Time for me to look back on the beginnings of this blog and to do a better job of explaining what I am trying to do!

 

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.

Ain't life grand! However old you get, there's always something new to learn. When that stops, is it twilight time?

 

My education lately has been coming from YouTube where I have been absolutely wallowing in gambling channels and being regularly gob-smacked by what's out there.

What I have not yet learned is either the purpose or the appeal of channels in which the presenter hurls around great wads of cash willy-nilly against a variety of casino table games, with no discernible betting plan and (surprisingly? Maybe not!) few losing sessions.

Who's watching?  No idea.  But there are tens, even hundreds of thousands of avid subscribers clicking into YouTube every day to gamble vicariously, while the audience for my new Pattern Betting channel remains, um...let's call it 'select'?

Seriously, it's obvious from the tenor and tone of the gambling channels out there that nobody is interested in the nitty-gritty of the numbers that keep the casinos' lights blazing: they just want to HAVE FUN!!! OMG!  LOL!!!

Phew! is what I say.

I have been enjoying feeding outcomes from some of the sessions I have watched into PB models to see what 'coulda, woulda, shoulda' happened if the player in question had bet strategically rather than throwing money around like a drunken sailor working up to a bar-fight!

You will not be amazed to hear that a logical, consistent plan always does better than random betting.

Which brings me to a happy resumption of cordial relations with the creators of Baccarat WinPro...

Here's today's update of a shoes list that is becoming very long indeed:

 

 

It is also becoming very predictable (that of course being what is supposed to happen).

I have no idea how anyone could hope to achieve results like these without progressive betting and, more importantly, my version of it, renamed Pattern Betting for 2023 but in reality still old solid and reliable Target/Turnaround.

As ever, it's all about winning more when you win than you lose when you lose, which as regular readers here will know is the only way you can overcome the red-ink effect of losing more bets than you win in the long run.

Today's two early sessions provide perfect examples of the way things are likely to go in a real-money, real-time encounter with an eight-deck baccarat shoe:

A lot to absorb, I realise, and I hope no one is gagging from sensory overload.

The top snap is old hat for most of you, but my noisy adventures in YouTubeland have reminded me that no one living and playing there seems to see the need to link bet values to a win target, and without that, only blind luck can save you and your bankroll from going over the house edge, so to speak.

There are sensible, sober, strategic players in Las Vegas and other gambling locations, of course, but they are not signing on to or revealing themselves on YouTube, for sure.

I have barely dipped a toe into that choppy sea so far, but there are a few stand-outs, and if anyone's interested drop me a friendly note to sethbets@gmail.com and I will send you some links.

My preference is for presenters who seem to enjoy what they are doing (I had to hit the mute button for one guy who is the Woody Allen of YT gamblers, constantly complaining about his awful luck and oblivious to the fact that his awful play and worse attitude are the real root of his troubles!).

Win or lose, I transcribe outcomes from YT sessions into a notebook, the old-fashioned way, then plug them into the appropriate Excel model.

As the BWP shoe list above shows (look for red ink!) sometimes beating the odds is not easy.

But if you hang in there and stick with the plan, turnaround is a much better prospect for you than it is for 99.99% of gamblers out there.

What you will see in that list, over on the right, is yet more confirmation that winning more when you win etc. is the engine of Pattern Betting and (presumably) all other cool-headed, logical challenges to games with a house advantage.

I see from Google analytics that lately Singapore has become the #1 souce of hits for this blog!

What's that about, I wonder?  Is it one person reading every spit and cough going back to 2009, or is there a group of baccarat hotshots checking me out mob-handed?  Guess I will never know!

I am reminded of a story I have told a few times about a group of doctor buddies who once used to almost empty the dealer's chip tray at the baccarat salle at the old Flamingo Hilton in Reno, NV on a Saturday afternoon.

They would pitch up for a late lunch after a morning's golf, and it was clear to the dealer who told me the tale that they worked together to beat the odds, getting ahead of the house almost every week.

They bet progressively but did not overdo it--they spread the load among their group so that no individual stood out too much, and week after week, their pockets were heavier when they left, not always but more often than not.

Random betting cannot make that happen.  Except on YouTube, perhaps...

Late update: BWP Shoe #238, third and last for today, plus session summaries for the current month.

 

Notice how many sessions ended with more bets lost than won but more money won than lost and remember that the only way you can do that is if you (sing along with me!)...win more when you win than you lose when you 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 an online "casino" maybe spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this.

