Blackjack can be consistently beaten without a millionaire's bankroll. But beware of "Catch-21" (the "rule" that what you know won't help you win)!

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"Catch-22" author Joseph Heller devised a fictitious military decree that only insanity can get you out of the Army, but if you are sane enough to know you're nuts, then you don't qualify for a medical discharge.

In similar vein is the cliche that insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Does it apply even if the results you get every time are positive?

Personally, my favorite (tangentially gambling-related) funny story involves a conversation overheard in a schoolyard: "My little brother thinks he's a chicken and me and Dad want him to see a psychiatrist. My Mom won't let him - she says we need the eggs."

Defying the conventional wisdom that house table games cannot in the end be beaten, and spending several decades proving that the house advantage can indeed be overcome, qualifies as madness in most people's opinion.

And I would have given up the effort years ago if the numbers coming at me from a succession of increasingly powerful computers, and ever more sophisticated spreadsheet models, did not keep turning the "invincible" house edge on its ear.

Like many of you, I am disappointed that so far a method of winning with little or no risk has eluded me.

But on the other hand, I figure that if casino operators have to front millions (billions!) of dollars to make blackjack, baccarat, craps, roulette and other beatable games available to us, we should try not to resent having to invest a little time and money to win at them!

I have said in earlier posts that the basic principles of target betting can benefit pretty much anyone tackling a casino table game, given a reasonable level of discipline and a bankroll to match.

But nothing I have learned and am attempting to pass on to you for free can do you any good if you believe the academic argument that past outcomes from games of chance, however large the sample or mathematically, objectively impeccable the analysis of them, cannot predict the future.

It's nonsense, of course.

In every other field of human activity, from a baby's first steps to the most complicated scientific research imaginable, the past is our surest guide to what's ahead. We learn from our missteps, in other words.

But not in gambling, say the experts...random numbers (stats, probabilities, percentages or whatever else you might choose to call them) are so uniquely and magically erratic that studying them is fruitless.

Baloney!

Common sense is probably a player's best ally if he expects to win consistently, as long as it (sensibly) rejects the idea that you can't win at games of chance.

And I should say again at this point that anyone who approaches a casino game with a will to win and the mental and monetary means to do it should never think of himself as a gambler.

Gamblers are, by their own definition, losers who say they want to win and might even believe it, but then repeatedly do everything they can to sabotage their own efforts.

Frequent players know that in big picture terms at least, table games are broadly predictable, repeating patterns of wins and losses along with seismic swings north or south of the wiggly line that we think of as "the norm."

What most players don't know is how to effectively exploit those mostly reliable patterns, betting in such a way that more wrong bets than right ones do not in the end mean more money lost than won.

And that, of course, is what target betting is all about.

All that really concerns us is the frequency of paired or "twin" player wins even when the overall trend of wins vs. losses is dramatically in the house's favor.

As long as we are not betting at our maximum level, meaning that we no longer have wiggle room and switching locations will probably not help us, twin wins will quickly get us out of trouble. And if the MSL rule is applicable, a win-loss-win sequence will do the trick.

On average, paired wins occur about five bets apart, enabling disciplined target betting to stay constantly ahead of the game in spite of more bets lost than won over the long haul.

Once in a while, the right pattern will become as scarce as hen's teeth and bet values will soar. But it happens rarely and never lasts for long, making the long-term prospects for target betting consistently positive.

It is simple enough to create an RNG model that will visually confirm the frequency of "twins" in spite of a relentless HA (anyone interested can e-mail me for an Excel example). Much as I dislike "sims" I have to accept that from time to time, they can be useful.

Academics who see themselves as the guardians of the status quo, defending the gullible from snake-oil salesmen like me (never mind that I am not actually selling anything!) insist that progressive betting is suicide.

I insist exactly the opposite, and have proved it again and again, oblivious to claims that since "it can't be done" I must be either crazy or a crook.

All target betting really says is that because you will certainly lose more bets than you win in the long term, you must see to it that you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

Sure, we have been there before, I know. But defying the conventional wisdom demands almost endless repetition of what I see as the obvious but others somehow find controversial.

