Midsummer just went by in a UK heatwave and a few flashes of lightning, and I decided it was time for me to bring the Target Betting blog up to date.
The response to the last post in January didn’t bowl me over, but it’s probably just as well, because I have had my hands (a card game reference!) full with the Practice Makes Profit gambling channel on YouTube.
I first ventured into video territory almost exactly two years ago with the Pattern Betting channel, and to date the most views I have had for a single post is around 3,500.
LINK: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDgiBe3I2xfS93Bg7nHW9EA/
If I were a sensitive sort, that number should make me feel pretty darn small, since the premier gambling channel “content creator” Vegas Matt has more than a million subscribers and there are several challengers for the top spot in the field, all of them measuring daily clicks in the mid five figures and more.
But before I started this adventure, I knew I’d be swimming upstream and cheerfully accepted (as I always have) that not more than one punter in a thousand gives a tinker’s toss about what it takes to consistently beat table games in a casino.
The conventional wisdom—the “axiom” that decrees that no game with a negative expectation can be beaten in the long run—is consistently and expensively promoted by gambling operators everywhere, and Vegas Matt and his ilk are very much a part of the on-going disinformation campaign.
If you have read any of my posts since this blog was launched back in the age of dinosaurs (OK, 2010!) you will know that proving again and again that “any amount bet against a negative expectation must have a negative result” is a load of bollocks, to use a bit of British slang, is what I am all about.
Long-term loss is certainly axiomatic if you bet flat or randomly, because you can be sure that over time playing any “house game” you will lose more bets than you win.
With flat betting a fixed sum every time, it is safe to predict that against a 2% house edge, you will lose 51 bets in every 100, on average, although sometimes in any block of a hundred wagers, you will win more bets than you lose, and in others you will encounter far worse than a 2% disadvantage.
Progressive betting changes the arithmetic dramatically, and that’s why table betting limits exist--$25 to $2,500 or $500 to $10,000, for example.
Even the well-respected guru of gambling, the Wizard of Odds (Mike Shackleford) stoops to peddling casino disinformation that table limits exist for the comfort of players of varying resources and not to protect casino profits from players who use their brains to determine bet values at any given time.
The lie says that players on a limited budget feel small if they are shoulder to shoulder with high-rollers, and fat cats get their fur in a fizz if inexperienced punters with a tin-pot bankroll sit down beside them.
Codswallop!
The explosion of gambling channels on YouTube has provided casinos in the USA with the best advertising medium they have ever had, countless hours of exposure every day and an opportunity to promote versions of traditional table games—blackjack and baccarat, mainly—that tighten the screws and make them even harder to beat.
Along the way, Vegas Matt (Morrow) and Mr. Hand Pay (Jason Boehlke) and countless others dipping into the shallow end of the same pool of gambling-as-a-spectator-sport fans, do their duty and sneer at progressive betting as a winning strategy whenever they can.
In the last couple of years, I have produced hundreds of narrated bet-by-bet demos showing my handful of followers that controlled, strategic progressive betting is not just the best way to beat casino games of chance time and time again—it is the ONLY way.
The YouTube gambling gods have feet of clay for sure!
They are professional losers, pitching reckless and irresponsible random betting in every new video, making casinos seem like an exciting and entertaining scene of expensive thrills while safe in the certainty that one way or another, they at least will get their money back and then some.
I have no evidence to claim that Vegas Matt and his punting peers get refunds from the casinos that they promote, but all of them boast about the freebies and “promotional chips” that come their way every day, and monthly cheques from Google in the ten$ of thou$and$ sweeten the pot still further.
Vegas Matt in particular insists that he is not promoting gambling or leading lambs to slaughter, but quite obviously that is a disingenuous falsehood, and his constant banging on about “valuable player points” makes him look like a hypocrite!
And of course, every one of the casinos that permits table-side filming of their logo-laden layouts would shut content creators down in a heartbeat if they believed a word of Vegas Matt’s nonsense!