You can show a gambler the facts, but you can't make him or her give a damn! (Unless he or she actually wants to win).

 

The new Pattern Betting gambling info channel on YouTube is starting to attract a little attention, but I am not holding my breath--for years, I have been saying here that less than 1% of recreational gamblers actually want to win, and those that do are often reluctant to embrace new ideas.

Pattern betting (or Target/Turnaround as I prefer to call it when there's room for a few extra words!) is not really a dramatic breakthrough but an adaptation of progressive betting that greatly reduces risk and improves long-term viability.

Regular readers will know my mantra about winning more when you win than you lose when you lose to offset the harm that can be done by losing more bets than you win (an inevitability) but in YouTube country, no one seems to understand that if you don't bet progressively, you are certain to lose in the end.

I have been particularly absorbed by the antics of a hugely popular live-stream gambler who plays like an absolute idiot, has no betting strategy whatsoever, moans endlessly about his piss-poor luck, but somehow attracts a regular audience in the hundreds of thousands.

Am I jealous of his success?  Well, I know I would be if he was winning, but instead his schtick is to throw huge junks of cash at some of the worst betting options around, perhaps to persuade suckers who are watching to join him on the clifftop and jump along with him, and I can't watch his regular car crashes for too long at one time.

My connection with Baccarat WinPro got nowhere, because much as I enjoy their sim and the analysis tools they provide, I am not about to maintain a paid subscription when I have plastered free publicity all over the place for them!

No damage, because along the way I discovered a new source called BNB Simulation, a YT channel which has an archive of tens of thousands of shoes of baccarat and also offers real-time play against an impressive simulation.  The only downside is the constant distraction of ads, but we all need to make a living!

And of course, there's always the Wizard of Odds baccarat sim, which, fickle as I am, I abandoned when I discovered BWP.

I started this week by playing three Wiz shoes in succession and recording the results to post on the Pattern Betting channel, and it was something of a surreal experience--three fat wins in a row, each for the same amount, $2,700.  It amounted to a profit of $8,100 in less than an hour!

As regular readers here will know, two key Target/Turnaround rules that keep danger at bay to a high degree are 3-play and the fallback to a minumum bet after a win target is met.

I have also found a new way to describe something I have been recommending here forever--the notion that if you are getting your butt kicked with no end apparently in sight, you just take up thy chips and walk to a different game, always making sure that you resume play at the same betting level so that turnaround remains do-able.

Now, I call it the GAG rule, short for get-up-and-go (sorry, but GUAG doesn't do it for me!).

Let's face it, sometimes you will encounter a run of bad luck that makes you want to GAG in more senses than one...

The BNB shoes, all of them verifiable online, are now fed into an Excel model which enables me to rerun each data set betting solely on Player at first, then only on Banker, then using win-before-last, which the French fancify as 'avant dernier' and which I prefer to call the Wobble using the acronym for win before last.

It makes for interesting info, for me at least, for several thousand blog readers, and for the handful of folks who have found me at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDgiBe3I2xfS93Bg7nHW9EA! 

 

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" spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this.

A grateful plug for an online resource in which I have no vested interest whatsoever. The more you know, the smarter you'll bet, and this is a great tool for learning...and winning.

 

I guess laying the groundwork for the new PB (Pattern Betting) channel on YouTube has prompted me to take a closer look at useful tools for betting strategy analysis, and for a while I thought the Wiz's blackjack sim was un-toppable (blackjack is my go-to game, after all).

Wrong!

Regular readers will know that I'm not much of a fan of baccarat--I have played it quite a bit in Nevada casinos and made steady but never spectacular money at it (especially after one casino banned me from its 21 tables) but I have always felt uninvolved in the process

It's true that the most popular casino games are essentially a coin-toss, especially blackjack, baccarat and craps, which all have a notional house edge below 1.5%, and the frills are there to make them more alluring.  

I mean, who'd want to watch a dealer spinning a silver dollar hour after hour, calling out heads or tails!

The point I have been making for donkey's years, here and elsewhere, is that in the end, all that matters is how you BET.  

How you PLAY is only an issue with blackjack--and crapsters, please don't tell me you know a way to toss the dice to make them roll the way you want them to.

