it all up: If you have 16 against a dealer's 7 or higher and the deck is rich, the dealer probably has a pat hand, and you will probably bust if you hit yours.
But as always, probably does not mean certainly until after the fact, and you will make a wrong decision just a little more often than you make a right one.
Taken over the long haul, the difference between the number of times you get it right and the frequency of wrong calls will approximate the house edge overall, and counting will turn out to be about as helpful as...not counting.
Casinos love card counting because so many people try it and get it wrong, prompting them to bet (and lose) more money than they might otherwise.
Ed Thorp's book, for example, convinced countless thousands of punters that they'd found the brass ring and prompted an explosion in the number of blackjack tables in Las Vegas.
And - surprise! - casino profits exploded too.
In the end, we come back to the tough truth - how you bet is more important than anything else, and if your betting method is not consistent, you will lose in the end.
Counting sets bet values that bear no relation to prior losses, since those bet values depend on the deck count, which bounces up and down like Pedro on a pogo-stick.
So...don't count on it.
Progressive betting remains the only answer, and here's a snap of what I'm talking about.
"Plus-Five" (for a $5 minimum bet) is a method that adds 1 unit after every loss until a win, then bets LTD+.
"Double 3" doubles the bet after a first, second and third loss, then repeats the bet until a win, again going for LTD+ on the next bet after a mid-recovery win.
Both of these methods can do very well for tens of thousands of rounds on end.
My RNG-driven spreadsheets will often record dozens of consecutive strategy wins before a crash-'n-burn noccurs, and since each consists of 5,000 rounds, that's a very long time in profit before a bite gets chomped out of the bankroll.
And then, of course, we're back to the old inertia effect!
I just tapped recalc 54 times before getting a "bust" for Double-3, and the series opened with four consecutive losses, a win, six losses, a win, eight losses and so on.
Skeptics like to say that a player who backs away from a "cold" table is just as likely to end up in a worse situation as he is to improve matters, and that may be true.
But the "killer" series that hands the house an edge of 20% and up vs. 1.5% and less is a rare bird indeed, and I believe in being safe rather than sorry, even if the only good thing to come out of a move is that it makes me feel better.
The overall house edge for the series I just described was "only" 8.0% - but the problem is that once you hit your max, only a miracle is likely to save you.
And that's why I prefer Target over all the other variations of progressive betting.
It takes longer to get into trouble, and I think that's a good thing.
Update, October 5: "Oscar's Grind" often comes up as a topic in my in-box, and since it's a progressive betting strategy, I'd have to say it's preferable to flat or random betting.
But I have some problems with the method as it is described in Tom Ainslie's "How to Win in a Casino," in which he claims that Oscar has covered the cost of many of his gambling trips to exotic Caribbean locales.
Mr. Ainslie recommends a stop-loss of 20 units, so if you started at $5 and your next bet would be $100, you cut your losses and bow out of the game.
That's a conservative approach that appeals to players on a tight budget (and since most players carry a lot less money than Target recommends for battle, I won't quarrel with it!).
The Ainslie version of the Grind also omits any win progression, so a series that begins with successive wins doesn't exploit the temporary run of luck, it simply bets $5 every time.
Based on the Ainslie rules, I'd say Oscar's Grind is a certain long-term loser, but it can do well in the short term, and it imposes a discipline that many people will welcome.
As always, the above is not submitted as proof of anything - just as an example. I'm not a fan of "Plus-Five" as an alternative to the recommended Target rules, but it's a progressive method and often does quite well.
Against the same data set, Oscar's Grind does less well in this example. That's all I'm sayin'!
(The data set is 5,000 rounds of baccarat, courtesy of one of those RNGs I despise; that's at least 50 hours of continuous play).
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)
I once read a sarcastic response to a new betting strategy in which the author of the post claimed he had come up with what he called the "1-Minute System."
I'm not sure if the method got its name because it took one minute to devise it, or because it only needed one minute to win.
Either way, it was a pathetic failure that couldn't beat a mere 100 outcomes from a simple RNG, and the poster said that was the whole point - no betting strategy could ever win.
He was one of those interested parties I talked about last time, a software salesman pitching the ridiculous notion that the only way to win at blackjack was to learn to count cards using a tutorial that he could provide for $600 or so.
On a trip to Las Vegas, I spent an entertaining evening with an avid card counter who used a wonderfully uncomplicated method: When the deck was "rich" in high cards, he bet $50, and when it wasn't, he bet $25.
