Let me first of all make it crystal clear that I am not in the business of promoting or recommending what is sometimes (cynically, in my view) referred to as "recreational gambling."
In almost 30 years of living in Nevada and across more than four decades of living and working in and around casinos, I got constant reminders that gambling is a dangerous business for people who don't know what they are doing and are ill-equipped to take on negative odds.
No one knows better than the builders and operators of casinos that most gamblers (perhaps as many as 999 in 1,000) are their own worst enemies, and those that slide further down the slope into regular self-absorbed betting hurt not just themselves, but people who depend on them for financial support and have no say in how much is wagered, when or on what.
For those punters, money ceases to have any real-world value, and instead becomes food for an ever-hungry beast that is out of control.
I am not making a moral judgement about gambling: I would be a hypocrite if I did that because I have enjoyed chancing my luck against any number of games since I was a little kid in an English boarding school, and I gambled regularly throughout my Nevada years.
I do, however, question the wisdom of a society--a culture, if you like--in which the financial interests of gambling operators are put high above the health and welfare of the rest of us.
For example, in Nevada, laws were changed to permit ATMs to be installed in casinos within steps of cashiers' cages, and casinos got the state's blessing to cash customers' pay-checks without any concern for where else that money should have gone, silly things like housing, food, clothing or education or life in general.
The casinos in turn have always taken the position that they don't force anyone to gamble--they don't pick the games or the size of bets or decide when enough is enough, they just provide betting opportunities that are there once a customer has exercised his or her free will, to be enjoyed or ignored.
So casinos use the same self-serving argument as drug-dealers or gun-merchants: "We are providing a service and we are not forcing anyone to buy it."
Here in the UK, until recently the betting shops that crowd Britain's high streets and town centres made most of their money not on old-fashioned low-level punting but from electronic cash-guzzlers that offered casino games (mainly roulette and blackjack) and the opportunity to wager up to £100 a round.
For more than a decade, the government turned a blind eye to the societal havoc caused by enabling easy access to games that could easily gobble up £3,000 an hour, just a few steps away from busy family shopping areas.
The gambling behamoths racked up profits of close to £2 billion a year from the casino machines alone, and the British government dithered and delayed because it didn't want to lose the £400 million a year it collected in taxes on gambling revenue.
Today, the high street casinos are out of business, or limping along on a bet cap of £2 a round--but the government-endorsed national lottery operator, Camelot, has built up a side business with a huge online array of instant-win slot machine-like games that rivals offerings at any other online casino in the world.
Camelot was set up to run a national lottery that would divert a big chunk of its profits to good causes, and it is true that without funds from the lottery, hundreds of charities would struggle to survive, local projects like the £7 million leisure centre in my own home town would never have been built, and Britain's medal-laden national sports teams would have run out of money years ago.
Camelot is about to lose its licence and has already been bought out by its successor, Alwyn--perpretrator of a truly awful pun. Meanwhile it continues to inflate the viability of the original UK national lottery with a robbing Peter to pay Paul fiscal trick that would make Donald Trump proud if he had thought of it.
This is not meant to be a rant, just a catch-up on what started me on this blog back in early 2009!
My message has always been that negative odds can be consistently overcome--but not without appropriate recources and a betting strategy that demands discipline, confidence, consistency and (perhaps above all) sobriety.
We all know the English saying about taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut--the applicaton of too much force to overcome a minor challenge--and I tend to think of the average gambler in reverse terms, a nut constantly looking for a sledgehammer to smash the crap out of it!
Clearly, no one aiming to play blackjack, baccarat, craps or whatever (and frankly, I don't recommend whatever!) can match the resources of the casino operating the game--but with a large bankroll that is properly deployed, they have a better than 50-50 chance of coming out ahead at the end of any session.
Proper deployment means treating the bankroll as a whole weapon in the battle against the odds, not a succession of pin-prick weapons like the balls of lead in a shotgun cartridge.
I wince whenever I hear someone say that their bankroll has to be "protected" or their resources have to be "managed"--it is utter poppycock! If you protect or manage your money by backing down every time you encounter a rough patch (and you will, time and again), you are just feeding it to the sharks in little bites, and soon enough, it will all be gone.