So, to once (to me) dull and boring old baccarat, offered either at tables where you never get to touch the cards, or at fancy layouts where the dealers all look like posh waiters, the action takes forever, and some players behave as if the main objective is to destroy the shiny bits of coloured paper pushed their way.

Then I found https://baccaratwinpro.com/en/.

This is not a sales pitch, but I have noticed a sudden uptick in blog hits from the far east, especially Singapore and Thailand, and I'm guessing that the clicks are not coming from aficionados of 21 and dice

Firstly, the welcome page...too much like a casino come-on, in my opinion, but it is well worth hanging in there for what lies beneath.

The "table" layout is impressive, but there is a little work to be done after selecting the New Shoe option.

 

You will be asked if you want to create a 'session' so that all the shoes you play in a chosen timeframe will be summarised together, and I suggest that is a good idea.

 

Click on 'manage sessions' below the empty session name box, and away you go:

 

Job done, go to top right of the table display screen and select 'Fast' unless you fancy playing at the glacial speed of what I only just learned are called 'squeeze' tables, in reference to the brutal treatment of cards by superstitious players who believe that bending and squashing them can make them winners.

Those big blank areas at the bottom will start to fill up as you play, and that's where the miracles are revealed.

I don't mean to sound dramatic or gushy, but to me the work that has gone into this resource is nothing short of gob-smacking.

The big mystery is who it's for and where the market might be, but having tripped over the thing, I am making the most of it.

You will have to click on the chip value you want, then click again in Player, Banker or Tie, and then win or lose, your bet will vanish--added to or deducted from the totals to the right--and you will have to start over next round.

Long-time readers will know that I never, ever back anything other than Player, but more about that later.

The fun begins after the first few bets:

 

There's useful information all over the place, but your main job is to bet in such a way that you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, impossible unless you bet progressively following a strategy that will protect you against prolonged downturns.

 

Already, you can see from the screenshot above that we won two bets averaging £250 (I'm back in the UK now, remember!) and lost three bets averaging £125--a good start.

 

 

 

Fifteen bets in and we're ahead of Banker, which is nice but not normal.  As with a real game, sometimes you will have to fight for your life, and then you will be reminded that it makes no sense to tackle this game without a big fat bankroll and even bigger umm, courage, to go with it.

Random betting and 'bankroll protection' will not help you win, and poker king Phil Ivey put a stop to any funny business exploiting factory-marked cards!

As a sidebar to that, the casino security expert who educated me about 'squeeze' baccarat games insists that Mr. Ivey was not cheating, whatever a bunch of lawyers and judges may have decided.  He simply spotted an opportunity that the casinos themselves created through their own carelessness, and went after it like the ruthless poker player he is.

Since Mr. Ivey remains a free man, still at the top of the pro poker league, that seems like a fair conclusion, and I'd say Crockfords in the UK and Bogata in the USA still owe him and his baccarat partner a tidy sum.

 

But back to the topic of the day...

Click on Results and By Played Shoes at top left and a different level of fun begins:

 

You will be met with a list of past shoes, and a click on the '+' to the right will give you more information than you ever knew you needed.

 

 

Overkill?  To some people, maybe, but to a certifiable numbers nut like me, this is frickin' paradise.

I think that's enough for now, other than three little words--NEVER PAY COMMISSION!!!--and a brief explanation.  

 

Imagine that you just won £9,150 after 35 wins averaging £538 and 33 losses at £293 each, and owe '5%' commission on combined wins of £18,825.  That's a rake of £941 from your winnings, not 5% but 10.3%...and the screenshot above is a pretty friendly example, compared with shoes in which you lost thousands but still owe commission on winnings that in the end were not enough to offset your losses.

'Experts' tell us that Banker is the best bet because it wins more often and sees longer streaks and 5% is a reasonable price to pay.

I have just one word in response to that, but probably should not utter it here, so I'll go for a polite substitute: POPPYCOCK!

 

One last little thing.  I finished the shoe I started with you, and after the last cards were dealt, it looked like this:

 

The final win was £2,650 in spite of fewer Player wins (by one) and a rollover to the next shoe of £900 Down and £800 Out.  Our 31 wins averaged £224 and our 32 losses averaged £134 per the summary to the right above, so Target/Turnaround and PB got the job done yet again.

Remember, it's all about winning more when you win than you lose when you lose--there is no other way to build your bankroll.

Keep winning, everyone (except the house, of course).