He also played the fool, acting just a little bit drunk and a little bit more ignorant.
To me, the greatest drawback to card counting (other than the fact that it is unreliable in the long term) is that it often tells you to stand on a "stiff" - a hand that can be busted - against a strong dealer "up" card.
And if most of the time, you play perfect basic strategy, it gets noticed when all of a sudden you depart from the blackjack bible.
My Las Vegas companion (call him George) pretended he was a novice, constantly asking for advice, and reacting to the stiff/rich dilemma by saying, "I don't think you've got a hand, dealer" or "I'm betting you're gonna bust."
As it happens, George did very well that evening, winning quite a bit more than I did (although I wasn't complaining).
Seems to me counting's just fine for players with the patience to learn it and follow it.
But shuffle-tracking and ace predicting and hi-lo charts and 1001 other frilly add-ons to the old method that Ed Thorp marketed as brand new and all his own back in the '60s are all reminders that in the long run, card counting doesn't work.
The stiff/rich dilemma sums it all up: If you have 16 against a dealer's 7 or higher and the deck is rich, the dealer probably has a pat hand, and you will probably bust if you hit yours.
But as always, probably does not mean certainly until after the fact, and you will make a wrong decision just a little more often than you make a right one.
Taken over the long haul, the difference between the number of times you get it right and the frequency of wrong calls will approximate the house edge overall, and counting will turn out to be about as helpful as...not counting.
Casinos love card counting because so many people try it and get it wrong, prompting them to bet (and lose) more money than they might otherwise.
Ed Thorp's book, for example, convinced countless thousands of punters that they'd found the brass ring and prompted an explosion in the number of blackjack tables in Las Vegas.
And - surprise! - casino profits exploded too.
In the end, we come back to the tough truth - how you bet is more important than anything else, and if your betting method is not consistent, you will lose in the end.
Counting sets bet values that bear no relation to prior losses, since those bet values depend on the deck count, which bounces up and down like Pedro on a pogo-stick.
So...don't count on it.
Progressive betting remains the only answer, and here's a snap of what I'm talking about.
"Plus-Five" (for a $5 minimum bet) is a method that adds 1 unit after every loss until a win, then bets LTD+.
"Double 3" doubles the bet after a first, second and third loss, then repeats the bet until a win, again going for LTD+ on the next bet after a mid-recovery win.
Both of these methods can do very well for tens of thousands of rounds on end.
My RNG-driven spreadsheets will often record dozens of consecutive strategy wins before a crash-'n-burn noccurs, and since each consists of 5,000 rounds, that's a very long time in profit before a bite gets chomped out of the bankroll.
And then, of course, we're back to the old inertia effect!
I just tapped recalc 54 times before getting a "bust" for Double-3, and the series opened with four consecutive losses, a win, six losses, a win, eight losses and so on.
Skeptics like to say that a player who backs away from a "cold" table is just as likely to end up in a worse situation as he is to improve matters, and that may be true.
But the "killer" series that hands the house an edge of 20% and up vs. 1.5% and less is a rare bird indeed, and I believe in being safe rather than sorry, even if the only good thing to come out of a move is that it makes me feel better.
The overall house edge for the series I just described was "only" 8.0% - but the problem is that once you hit your max, only a miracle is likely to save you.
And that's why I prefer Target over all the other variations of progressive betting.
It takes longer to get into trouble, and I think that's a good thing.
Update, October 5: "Oscar's Grind" often comes up as a topic in my in-box, and since it's a progressive betting strategy, I'd have to say it's preferable to flat or random betting.
But I have some problems with the method as it is described in Tom Ainslie's "How to Win in a Casino," in which he claims that Oscar has covered the cost of many of his gambling trips to exotic Caribbean locales.
Mr. Ainslie recommends a stop-loss of 20 units, so if you started at $5 and your next bet would be $100, you cut your losses and bow out of the game.
That's a conservative approach that appeals to players on a tight budget (and since most players carry a lot less money than Target recommends for battle, I won't quarrel with it!).
The Ainslie version of the Grind also omits any win progression, so a series that begins with successive wins doesn't exploit the temporary run of luck, it simply bets $5 every time.
Based on the Ainslie rules, I'd say Oscar's Grind is a certain long-term loser, but it can do well in the short term, and it imposes a discipline that many people will welcome.
