Updated 10:30am Sunday, March 4:
From the Picture = 1,000 Words Department:
Any summary of past results can be dismissed by pedants as "anecdotal" -- and since I can't show you future outcomes or guarantee that betting smart will make you a long-term winner, gambling's doom-sayers will always insist on their right to predict the worst.
The top snap above shows that although Target Sports is in a slump right now (the 12th since July 24, 2010) it has consistently beaten the bookies' edge and delivered a hefty return on the initial buy-in.
The screen shots from iPhone/iPod gambling simulations can be dismissed as irrelevant, but I defy anyone to get results like these without progressive betting.
The apps could have been hacked and fiddled with, I suppose, but who the hell would bother?
It's much easier to simply apply the Target rules and watch those winning numbers grow!
The bottom line is that the moment any player reaches his or her maximum bet in a losing streak, it's game over.
And casinos and bookies everywhere do all they can to ensure that each player's maximum represents as high a percentage of his total resources as possible.
So if your cap -- whether it's self-imposed or the result of casino or book bet limits -- is, say, 10% of your total available bankroll, your chances of a long-term win are somewhere between piss-poor and hopeless.
I have been saying over and over again since the long-gone days of typewriters and biplanes that spread, spread and spread is (are?) the key to winning at gambling, and the summaries above are just a tiny part of the proof.
The ideal customer for casinos the world over is a guy who knows as little as possible about the odds he faces, and tackles a table game with $500 or less that he fully expects to lose.
He'll start out with a $5 bet, and whatever happens, won't spread wider than 1-5, making his maximum bet $25.
My little baccarat app tells the story very well:
Banker (a proposition I avoid because of the "5.0%" commission) won 4,047 bets; given an average overall bet value of $389, that means $1,495,000 net of commission; Banker LOST 3,944 bets at $389, or a total loss of $1,534,000; add the wins and the losses and you get a big red number...an overall loss of $34,000 in spite of more winning bets than losing ones.
I bet Player all the way and came out ahead $117,000 on total action of $3,430,000 -- not a huge win percentage or "hold" at 3.41% but a hell of a lot better than Banker's loss of 1.0% or so!
How was it done?
Not by cheating, I promise you.
The only way you can beat negative expectation in the long run is to bet in such a way that you consistently win more when you win than you lose when you lose.
Regular visitors to this page will have heard that before. Again and again.
But it's always worth repeating...
I learned just recently that Australian casinos probably have the tightest table limits anywhere in the world, presumably imposed by misguided regulators who felt they were saving gamblers from their irresponsible selves.
Those regulators apparently didn't do the math.
If they had, they would have figured out that tight spreads work entirely in the house's favor.
That's the reason Kerry Packer, the late, lamented Australian "whale" beloved by Las Vegas, came to Nevada to gamble -- his wild and crazy ways weren't permitted in casinos down under, including the ones he owned.
Mr. Packer was a legendary loser in spite of the long string of zeroes in his bets (6 x $250,000 at blackjack, for example) because he wagered a very tight spread and was totally at the mercy of the house edge.
He won sometimes, for sure, and those wins were widely publicized in the Las Vegas newspapers. His even bigger losses were never talked about because that's just, well...rude.
Let's go back to my $25 max punter with $500 in his pocket, and surmise that he doesn't hit his personal cap until he's $125 in the hole and starting to feel desparate.
He's now five bets behind with enough chips to cover 15 more bets at his max.
He doesn't play blackjack very well, so he's facing a house edge of at least 2.0%, making his chances of catching up and getting just a little ahead worse than lousy.
If he cuts back his bets while waiting for a winning streak, he'll probably never make any headway. But if he keeps on betting his personal max, he will probably lose everything.
Once upon a time in Nevada, the good news for losers was that at least the rooms and the all-you-can eat buffets were cheap.
Not so these days.
There's no good news for the punter with a tight spread and a limited bankroll.
He might get lucky for a while, but that won't last.
It all comes down to another cliche: If you can't afford to win, you really shouldn't gamble.
What I find most curious about high rollers -- the only people with the resources to consistently beat the house -- is that most of them are not much interested in winning.
For them, gambling is about the excitement of extreme risk and the thrill of instant gain, but because losing (as they all do in the end) doesn't hurt them one bit, you'd think bungee-jumping would be a better choice!
They have too much money for even an eight-figure loss at the tables to do permanent damage, whereas a rich man can go splat against the hard ground with the same effect as a pauper. He'll just get a fancier funeral.
Betting a very wide spread per the Target rules is not something the late Kerry Packer would have been interested in, for example, because it would have required the world's most famous whale to bet like a minnow much of the time.
And Mr. Packer was much more about image, in gambling and his business, than he was about substance.