If you are losing at blackjack, baccarat, roulette or whatever and are betting fixed amounts or randomly choosing the value of each new bet, you must either win more bets than you lose to get out of trouble...or win more money than you lose from now on.

The first option is completely out of your control, and may be achieved if you get lucky. But luck is not something you can count on.

The second option is only partially out of your control. You can determine bet values, but however clever you may be, you cannot know the outcome of each bet ahead of time.

To get around that little problem, you must make certain that when you win, you derive maximum benefit from having things go your way for once.

If you are playing at a 1.0% game such as blackjack, every single bet you place faces the same negative odds (495-505 to 1 against being one way of describing those odds).

When you choose to increase your bet value (and that never happens except in response to a mid-recovery win) you must know exactly how far behind you are, and therefore the precise amount you will need to win to get "out of the hole" plus a small profit.

The optimum rules set I have described throughout this blog is, to some, an aggressive approach that increases risk while proportionately increasing potential profits.

I can prove that to be a false assumption, but must concede that a $25,000 maximum bet and a $1,000,000 bankroll is beyond the reach of most players, whether they think of themselves as gamblers or not.

Just remember that erratic, emotional, irresponsible play will not win without a lot of luck even if there's a million bucks in the bank - high rollers don't win more, they just bet more, and don't hurt as much when they lose!

The solution to the added challenges of "economy play" is to scale back on some of the target betting strategy's more ambitious rules, saving them for that not far-off day when the bankroll has grown enough to make them less scary.

From the top, the optimum opening loss (OL) multiple I recommend is x5, meaning that if the $5 opening bet in a new series goes south, the next bet (NB) will be the previous bet (PB) x5, or $25.

Next is 2L x 3, meaning that if the second bet loses, NB=PBx3 = $75. Right after that comes 3L x 1.33 (you guessed it, after a 3rd consecutive opening loss, NB = $100).

All of the OL rules can be shelved to shield a limited BR, although be warned that the effect of that is to extend recovery time and thereby potentially increase risk.

Target betting's win progression (WP) component is another critical profit booster, and before I go any further, we should revisit the whole question of exploiting opening winning streaks.

If you ask a blackjack dealer the best way to "chase" a winning streak, the probable answer will be a "plus one" progression (+$5,+$10,+$15,+$20) that is the standard house recommendation, and is not surprisingly far better for the house than for you.

Think about it: Three successive wins at $5 followed by a $5 loss puts you $10 ahead; bet the house's way and you will also end up $10 ahead, your only hope being that along the way from $10 to $20, you hit a 3-2 natural or score a winning split/double.

The house likes "plus one" because a high percentage of potential winning streaks play out +$5, -$10, handing the dealer's tray an extra chip more than the conventional +$5, -$5.

Dealers do not always give bad advice: they usually preface every little lesson with the words "The books says..." But giving good advice is not part of their training, for obvious reasons.

The WP xfactor I recommend is 2, but the most critical WP rule in target betting is that you should not do as a dealer would recommend and fall back to a minimum bet after an opening winning streak ends. Bad, bad, bad idea.

Instead, you should treat the losing bet as your new loss to date (LTD) and set about recovering it in full.

Failure to optimally exploit winning streaks costs more players more money than just about anything else that happens in a casino, other than over-indulgence in "free" cocktails! (Greed and stupidity play a big role, too, but that's another story).

The WPx2 rule caps out at +$100, meaning that you don't double after PB=$200 but instead add $100 after every subsequent win.

And when the streak ends, as it always will, the recovery series is written off (with a profit of not less than $590) if the lost bet was worth $500 or more.

I am not opposed to the "plus one" approach, as long as the eventual loss is converted to the LTD and eventually recovered.

Skip that rule, and you will regret it.

Next up among "adjustable" target betting rules is the MSL or mid-series loss rule, referring to a second attempt at recovery (a do over) if the first LTD+ bet fails.