Instead, your bankroll has to be your strength, the best weapon you can muster against a Goliath who will always have more moolah than you do.
If you think of yourself as a David, counting on divine intervention to turn your sling-shot into a boulder big enough to bring the big guy to his knees, then good luck--you are going to need it.
Poker players know what I am talking about. You don't sit down to a million-dollar game with whatever you can find in your wallet or your back pocket: you pull together as much as you possibly can, so that if you have to, you can deploy the whole lot at once to back your play.
Pattern Betting--which was always the name for my take on progressive betting until I started the blog and found a totally different approach being described with the same two words--is about as simple as a strategy can get.
It slows down losing streaks by freezing or reducing the bet after a pre-determined number of consecutive losses, and it caps the response to a win to limit the damage caused by a subsequent losing streak.
The most important thing it does is that it links the win target (the amount you are in the hole) to the value of the next bet, because the aim is always to recover prior losses in fewer bets than it took to get into the hole in the first place.
If you are $10,000 up the creek, you stand zero chance of recovery if you are betting $100 or even $500 a time, unless of course you really are a modern David and can count on help from on high!
$2,000 is about as low as you should go, and to do that with confidence, you need a bigger bankroll than most players can hope to muster (poker stars preferring to stick with a game that delivers seriously big bucks on a win, or takes evrything away all away at once!).
Secondly, the PB strategy tells you to drop back to a minimum bet right after you achieve your win target, which always has a decent profit tacked on to the loss-to-date number in a given betting sequence.
You need that not just as a discipline, but to protect you from bets climbing too high too fast.
For the house, the best thing you can do is hit your "max" fast and then stick with it, because the moment you start flat-betting, the more vulnerable you become to negative expectation.
But you are not in this for the house--and you should keep in mind that 'the house' hates progressive betting with a vengeance not because it doesn't work, but because it does.
Overall, your aim is to win more when you win than you lose when you lose, and I have tacked on some paperwork below that shows just how do-able that really is.
In any serious challenge to the house edge, you need to know when it's time to back off for a while, lick your wounds, pull together your depleted but still powerful bankroll, and take the fight to a new game or location, maintaining the current betting level until you make that (temporarily) elusive win target.
Back off, but *don't back down* in other words.
I hope this has been helpful to readers who probably won't have been with me for all 14+ years of my stream-of-consciousness assaults on the mythermaticians who keep telling us that negative expectation canot be beaten in the long run. It bloody well can! (But it's not always easy).
Here are shoe summaries from my recent sessions with good old Baccarat WinPro, winners overall with some big red bumps along the way. Those win/loss percentages make my case pretty well, I reckon.
(I am enjoying baccarat a lot more than I used to, but I agree it's a shame it ain't real money)
You folks out there are smart enough to know that no strategy can claim to win all the time against any conditions. The rules must be combined with a strong sense of self-preservation, so whenever the hill you are climbing gets too steep, take a breath, step aside, and pick a different battlefield.
Today I watched a YT contributor whose betting spread would not suit me at all, but whose skill and good sense at a blackjack table is worth emulating (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYI639xKDZk). Most significantly, in his latest session, he had an easy ride for a couple of dozen hands, then hit a house spike. He did exactly what I would do and stepped back in mid-recovery.
Will he resume next time at the same level of betting? If he does, I will know he's been listening to me!
(Check out his watch! An 'iced out' Breitling, he tells me--good news, because a watch that looks like that needs to be be paying serious rent for the vast amount of wrist space it occupies!)
I'm not sure what those YT gambling channels are all about because many of them demonstrate a style of play that the casino sponsors/enablers must love, tutorials on 'this is how the house wants you to bet so you'll get wiped out faster!!! OMG!!! LOL!!!
Mr. Breitling is not in that catergory. He's friendly to dealers (generous, too), engages with other players, seems to be enjoying himself, and knows when to quit, for now, at least.
In other words, he's just like me!
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 any online "casino" maybe spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this.