UPDATE: OK, so I have painted myself into a corner here!  I decided to deal with the rollover from the trial shoe above, and had to pull the trigger on the next shoe, per the PB/TT rules (it's starting to sound like a government department, or perhaps a disease suffered by farm animals).

So, here we go:

Quickly sorted!

And next came:

That would have been fine, except that the shoe ended D £800, O £300 and I really don't want to be posting new battles forever.

Trolls and other 'experts' will no doubt conclude that I have been taking lessons from Phil Ivery and have found a way to manipulate the BWP sim.  Nonsense, of course, but nonsense is what they do.

Here's the top of my sessions summary...

 ...cutting a very long story short!  A month ago, I would have scoffed at any suggestion that I would be playing baccarat again hour after hour, especially without real money to be made.

But this makes sense for me and, hopefully, for at least some of my regulars.

It illustrates perfectly the efficacy of winning more when you win than you lose when you lose, the alternative being losing more dosh than you win over and over again.  Horrors!

Crunch the numbers above from the top line down, and you get +£455/-£344, +£145/-£114, +£662/-£520 and +£386/-£330.

Point made, I hope you will agree.

Obviously, this is not a strategy that will protect a shoe-string budget, but then I'm not in the miracle business--I'd be playing poker alongside Phil Ivery and reading minds if I was!

I'm just saying (as I have been since my first internet post in 1996) that discipline, consistency, sobriety and confidence can beat the house time and again, keeping in mind that 999 out of a thousand 'recreational gamblers' hit the tables for fun, can't be bothered to learn a better way to bet, and actually believe that those cocktails that keep on coming are free.

To me, winning is much more fun than losing.  

But everyone in the casino business will tell you it is an impossible dream, and will often retaliate swiftly and cruelly if you dare to step out of line and prove them wrong.

Good luck everybody!

Uh-oh.  I had to go for a last shot at ending a shoe without a rollover.  Came close (D2,O3 x £100) and I'm determined to call it a day:

Not too shabby?

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" (clip joints, mostly), spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this.

Progressive betting is the only way to win, and the new Pattern Betting channel on YouTube is the best place to see it in action. 

It's early days yet!  The Wizard's whizz-bang blackjack sim has kept me busy for the past month and a half, and 15,000 rounds later I'm about $600,000 ahead of the game.  

Pity it's not real money.

The idea of the new channel is to show, not just tell, that house games of chance can only be beaten with progressive betting.

As I have been saying here for years, it's just logic: bet flat or back-pedal when the pressure's on, and you are certain to tap out your bankroll before you can turn things around.

Two things set the Target/Turnaround progressive strategy apart from pie-in-the-sky methods that have been around forever and cannot hope to win in the long run.

First, there's 3-play, and second is the rule that once your target is achieved you fall back to a minimum bet.

I waffle a lot in the videos, but I make no apology for that--the message I want to get across to players who are serious about tackling the house edge in blackjack and other games of chance bears repeating as often as it takes to make it stick.

Blackjack offers the best beat-the-house opportunities, as long as players learn the hit-or-sit tactics known as the Basic Strategy until it becomes second nature.  

Like me, you will make mistakes, but consistency and discipline get easier with practice (I'm guessing that by the time I pop my clogs, I should only be about 20 percent shy of perfection!).

The wide bet spreads that this strategy calls for will make it necessary to move often, from low-rent layouts to the gilded hall where high rollers lose sums with multiple zeroes, but you should never hesitate to take a walk and start over somewhere else if where you're at doesn't feel right or if you just need a breather.

What counts (literally) is that if you are in mid-recovery, you always take your Down and Out numbers with you and resume play at that level when your gut tells you the time is right.

Down is your win target, and Out is the value of your next bet, two critical values that you should always have in mind.

Casino mouthpieces will never stop spouting the mantra that 'any amount bet against a negative expectation will always have a negative outcome' and as always they will be absolutely right, as long as bet values are flat, or randomly selected.

Perhaps the most important thing my progressive strategy tells you is when you have won enough and it's time to fall back and start over.

Enough can be defined as 'just a little more' and not knowing when enough is enough is the downfall of most gamblers.

Enough said?

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDgiBe3I2xfS93Bg7nHW9EA

 

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", spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this.

Winning at Blackjack is a skill that takes practice, and here's the best place I have found to work on basic strategy and (much more important) how to bet.

 

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. _