It's a major boost to the strategy's long-term efficacy because because most house wins are followed by an opposite outcome, as are most player wins. I recommend an MSL value of $1,000, meaning that a second LTD+ bet will follow a failed turnaround bet if its value was $1,000 or less.

On a budget, you can cut the MSL value all the way down to $100 (the lowest value I would be happy with) or even to ZERO if you have the fortitude to smile through all the series that would have turned around, if only...

The greatest value of the "L" rules is that they make it possible to turn a mounting loss around with a single win, a handy reversal that can occur more than 70% of the time at blackjack!

Blackjack is the best possible game for target betting because of the real (but not absolute) control afforded the player by consistent adherence to sane and sensible basic rules of play.

Skeptics dismiss past results as proof of anything, but against 85,000-plus rounds from Ken Smith's Blackjack Strategy Trainer, I have managed to keep the HA down to well below 1.0% overall in spite of almost always choosing the 8-deck shoe option.

I do that because there are usually far more split and doubledown options against a multi-deck game, and because I welcome the "streaky" nature of output from a long shoe.

If I don't like what I am getting, I can always go somewhere else - a rule that every target betting player should keep high on his list!

The results illustrated below can easily be dismissed as anecdotal or completely irrelevant but I believe they have much more to say about how we can hope to win at blackjack than runaway sims that do away with every single aspect of the casino experience other than random numbers.

Imagine if all casinos offered were heads-up games against a random numbers generator, with rules requiring that you bet from your lowest value to your highest in the same place, and forbidding you from quitting when you felt like it.

If you walk in a straight line across a minefield, paying no attention to where you put your feet, chances are you will be blown to bits before you reach the other side.

If you drive a car very fast down a winding mountain road without touching the steering wheel or the brake and gas pedals, you will probably crash and burn long before you get to the valley below.

If you jump out of a high-flying plane without a parachute you...well, by now you probably get my drift.

So it is with "runaway sims": they eliminate cards, dice, tables, dealers, players, wheels, chips and almost everything else including real time, and are then claimed to accurately represent what you can expect to encounter in a casino game of chance.

They don't.

I am sometimes accused of dreaming up arbitrary rules that by sheer luck prevail against a given set of outcomes, and will never beat another sample of any size.

That might be fair if the rules of target betting were derived from the blackjack outcomes summarized here.

In truth, those rules have been around since the early 1990s and were first published on the 'Net in 1997, while the BST outcomes trounced here date back just a few months (the product of more time at my computer than I care to admit to!).

Take them or leave them.

The same advice applies to all of the charts and summaries published here.

They are warts-and-all slices of objective data that demonstrate conclusively something most people already know: If you bet fixed amounts or randomly, you will lose.

Progressive betting is not suicide, it is survival.

Winning is not always easy, and it gets harder the more you tighten your spread and the smaller your available bankroll.

But at worst, it is a whole lot more fun than losing.

Here's that blackjack data:


The run-through summarized here features target betting's performance top-lining in the chart, with the session results to the right of the line seen headed boldly north-east.

The other blocks of data are from a souped-up version of Oscar's Grind, a standard Small Martingale (-1, -2, -4, -8, +16) and a more aggressive Martingale (-1, -2, -5, -10, +25).

Target betting invariably does best of the alternatives programmed into my models, which are included simply to underscore the superiority of almost any method of progressive betting over a hit-and-hope, seat-of-the-pants approach.

It is important to understand that the deeper the hole you are in, the bigger the shovel you will need to get out of there!

That means freezing the bet value after any mid-series loss, assuming MSL is not in play, and making sure after a win that you press as hard as your BR permits.


Again, the BR has been cut to 20% of the $1m optimum, and the spread has been tightened to 1-2,500 while increasing the minimum bet from $5 to $10.


Above, we still have a $200,000 BR, but the minimum is up to $25 and the spread is 1-1,000.


And here's what we get with all target betting's bells and whistles in play: one crushing loss, then a sustained string of wins suggesting that serious threats are so rare, they can almost - almost - be discounted.