As always, the above is not submitted as proof of anything - just as an example. I'm not a fan of "Plus-Five" as an alternative to the recommended Target rules, but it's a progressive method and often does quite well.
Against the same data set, Oscar's Grind does less well in this example. That's all I'm sayin'!
(The data set is 5,000 rounds of baccarat, courtesy of one of those RNGs I despise; that's at least 50 hours of continuous play).
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._
Monday, October 3, 2011
If you're still on the fence about wide spreads and "twins" here are some numbers that might tempt you to climb down on my side.
_
(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)
Most gamblers feel very strongly that any analysis of casino games of chance is a waste of time that could be better spent playing at the tables - and probably losing.
"You know there's a house advantage and it is whatever it is, so why worry about it?" sums up the prevailing attitude, along with, "No one's forcing you to make a bet."
All true.
But risking good money on any proposition without a full understanding of the numbers at work makes no sense to me, and I am comfortable being a member of a tiny minority.
I know this much: Even without the huge bankroll that I know is the most important weapon against negative expectation, I lose a lot less often - and a lot less money - than most of the people I know.
And the regular gamblers I come across out there in the real world are all experts as far as they are concerned, convinced that their way, and only their way, works.
You have to admire a blackjack player so dedicated to his own infallibility that he will risk a smack in the eye by telling a stranger, "You never hit 13 against a 2" or "I never hit a three-card 16 unless the dealer is showing a 10 or an Ace, and I don't care what the book says!"
As it happens, it really doesn't matter what the book says, and the self-styled experts I'm quoting are probably right about as often as they are wrong, just like anyone else who prognosticates about casino games.
And that's the reason why when I get an idea, I round up as much data as I possibly can and test it with the help of complex spreadsheet models that have been years in the making.
Every test says the same thing: How you play (in the few games where you actually get to make choices after placing your initial bet) is a whole lot less important than how you bet.
That conclusion is, of course, anathema to the thinly-veiled con artists who charge hundreds of dollars for software and systems that claim to "teach" optimum blackjack play, using card-counting or "advantage play."
It's true, there are times when the odds of winning at blackjack improve when the composition of cards yet to be dealt matches certain criteria.
But the improvement is so tiny that if you don't have the right bet on the table, knowing the deck count won't help you.
Ace prediction, shuffle-tracking and all that malarkey are money-makers for only one group of people, none of whom actually play blackjack because they know that with or without their magic tricks, it's a losing proposition.
Unless you bet right, of course.
A while back, I mentioned baccarat data that originally featured in "System Tester" books put out by Zumma Publishing, and were supplied to me in spreadsheet format by Lee Jones.
It's about five years since I have looked at them, but baccarat has been coming up a lot lately as a suitable platform for Target Betting (I guess it never really went away) and my models have improved significantly since 2006.
So out came the ancient Zumma files, and I spent half of Sunday picking up all those numbers and plugging them in to new models specifically set up to evaluate different spreads all the way from 1-10 to 1-5,000.
I'm often criticized for saying that a spread as wide as 1 to 5,000 may be the only tenable option at any casino game, the primary complaint being that not more than one player in 10,000 can afford to risk that kind of money.
I understand that, I really do, but I can't apologize for accurately reporting what my research uncovers.
I am also convinced that the basic principles of Target Betting can serve any player well, as they do me, even without a bankroll that runs into six figures.
First, a summary of "bare bones" results for the entire Zumma data set, which I think may have been augmented by Mr. Jones, and all of which he claims is drawn from actual shoes and not cooked up by a Wiz-style sim.
As I see it, the most important thing about the Zumma/Jones sample is that it isn't mine, and I did nothing to alter it.
There are people out there who will say that 186,000 rounds is not a "representative sample" - but there are also people out there who say global warming is a Liberal hoax, and I accord both groups the same degree of respect.
The sample depicted below adds up to more than two and a half years of professional play (five hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year) so I contend that it has something useful to tell us.
I am happy to see that even stripped down to its barest skivvies, Target Betting delivered a 4.0% win overall against a 1.30% house edge, which is probably about right for a large baccarat data set.
(Note that Target did not lose even once against 26 separate data sets).
I'm not so happy about the size of the spread that was needed, but since it just confirms what I have been saying for years, there's nothing I can do about that.
"Bare bones" Target means playing the ultimate waiting game - no win progression, no loss progression, just flat betting until a mid-recovery win comes along, prompting an LTD+ bet that has just a 1-unit win goal.
