A friend sent me a link to this thread the other day, and the biggest kick I got out of it was the news that Mike Shackleford, aka the Wizard of Odds, had finally sold out to the casino industry after years of pretending that he was a players' champion.
Sure, I'm just a little envious of the $2.4 million he banked in exchange for at last showing his true colours.
But perhaps now gullible punters will see that the WOO website has always been the internet equivalent of a fairground barker, loudly luring suckers into a tent that they will leave lighter in the wallet than they were when they fell for his patter.
I have never denied that Mr. Shackleford knows his arithmetic, and even under his empire's new owners, his numbers are solid.
But all the numbers really tell you is that if you bet exactly the way the Wizard and his paymasters (the ones who funded him for years before he stopped trying to fool everyone and openly sold out) want you to, you don't have a cat in hell's chance of winning in the long run.
You have to set your bet values randomly, without any reference to how much you're in the hole or what it takes to get back in the black.
Above all, you have to bet a very tight spread ($5 to $100 should see you broke in no time!).
And if that doesn't finish you off, be sure to get scared before you can get even, taking a big hit and hoping you can start over and recover your losses another day.
Here's the http://betselection.cc/baccarat-forum/ post that caught my friend's eye:
But he's at least a few rungs higher up the ethics ladder than my old pal Dave "Imspirit" Anonymous.
Years back, Imspirit published reams of charts that he claimed proved that my Target method crashed and burned against baccarat outcomes sourced from Zumma Publishing and the Wizard of Shills.
I had already published proof that Target handily beat the same 250,000 or so objective (meaning verifiable) data sets, so I asked Dave to confirm that he had applied my "core" algorithm correctly.
It took him a month or more to comply, and I was not greatly surprised to learn that he had thrown out all of the Target rules to get the results he wanted, excusing himself by saying that he followed an algorithm supplied by a third party.
I knew Dave wasn't on the side of the angels when he said he was "not interested" in running an objective trial using the methodology I had long ago posted online, where he could easily have found it if he had any integrity at all.
All water under the bridge, but readers might at least see why people like "Albalaha" who trash my work without explanation (and sad little weasels like Dave who cheat to get the results they want!) don't bother me for longer than a day or two.
That said, the name of the forum where "Albalaha" posts is a sure sign that he has nothing to teach players who really want to win.
Bet selection is irrelevant to the challenge of beating the house advantage in casino games of chance.
If you have two or more options to choose between, you are much better served sticking with one or the other than hopping back and forth.
The only determining factor in long-term profitability is how much you bet and when, and in effect, switching from one choice to another can double your chances of losing.
For example, my (verifiable!) single-zero roulette model confirms that it is entirely possible to win on all six even-money propositions at the end of a long session at the table, assuming you can accurately track the optimum bet values for red AND black, odd AND even and first AND last without blowing a mental gasket.
The essence of Target is, of course, progressive betting.
And progressive betting is the only way to overcome the otherwise certain negative effect of losing more bets than you win.
Many of you will know the mantra very well: If you bet in such a way that you win more money when you win than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win won't hurt you.
Betting six ways to Sunday as above isn't something most solo players could handle, but backing both propositions at baccarat can be just as successful:
I am often chided for making life too complicated for the average punter, and I never apologise for that.
Far better to back my statements with proof, I believe, than to behave like so may of my critics and dismiss a viable betting method without corroboration or explanation!
The baccarat outcomes summarized above are from the first 2,000 shoes in the 10th tranche of simulated decisions (25,000 shoes in each!) posted online by the Wiz of Shills before he cashed out.
Of course the big problem with all simulations (mine included) is that they cannot tell us what WILL happen, only what CAN happen.
Massive data sets that seem to cause a fixed betting algorithm to crash and burn can only do so if we accept that a gambler with a huge bankroll would happily throw it all away rather than take any defensive action when things get really, really tough.
Target 3-Play and the other riffs on my original algorithm (Turnaround, first posted online 20 years ago!) demand progressive betting, and that puts very large sums of money at risk from time to time.
But my approach applies a bet limit, with a fixed maximum and a brake on how much greater a bet can be than the one that preceded it.
It also freezes or even reduces bet values when a prolonged losing streak calls for defensive action, little details that Dastardly Dave and his ilk prefer to ignore.