Note that none of these data summaries conform with the so-called conventional wisdom, which would probably accept 85,000 rounds as a reasonably representative sample, and require that the final outcome be within range of the product of action multiplied by the 0.85% HA.

Expected or indicated results - what "should have" happened are plain to see in all the summaries.

The HA is, to target betting, a mere nuisance.

My version of Oscar's Grind (owing very little to the disaster recommended by the author of a best-selling book called "How to Gamble in a Casino"!) at least managed to do a little better than break-even.

But we are not about breaking even, are we?

We want to win. And we know how!

The most effective antidote to the house edge is making bet values as variable as your BR permits, keeping in mind that variable does not mean random!

Target betting rules do all a player's thinking for him, and that in itself lifts a huge burden (although some critics have suggested that I have taken all the "fun" out of gambling by replacing spontaneity with discipline).

Tom Ainslie's glacial interpretation of Oscar's Grind keeps bet values on an upward climb, it's true.

But because it lacks a win progression and adds just one unit in response to a mid-recovery right bet, it is doomed to comply with the HA in the long run.

My upgrade of Oscar applies a +1 WP and permits the bet to be doubled after a mid-series win until turnaround is within reach, so it actually makes consistent headway.

But in spite of the turbo-charge, OGX (short for Oscar's Grind Extra) falls far short of even the most cautious version of target betting.

Against the BST blackjack data set, "Ainslie's Grind" ended up losing 0.67% of its overall action, which was at least a slight improvement over the net HA of 0.85%.

Maybe that's why Mr. Ainslie's book is not titled "How to WIN in a Casino"!

OGX came in at +0.63%, not quite flipping the HA into a significant player edge, but making a contribution to expenses.

The tamest, most toned-down version of target betting delivered a win equal to +3.65% of its total action.

As an old-time mathematician would put it: "Q.E.D."!

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.
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You will never be able to predict the outcome of the next bet, but target betting makes sure you always bet the right amount at the right time.

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"Negative" is a word that frequently crops up in discussions about gambling and how to win, and the axiom is that negative expectation must eventually have negative results.

It's nonsense.

The truth is that the house advantage at casino games of chance can be the player's good friend, because the baseline percentage value can never be large enough to make winning impossible.

Casinos would be happy to offer games with a house advantage far greater than blackjack's +/- 1.0% or even roulette's 5.26%, and sometimes it seems not a day goes by without some new "side bet" appearing on table layouts to tempt easy money from players who can't or won't do the math.

The gambling industry knows, however, that winners play a critical role in their business. Why? Because games that could not be beaten would very quickly run out of suckers.

Casinos rely on the fact that most players are unconcerned about odds: they just want to be able to win once in a while, so they won't feel foolish. The only way that can happen is if the house edge is kept in check (usually less than 1.5% at mega-money games such as baccarat and blackjack).

Because of the random nature of all games, the house edge will sometimes tip far above the known expectation of 1.0% or whatever, a negative trend that will occur only a little more frequently than an opposite pattern.

Especially interesting to me is the fact that most players will bet more during a losing streak than they will against a winning one, making it almost impossible for them to "get out of the hole" when a prolonged negative trend is finally over.

It stands to sense (and simple arithmetic) that flat or random betting against negative expectation is more likely to lose than to win. So the only alternative to losing long term is a disciplined method of money management that minimizes the damage from losing trends and maximizes the profit from a positive pattern.

In two words: progressive betting. In two better words: target betting.

The casinos and their house-trained "experts" work very hard to make sure that the words above are perceived as dirty ones.

That's because progressive betting consistently upsets "the math" for the house, repeatedly and indefinitely enabling the player to make money in spite of losing more bets than he wins.

Obviously, you will never see those proliferating side bets I mentioned earlier flagged with signs warning players "Don't waste your money, this is a seriously dumb bet."

And for the same reason, people who bet stupidly without taking the trouble to learn the game they are playing are never taken aside and given helpful advice on how to protect and conserve their bankroll.