So: -10,-10,-10,-10,+10,-40,-40,+40,+80 = +10/250 = +4.0% vs. AV -3/9 = -33%, Expectation -83.
Nothing fancy, and it would drive me nuts to bet that way, but often I just want to test the primary rule of Target Betting, and this was one of those times.
These were all Player bets, by the way, because in spite of all the stick I take from baccarat aficionados, I flat-out refuse to hop back and forth between two choices in any casino table game.
And giving up a substantial percentage of my winnings by betting Banker is just plain daft - tell me "it's just 5 percent" and I'll know you're a global warming denier!
In a game with two or more options, pick one and stick with it through thick and thin to avoid zigging when the cards zag and vice versa. It's just statistical common sense.
The spreads breakdown from the Zumma/Jones sample looks like this:
Action values are right next to the overall result, win or loss (mostly loss!) for each spread range.
The big stand-out in a sample this enormous is always confirmation that spreading 1-5,000 does not, in the end, call for much bigger bets on average than spreading 1-10.
The explanation for that "surprise" is that the tighter your spread, the sooner you'll hit your green ceiling, and the longer you'll have to keep placing top-dollar bets in pursuit of turnaround.
Which, of course, hardly happens, like hurricanes in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire.
Spread as wide as you possibly can, and you'll enjoy faster recoveries and smaller bets overall because each turnaround prompts you to drop back to a minimum bet and start over.
"It's the arithmetic!"
I'll just briefly refer to the inertia effect for those who haven't been here, done that already.
The problem with any large data set and the process of applying a fixed set of betting rules to it is that real people are not computers, and they respond to influences such as "hot" and "cold" tables and gut feelings - not to mention dealers with bad breath and drunks with big cigars! - in ways that a computer cannot imitate.
So this very large sample includes preposterous losing streaks that no human player would put up with. I don't worry about matching winning streaks, because I think most people would stick around for those!
The most important lesson from all those boring, never-ending mathematical exercises is that it is essential to bet consistently in such a way that you can win back prior losses in fewer bets than it took to lose the money.
You have to Win more when you win than you lose when you lose, in other words - something Target achieved here with wins averaging $46 each and losses averaging $41 a pop. There were, as expected, more losses than wins - but, as always, Target didn't care.
It's important not to throw wins away - always know how much you're behind, and when the potential for even a short two-bet winning streak arises, as it does each time you win a mid-recovery wager, make the most of it.
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)
Most gamblers feel very strongly that any analysis of casino games of chance is a waste of time that could be better spent playing at the tables - and probably losing.
"You know there's a house advantage and it is whatever it is, so why worry about it?" sums up the prevailing attitude, along with, "No one's forcing you to make a bet."
All true.
But risking good money on any proposition without a full understanding of the numbers at work makes no sense to me, and I am comfortable being a member of a tiny minority.
I know this much: Even without the huge bankroll that I know is the most important weapon against negative expectation, I lose a lot less often - and a lot less money - than most of the people I know.
And the regular gamblers I come across out there in the real world are all experts as far as they are concerned, convinced that their way, and only their way, works.
You have to admire a blackjack player so dedicated to his own infallibility that he will risk a smack in the eye by telling a stranger, "You never hit 13 against a 2" or "I never hit a three-card 16 unless the dealer is showing a 10 or an Ace, and I don't care what the book says!"
As it happens, it really doesn't matter what the book says, and the self-styled experts I'm quoting are probably right about as often as they are wrong, just like anyone else who prognosticates about casino games.
And that's the reason why when I get an idea, I round up as much data as I possibly can and test it with the help of complex spreadsheet models that have been years in the making.
Every test says the same thing: How you play (in the few games where you actually get to make choices after placing your initial bet) is a whole lot less important than how you bet.
That conclusion is, of course, anathema to the thinly-veiled con artists who charge hundreds of dollars for software and systems that claim to "teach" optimum blackjack play, using card-counting or "advantage play."
It's true, there are times when the odds of winning at blackjack improve when the composition of cards yet to be dealt matches certain criteria.
But the improvement is so tiny that if you don't have the right bet on the table, knowing the deck count won't help you.
Ace prediction, shuffle-tracking and all that malarkey are money-makers for only one group of people, none of whom actually play blackjack because they know that with or without their magic tricks, it's a losing proposition.
Unless you bet right, of course.