Adam Wiesberg, general manager at (Shhhhh) in Las Vegas, was the first to recognise and exploit the boundless advertising potential of YouTube coverage, and he hovers over almost every one of the multiple daily filming sessions on his casino floor, perhaps to offer friendly support but more likely to make sure that his tame shills are not showcasing ways to beat the house.
That would not do at all.
So, if you tune into any of the YT gambling channels, don’t expect to see anyone making serious money—unless, once in a while, they happen to win more bets than they lose.
My primary focus since last summer has been on my spin-off YouTube channel, Practice Makes Profit:
LINK: https://www.youtube.com/@seththeobeau310
(Content on this channel offers endless demos with real-time sessions of baccarat and blackjack with the pattern betting rules strictly applied as well as a flawed human being is able, with each bet explained. I strive for perfection but never get there, and that's a good thing because then no one would ever come near me! Comments are always appreciated, except from people who are paid to trash any suggestion that casino table games can be consistently beaten!).
Even the lowliest of the losers in the YouTube gambling arena has at least a thousand times more subscribers than I do—but unlike them, I’m not promoting reckless random betting with money that may or may not belong to the person who’s putting it into play!
I’m the killjoy grinch who says over and over again that if you behave the way these content creators do, be ready to go home broke.
So I’m not even an also-ran in their race to the top of the YouTube popularity charts!
My message has always been, if you can’t afford to win, you shouldn’t put your money at risk, and there is no malice or mockery in that.
My years as a regular gambler in Nevada, living just a few miles from casinos in Reno and Stateline, came with constant reminders that a high percentage of punters are risking money that they can’t afford to lose and—worse!—are flushing away cash that isn’t theirs to put at risk.
I lost count of the number of times I saw players wiped out by downturns that did not last long, but just long enough to suck all the chips they had into the dealer’s tray.
Tears, tantrums, threats, and tables overturned…I got to see it all, and I’d wonder what sort of reaction those losers would get at home when they had to confess that money needed for food and clothing, shelter and other necessities of life had been fruitlessly “fired in there” on slots and table games.
In Nevada in particular, casinos not only make it possible for players to cash their paychecks on their premises but offer rewards to encourage it, and there are cash machines at every turn offering what I used to call “ATMtation” to players who decide their lost wages need also-doomed reinforcements.
There is no other business in the civilised world whose success depends on its customers’ failure and misery, while local and national governments keep on bending over backwards to further enable the damage casinos do.
Yes, the gambling business and hotels, restaurants and other associated commercial activities generate tens of thousands of jobs and pump multi-millions into local economies.
But it’s not casinos who cover the cost of crime, suicides, health problems and broken or lost homes that are the downside of the deal, it’s the rest of us.
Can you imagine how "the authorities" would react if KFC or McDonald's or any other worldwide service business were to offer meals with the warning, "What you are about to eat might make you sick, and not just you but your family too"?
How long would their doors stay open?
Casino operators like to remind us that they don't hold a gun to anyone's head and they don't tell their customers whether or not to bet, or when and where or how much.
Theirs is a service business, they say, and they are simply giving people what they want.
Drug dealers whose clients can make themselves very sick and even die when they get what they want rely on the very same argument.
Whenever I utter any of these readily demonstrable truths, there is always someone out there eager to conclude that I am a failed, defeated gambler who’s out for revenge against the sources of the sickness that brought him down.
It’s a tidy explanation, but it ain’t so: I quit gambling and switched instead to disciplined, controlled playing almost 50 years ago, around the time I first visited Las Vegas.
I had great help, firstly from a woman who knew blackjack inside out and was happy to spend a couple of hours teaching me the difference between the most popular casino table game, and Pontoon, a card game I started playing when I was barely ten years old.
(Pontoon is an English corruption of vingt-et-un, which is French for 21; in my school games, real pocket-money was at stake, and when you caught a 2-card 21, you took over the “bank” and raked in profits from you pals' losses until another player qualified for the job with what we now call a natural).