The only way you will ever prompt a lecture on odds and optimum play from pit personnel is if you are spotted betting a progression. (Please see the comments at left under the heading, "An easy way to test the lie that progressive betting can't win").

If you want the house to love you to bits, showering you with sundry "comps" to induce you not to go next door or across the street, bet randomly within a very tight spread (1-5 is standard for most weekend punters), and keep telling yourself that losing is fun.

If you want to win, do as I tell you!

Here are numbers from the latest BST blackjack attack...

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
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.
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Everybody gets lucky once in a while. Penny-ante punters depend on it. If you are target betting, you don't need luck (but be grateful anyway!).

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In the interests of political correctness, even though being PC is no longer fashionable, let me say right now that I have nothing against penny-ante punters.

I respect and welcome them, because without them there would be no casinos.

They mystify and occasionally (when they stray onto "my" blackjack table and play badly) they frustrate me, but I would not be without them for the world.

The latest BST session inspired me to state the obvious, as in the headline above this post.

But in a field where what little discussion there is tends to be dominated by academic mathematicians who may never have placed a bet in their lives, stating the obvious is essential.

Target betting succeeds with predictable consistency because win-loss patterns, regardless of the randomness of individual outcomes, are in themselves predictable and consistent.

When bet values are also selected at random, the house advantage is almost certain to win, the exceptions being lucky streaks (accidents!) in which the player wins more bets than he loses, or when by a fluke he achieves an average win value that exceeds his average loss value.

If you give target betting a fair and open-minded trial, you will learn that end of series (EOS) bets occur every three bets, on average (less, actually, but only mythematicians know how to place 0.7 of a bet!).

Most of those recovery attempts will FAIL.

The failure rate for EOS wagers is also predictable: roughly 53%.

But what might seem to you like a worrisome demonstration of the inevitability of more losses than wins is in reality the reason why target betting can fail only very, very rarely indeed.

That's because the value of each EOS bet is not randomly selected, making each failure just a temporary setback.

There will always be more failures than successes. But the combined value of the smaller number of successes will always exceed the total value of the greater number of failures. Result: happiness!

The first session in the latest BST trial (which now may not end until I have reached 100,000 outcomes) was a perfect example of how accidental good timing can improve the performance of a betting method that is already very difficult for the house to beat.

The sample had 7 more losses than wins, but in spite of that, the profit after the last EOS was $9,835.

That was with the BST 1-200 ($5-$1,000) spread/table limit in force.

Target betting without the wimpy TL did less well, but only because I'm still working on modeling my real-time responses to dealer naturals and 3+ 21s:

bst090327a: 7.5 net AV = +3.52%, target win $3,798 = 29.49% of $12,878 action
227.5 net rounds incl 3-2 naturals, average bet $60, bets of $1,000+ = 10

Modeling a $1,000 TL with the same target betting rules applied produced these results:

7.5 net AV/HA = 3.52%, target win $7,500 = +3.30% of $227,500 total action
227.5 net rounds incl 3-2 naturals, average bet $1,068, bets of $1,000+ = 213

The standouts in these data are the ones that always highlight themselves: a much bigger action number with the BST TL imposed, caused by a far greater need for bets of $1,000 or more (10 with a wide spread vs. 213 with a "house" spread).

I have to confess at this point that the last few BST summaries have exaggerated the number of big-ticket bets for the BST TL. It is one of the hazards of spreadsheet modeling that every once in a while, a "bad" cell will proliferate, skewing results until the glitch is exposed.

I am as a rule a demon error-checker, but this one got by me for a week or so. Turns out the exaggeration goosed the numbers, but not by much. Here's a revised summary with the miscount corrected:

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
As you can see, a tighter spread (1-200 vs. 1-5000) resulted in an overall loss for BST TL, along with 3.5 x target betting's total action and average bet value, and almost 20 times the number of $1,000+ bets for a method that most people would assume to be "less aggressive."

In every sample that had a negative net AV/HA, the BST table limit delivered an overall loss, rendering target betting as ineffectual as any other betting method, including fixed or random values. And that of course is the whole purpose of spread limits: to ensure that the house advantage exacts its ordained toll on players who dare to challenge it.