The baccarat summaries above confirm that backing Player all the way routinely nets bigger profits than following the standard shill advice to "always bet on the Bank because it wins more often."
Sure, Banker catches more wins overall. But the drip, drip, drip of "5%" commission shaved off every payback adds up to a bloody red torrent at the end of the day (70% of the total win in the first 1,000 shoe set above, and 66% in the second).
So, Mike at betselection.cc thinks I may be a shill in disguise, just like Mr. Shackleford.
The truth is that casino games really can be consistently beaten, and the casinos know that better than anyone.
Progressive betting is Casino Enemy Number One, which for most people means doubling up from an opening 1-unit bet after a loss, doing it again and again (-1, -2, -4, -8, -16...) until an eventual win delivers an overall profit of one unit.
I prefer a modification that adds +1 after an opening win until a loss, then repeats before resuming doubling (+1, +2, +3, +4, -5, -10, -25, +50) but that's not the Target way and I am just demonstrating that the much-derided Martingale is not the only way to go.
Folks like Mike happily buy into the myth that casinos love system punters, with Las Vegas pioneer Benny Binion RIP often quoted as saying that he sent chauffeured limos to bring the poor saps to his door.
The truth is that if you, Dear Reader, ever sit down at a casino table game and launch an obvious progression, you will have a pit critter purring at your elbow in no time flat.
Casino personnel never lift a finger when an idiot is throwing his money away (why would they!) but put a Martingale or similar into play, and friendly advice will soon come at you from all directions.
So, the TRUTH is that shills are in business to convince punters that there's no way to win in the long run, but never mind...losing is such fun.
A charlatan is a creature of a different stripe, someone who will ding you for $5,000 and sit you down for a two-day seminar "teaching" you that baccarat can be beaten by using past trends to predict what's going to happen next.
It can't work, it doesn't work...but then again, it does, as long as you're the guy giving the lecture, rather than the mark sitting in the audience.
Target, Turnaround and all its variations are about pattern betting, as the intro to this blog has been saying since Day One.
I can't tell you what the next decision in any game will be, but I can guarantee you that if you bet the right progression, you will see a losing sequence turn around in five bets or fewer about 80% of the time, and in 10 bets or fewer 95% of the time.
Will the other 5% kill you?
It will if you sit tight and keep betting larger and larger amounts until you go broke, that's for certain.
But if you do as no simulated robot can and take a break whenever you feel like it, resuming the algorithm at the same values elsewhere when you are ready, the patterns of wins and losses that apply more than 95% of the time will probably (but not definitely) get you out of trouble.
It won't always be easy and it won't always be fun.
But in the end, winning is always better than losing...and the casinos can handle a few more winners.
Too often, I'll hear that the bet values Target requires are too rich for the average punter.
Sorry about that, but it's the reason the average punter always loses in the end.
You know the rule: If you can't afford to win, you shouldn't play...
Casinos have the edge in all their games, obviously, but even they see occasional slumps when all the numbers they know inside out and upside down take a temporary break, and madness prevails.
What Target does, as regular readers know, is to tell you when you have won enough.
Most gamblers are undone by greed as much as by ignorance. They press and pull back randomly, with no notion of the damage their behavior is doing to their long-term prospects.
You can't neutralize a prolonged losing streak by hurling money at it, but as long as you are betting below your max, chances are that a move will put you alongside a more "normal" win-loss pattern.
As for moving from game to game, often the decision will not be yours to make.
Table limits are in place solely to confound progressive betting, and as soon as your next bet value exceeds the prevailing limit, it's your cue to take up your chips and walk.
Here's a fact: the sum total of all your bets of below average value will always be negative, while high-value bets will add up to a profit sufficient to offset the low-value losses and put you ahead.
Look at the baccarat summaries above.
It's all there, un-fiddled, un-fixed and un-faked, UN-like the methods of Dastardly Dave and other shills whose job it is to convince you that you can't win in the end.
Sure, the sums at stake in 160,000 rounds of robotic, non-human, simulated play are often gigantic, and very few of the world's baccarat players could handle the...er...handle.
Doesn't matter.
The message from the You Can't Win contingent will always be that the house advantage at games of chance is mathematically unbeatable.
It's just not true. The odds can be beaten. The casinos know it. And that's why they need shills.
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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 Bovada, spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this. _