Then I fell in with a mathematical genius from Thailand who played baccarat and blackjack in Nevada on most weekends and was comped every step of the way. He’d arrive on a Thursday night and sometimes wouldn’t go near a table until Sunday, when the weekend rush was over, and he was well rested and sharp as a tack.
He taught me a lot about betting, but the most important thing he had to say covered the need to be at your best before you tackle games that require alert concentration and what he translated as “right attitude”.
It’s from him that I got the GAG concept, short for get up and go, and describing the need to back away from a game that for whatever reason makes you uncomfortable.
Similarly, the DBO rule—“Don’t Bend Over!”—reminds us that prolonged downturns should not be endured longer than is absolutely necessary.
The professional losers on YouTube who focus on table games are self-flagellators to a man (so far, very few women are in the frame) and they all bet as if they just got off the bus from Beyond the Black Stump and have never before seen a blackjack or baccarat layout.
As I said, that’s how it has to be: Adam from Shhhhhh wouldn’t like it one bit if his puppets started playing like serious consistent winners.
It would not be enough for me to simply say that the pro punters on YouTube bet badly on purpose--I have to prove it, and to do that, I regularly take every outcome from a table game session posted by Vegas Matt or whoever, and run the same wins and losses in the same order through the pattern betting algorithm in a verifiable worksheet.
I have transcribed dozens of sessions bet-by-bet over the last year or so, and "Algy" (the pattern betting formula) routinely turns a profit when the YT punter in question took an expensive bath against the very same sequence of wins and losses.
It's all proof that random betting is, to put it bluntly, a stupid idea, even dumber than suggestions that I routinely tweak the algorithm to get the results I want (I may be obsessive or even anal, but I am not an idiot!).
Vegas Matt just put up another YouTube "short" to pour scorn on progressive betting, and every time one of these pampered shills does that, they shed a little more credibility as they build their bank balance.
(LINK: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jWVMuAJiU0s)
There's no doubt that if you apply progressive betting the way casino bosses and their performng seals describe it, you will get into trouble pretty quickly, and that is why the strategy I have developed stresses control and discipline along with logic and common sense.
It also emphasises the need for a very large bankroll, with my demos reminding my enormous (OK, tiny) audience that if you can't afford to win, you should stay away from casino table games.
To put it another way, if your bankroll is so small that it needs "protection", then it's not big enough to get a tough job done.
Big bucks alone will not make a winner out of a high-roller in spite of the White lies some "whales" tell their friends, and a brilliant betting strategy without substantial backing is equally doomed in the long run.
In the never-ending war against the odds, you have to be fully armed, and that comes down to brains, balls, and a bloody big bankroll!
Pattern Betting is just another name for Turnaround (meaning recovery of prior losses plus a modest profit), aka Target Betting (ditto) and it simply exploits the fact that even when losses far outnumber wins, there is an ebb and flow, a ping and pong and a to and fro tick and tock that make long-term profit possible if you know what you’re doing.
At the root of it all is what I call 3-Play: suffer three consecutive losses, and if you are playing blackjack and the next bet required by the strategy exceeds $1,000 fall back to a fifth of that value, rounded up, and wait for a win before resuming with a full value wager.
At baccarat, get ready to HOP from Player to Banker or vice versa, wait for a win, then repeat the bet, doubling twice before repeating the process.
It takes a lot of words to explain this very simple strategy in detail, and that’s why I decided to jump into YouTube with a long succession of demos covering both blackjack and baccarat, with each bet fully explained.
You have to know that from time to time, you will break the rules and do something really stupid.
I am definitely not immune from inexcusable stupidity, and you will find a few examples of that on my channel—but even on my worst days, I don’t play as recklessly and irresponsibly as Vegas Matt or Mr. Hand Pay or any of their imitating (and irritating) fellow sinfluencers.
At the end of the day, they get their losses back.
I don’t.
So I try extra hard not to lose!
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.
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