Longtime readers of this occasional blog will know that I am not the greatest fan of the Wizard of Odds (Michael Shackleford) and I have politely disssed him from time to time.
But this year I have a little egg on my face.
The snap above is from a sim you will find at https://wizardofodds.com/play/blackjack-v2/, perhaps the best I have ever come across, and from the way it is presented on the WOO website, I get the sense that it has been available for years.
Once I found it, it quickly became obvious that it meets all of my very picky requirements, needs that cannot be covered all in one place anywhere in the real world.
It has never been possible to bet the spreads that Target demands at the same game layout or even in the same casino when the bets start to climb, which is why for years I have been telling my readers that staying on the move is the way to stay out of trouble.
As always, the key to the strategy is the down-and-out concept, $n down in the hole (the target), and $n required for the next bet, out onto the table.
So if you've been taking a beating and you are $2,000 out of pocket, your d&o might be 20,4 in $100 chips. If for whatever reason you opt to back away from your current location (you have hit the table limit, you are busting for a leak, the dealer is obnoxious, the drunk at the other end of the table just knocked over his bottle of booze) the d&o goes with you wherever you may roam, until you achieve turnaround and it's back to a minimum bet.
Three play (freezing the bet after three losses in succession) was added to the Target playbook well over a decade ago, and that was the strategy I used when I decided to launch a challenge with the WOO sim.
The aim was simple enough, to start with a bankroll of a hundred grand, and double it in under 20 hours of recorded play against the best blackjack simulation available.
Easy-peasey, a casino-funded troll will tell you: just set the sim's bankroll at $100,000, bet the max (also $100,000) and pretend you are a gambling genius.
So, that's what the bet-by-bet and blow-by-blow videos are all about, hour upon hour of them that will eventually be posted on a dedicated YouTube channel, raw and uncut but hopefully useful to anyone who wants to learn how to win consistently at blackjack.
I have said here a thousand times that because it is a certainty that over time you will lose more bets than you win, you must bet in such a way that you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.
For 30-plus years I have had house shills deride the entirely logical concept with comments like, "Oh, sure, you just bet more when you know you are going to win and less when you know you are going to lose."
Idiots! But I get it, they have a job to do, that job being to convince punters everywhere that losing is fun and trying to beat the odds is exciting entertainment. Luck is the only way you can win, they tell you, and maybe it's your turn to go home with a bulging wallet, just this once.
The truth is that all of the conventional wisdom yammered out ad nauseam by casino mouthpieces applies only to random or flat betting. Progressive betting, properly applied with a smart set of rules and filters, is the one and only way to beat the house, and the house bloody well knows it!
As I said in my very first post here, try a simple double-up strategy in any casino, and first your dealer and next an unctuous pit boss will wag fingers at you and warn you against it while drunks and fools will be left alone to lose their shirts and underpants.
Believe me, the casino staff don't give a tinker's toss for your welfare, they're just worried about their bottom line, and progressive bettors can seriously dent a given shift's numbers when the house win is tallied at the end of the day.
My little battle with the Wizard was fun, as it happens, and as I write this, I am less than $500 away from doubling my funny-munny bankroll to north of two hundred grand.
Every hand is on record, and every bet has been logged in an Excel spreadsheet that looks in part like this:
(The total above tops $100,000 because of a short burst of accidentally unrecorded play; my job won't be done until I can post a final video with a big fat number in plain sight next to my pile of fake chips!)
Links to the entire log will be posted on the new YT channel, but you can see that house trolls and turds be damned, I am taking this challenge very seriously indeed, with 14 hours of videos in the can so far and just a fistful of dollars to go before this particular target is met.
No one knows better than I do that bankruptcy is always a threat, which is why the Target strategy stresses coolness, calm and confidence, and rules out mad impulses and suicidal stupidity.
Yes, I had to bet $20,000 in fm (funny-munny) in the bet circle at one point, and yes, my ass was saved with a 3-2 natural at precisely that moment.
Blind luck? Of course. But the dealer (I call him The Wiz, naturally) benefitted from blind luck and breathtaking flukes at least as often as I did, and at no point did I take it personally.
I suppose it is possible that Mr. Shackleford has fooled us all with a game simulation designed to be over-generous so we will be tempted to dig for some real dosh and click on a link to one of his dozens and dozens of casino clients.
But somehow I doubt that. Shill he may be, but we all need to make a living, and I suspect that beneath the glitz of his website (his face is on every card, would you believe!) our man Mike is a serious mathematician with high standards to maintain and a reputation worth guarding.
I hope so.
I would also like to think that once I make my $200G target, I will step back from the Wizard's super sim and focus fulltime on the business of making real money.
But somehow I doubt it.
Watch this space!
PM Update:
No one is likely to be amazed that my Wizard target was achieved after a couple of bad runs (I used to call them brown-trouser moments). Just remember the old Vegas cliche, 'You have to speculate to accumulate'--the wolves of Wall Street follow the same rule, but they do it with other people's money.
The new Sethbets YT channel should be up in a few weeks, time and cloud permitting, but in the meantime, a few relevant snaps from recent activity. Right-click on any one of them to get a full view in a new tab.
And as always, thanks for your interest!
At last!
An operator error under-reported exposures in the first Excel screen grab today. Guess I'm going to fire my numbers guy. Oh, wait...
This is relevant because throughout the Wizard project, I tracked a simple double-down strategy at the same time as Target play. The rules for my capped DD are much the same as for Target, and both methods will be fully described on the YT channel. Especially worth noting is that the net house edge for the sim, set for an 8-deck shoe with 85% penetration, was just below -0.8%, which is on the generous side over 2,500 or so bets. Net means that doubles/splits and naturals were factored in. Gross AV (actual value) simply counts all wins and losses as single bets. That number was a much nastier -4.9%. Yikes!
_ 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" on the Wizard's shill list, spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this. _