A while back, I mentioned baccarat data that originally featured in "System Tester" books put out by Zumma Publishing, and were supplied to me in spreadsheet format by Lee Jones.
It's about five years since I have looked at them, but baccarat has been coming up a lot lately as a suitable platform for Target Betting (I guess it never really went away) and my models have improved significantly since 2006.
So out came the ancient Zumma files, and I spent half of Sunday picking up all those numbers and plugging them in to new models specifically set up to evaluate different spreads all the way from 1-10 to 1-5,000.
I'm often criticized for saying that a spread as wide as 1 to 5,000 may be the only tenable option at any casino game, the primary complaint being that not more than one player in 10,000 can afford to risk that kind of money.
I understand that, I really do, but I can't apologize for accurately reporting what my research uncovers.
I am also convinced that the basic principles of Target Betting can serve any player well, as they do me, even without a bankroll that runs into six figures.
First, a summary of "bare bones" results for the entire Zumma data set, which I think may have been augmented by Mr. Jones, and all of which he claims is drawn from actual shoes and not cooked up by a Wiz-style sim.
As I see it, the most important thing about the Zumma/Jones sample is that it isn't mine, and I did nothing to alter it.
There are people out there who will say that 186,000 rounds is not a "representative sample" - but there are also people out there who say global warming is a Liberal hoax, and I accord both groups the same degree of respect.
The sample depicted below adds up to more than two and a half years of professional play (five hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year) so I contend that it has something useful to tell us.
I am happy to see that even stripped down to its barest skivvies, Target Betting delivered a 4.0% win overall against a 1.30% house edge, which is probably about right for a large baccarat data set.
(Note that Target did not lose even once against 26 separate data sets).
I'm not so happy about the size of the spread that was needed, but since it just confirms what I have been saying for years, there's nothing I can do about that.
"Bare bones" Target means playing the ultimate waiting game - no win progression, no loss progression, just flat betting until a mid-recovery win comes along, prompting an LTD+ bet that has just a 1-unit win goal.
So: -10,-10,-10,-10,+10,-40,-40,+40,+80 = +10/250 = +4.0% vs. AV -3/9 = -33%, Expectation -83.
Nothing fancy, and it would drive me nuts to bet that way, but often I just want to test the primary rule of Target Betting, and this was one of those times.
These were all Player bets, by the way, because in spite of all the stick I take from baccarat aficionados, I flat-out refuse to hop back and forth between two choices in any casino table game.
And giving up a substantial percentage of my winnings by betting Banker is just plain daft - tell me "it's just 5 percent" and I'll know you're a global warming denier!
In a game with two or more options, pick one and stick with it through thick and thin to avoid zigging when the cards zag and vice versa. It's just statistical common sense.
The spreads breakdown from the Zumma/Jones sample looks like this:
Action values are right next to the overall result, win or loss (mostly loss!) for each spread range.
The big stand-out in a sample this enormous is always confirmation that spreading 1-5,000 does not, in the end, call for much bigger bets on average than spreading 1-10.
The explanation for that "surprise" is that the tighter your spread, the sooner you'll hit your green ceiling, and the longer you'll have to keep placing top-dollar bets in pursuit of turnaround.
Which, of course, hardly happens, like hurricanes in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire.
Spread as wide as you possibly can, and you'll enjoy faster recoveries and smaller bets overall because each turnaround prompts you to drop back to a minimum bet and start over.
"It's the arithmetic!"
I'll just briefly refer to the inertia effect for those who haven't been here, done that already.
The problem with any large data set and the process of applying a fixed set of betting rules to it is that real people are not computers, and they respond to influences such as "hot" and "cold" tables and gut feelings - not to mention dealers with bad breath and drunks with big cigars! - in ways that a computer cannot imitate.
So this very large sample includes preposterous losing streaks that no human player would put up with. I don't worry about matching winning streaks, because I think most people would stick around for those!
The most important lesson from all those boring, never-ending mathematical exercises is that it is essential to bet consistently in such a way that you can win back prior losses in fewer bets than it took to lose the money.
You have to Win more when you win than you lose when you lose, in other words - something Target achieved here with wins averaging $46 each and losses averaging $41 a pop. There were, as expected, more losses than wins - but, as always, Target didn't care.
It's important not to throw wins away - always know how much you're behind, and when the potential for even a short two-bet winning streak arises, as it does each time you win a mid-recovery wager, make the most of it.
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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