Of the two iPhone game simulations illustrated above, Baccarat Pro has the most to tell us because it permits bets from $5 to $100,000 -- a 1 to 20,000 spread which is even wider than the 1 to 5,000 recommended for Target and matches the highest max available in the USA without special dispensation.
You can be sure of this: No casino that has seen a player betting $5 a hand would ever permit the same gambler to wager a hundred grand all at once.
He would have blown his cover as a progressive bettor, and casinos know as well as you and I do that progressive betting is the only way to beat the house edge long-term.
I have not had to bet $100,000 against Baccarat Pro to maintain my victory over negative expectation, but I will admit to an occasional $20,000 brown-trouser moment.
Does it make sense to risk $20,000 to protect a $125,000 bankroll?
It does when you consider the alternative.
By the time you're forced to place a monster bet per the Target rules, you must already be in a deep, deep hole.
So if you choose not to fight to get back on top (keeping in mind that by now the house edge must be unsustainably ahead of negative expectation), you will have no choice but to make the loss permanent.
Big bets are rare. They are also ultimately unavoidable -- and also essential to long-term reversal of the house advantage in any game of chance.
What you cannot do is expect to bet the whole Target range in the same casino against the same game.
The only practical option is to be constantly ready for a sudden reversal, and to respond to it with coolness and absolute discipline.
I long ago lost count of the number of times critics have responded to Target with comments like "no one who's just won a $25,000 bet would want to drop back to a $5 table" or "betting that way would drive any gambler crazy."
If that's true, then there is only one conclusion: No one out there really wants to win.
The Target Sports experiment is in a scary place right now, for example.
Yesterday's potential turnaround bet went in the toilet, requiring a $25,000 wager today to defend a bankroll that in the past week or so has been slashed from a high of $195,000 to a still healthy but much smaller $168,000.
Should I eat the $27,000 loss and start building the BR again, or should I press on with a winner-take-all mentality?
The way I see it, the 19-month sports betting trial would have flopped more than a year ago without a few maximum bets along the way, and I'm in this thing for the long haul.
The sports version of the Target rules sets a cap on how many maximum losses I will suffer in any one negative run, but it requires me to put $25,000 in play whenever the trigger demands it.
We have now had 12 major slumps in 19 months, and obviously, none of the first 11 proved fatal.
Only time will tell whether I should have acted like Kerry Packer and sucked up the loss, or if the right move was to press on with fingers and toes crossed.
Watch this space!
Meanwhile...a baccarat update:
A math pedant will be absolutely unequivocal in his evaluation of the baccarat stats above.
He (or she, although I have yet to come across a female mythematician) will multiply 9,463 bets by the average bet value of $390.29 to get total action, draw a line under the bit that says there were 1.3% more losses than wins, and predict an overall loss of -1.3% x $3,683,314 = -$48,013.
A win of $140,000 (+3.8% vs. a 1.30% house edge) is simply not believable, you will be told.
Oh well...
You can see from the average bet value that I'm not betting $5 all the time -- or $25,000 either.
What I am doing is backing Player only, and very strictly applying the rules of Target whenever my BR is threatened.
I don't bet the Tie in baccarat, not ever, not nohow, but I do react to a tie by doubling the bet after any tie, and doubling it twice after a "money tie" (meaning that a potential winning hand worth 7, 8 or 9 was thwarted).
There's no mathematical reason for this, no expectation that a Player win is more likely after a tie (it certainly isn't!) but just a firm intent to wring maximum profits out of the process.
As for the failure of pedantry to correctly predict the final outcome of the session, I should concede that had I been betting randomly the way 999 out of 1,000 gamblers do (even those who don't realize it) the end result might very well have penciled out at -1.3% of the total action.
That did not happen because Target is designed to recover losses in fewer bets than it took to get into the red, and to keep doing that over and over again.
If, on average, you can recoup in two bets the chips that were lost in three bets, the house advantage (more bets lost than won, on the player's side) becomes an irrelevance.
A win of $140,000 against 9,500 rounds of baccarat comes out at better than $1,000 a shoe given that a little over 80 cards are dealt per shoe and the Baccarat Pro stats above therefore represent about 120 shoes.
Not a high-roller performance, perhaps, but definitely better than a long-term loss.
Earlier, I meant to add an illustration of the importance of a very wide spread:
The above short summary serves as a reminder that tight spreads simply can't win.
It's from about 6,000 rounds played against Bovada's online baccarat practice game, and the middle column indicates action, meaning the combined value of all bets.
Note that the widest (and winning-est) spread required less overall action and therefore less overall risk than all the other spreads tested other than 1-10.
And 1-10 was a sad and hopeless loser.
I'll say it again: Spread as wide as you can afford, or be ready to lose.
It's the arithmetic.
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._