When a player is able to widen his spread to suit his current needs, the house advantage becomes almost irrelevant.

A wide spread enables you to win more when you win than you lose when you lose, so that losing more often than you win will not prevent you from walking away from the game a winner. Isn't that what everyone on our side of the tables wants?

The best news of all is that with target betting strictly applied, single wins are all it takes to achieve recovery around 65% of the time. That's important, because isolated wins occur about twice as often as paired wins ("twins"!).

So, if you gamble because you believe in luck and imagine that you can somehow get more than your share, be ready to lose. If, like me, you accept that luck is a fickle ally and a plan is a whole lot more reliable and predictable than flying by the seat of your pants, welcome to target betting.

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.
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The YCW (you can't win) Brigade will tell you that if you can't be sure of winning, you should never attempt a betting strategy...

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...but if you don't have a plan, you are much more likely to lose.

It is plain to see who benefits most from the gambling attitude promoted by mythematicians, who go on to say: "You should think of gambling as entertainment, nothing more, and only bet what you can afford to lose."

My advice is fundamentally different: "Play to win, but don't play at all if you can't afford to win."

In other words, if a penny-ante bankroll is all you can muster (and there's no shame in that!) then you will probably be better off to trust to blind luck and hope that at worst, you break even.

Beating negative odds requires a bankroll large enough to keep you in the game through the inevitable rough spots when the house edge is temporarily far greater than standard negative expectation.

The latest batch of BST figures is not much different from its predecessors. It shows "the house" getting way ahead in terms of player losses vs. player wins, and as long as the 1-200 spread limit is applied, the result is another loss for the good guys (who don't work for the casino, let's be clear about that!).

Set target betting loose with an appropriate bankroll, and as before, we end up with an overall win with the total action (sessions A and B combined) greatly reduced. Also per prior experience, we see far more "big ticket" bets when the BST table limit is applied than without it.

So much for "conservative" play!

The BST results have been truly demoralizing lately, without target betting giving up a thin dime.

Here are the current "Batch #s 1-15 to date" numbers:-

Win Rate TD 100.0000%

ALL ahead +$1,715,420 = +5.17% of
$33,161,885 action
$25,000 max
$444 avg bet
$2,299 per hour
5.2 x avg bet


RISK (181,475) = 18.14% of bankroll
return 945%

EOS x 13,403 in 74,620 rounds
Avg EOS 5.6 rounds

AV/HA -5.28% (3,938) -5.28%
Expected ($1,750,087) per gross AV or (597) per net AV of -0.80%
TA/T 2.0 x expected result


+ MAX 12
- MIN -16
ABV $444
$1,000+ 3,536 4.74% of all bets

+ series 4,286 32%
0 series 4,153 31%
- series 4,964 37%
1-win EOS 8,737 65%

Most of the data are self-explanatory. Note that betting my way, big-ticket wagers were less than 5% of the total, and that the win to date represents better than a 5.0% "hold" of total action, against an overall house edge of between 0.8% and 5.28%, depending on the method of measurement.

Sometime soon, I will post average bet and $1,000+ data for a 1-200 spread for all 15 BST models, but it is safe to predict that action will be way up, the result will be an overall loss in line with negative expectation, and max bets will be in the majority, not a rare event at 1 in 20 or less.

I use a "net" number for the house edge (HA) or actual value (AV) which factors in doubles, splits and 3-2 payoffs for naturals. The old-fashioned way is to count hands as either won or lost: do that, and you end up with an HA that's more than SIX TIMES greater than my more inclusive approach.

As you can see, winning series (hey, they were ALL winning series) with more bets lost than won greatly outnumbered series with more wins than losses. Series that were negative or neutral still account for 68% of the total, so "expectation" demanded either a break-even or a loss in all those instances. Sorry, expectation.

The trial opened with a $1,000,000 bankroll almost 75,000 blackjack hands ago, and that has long since been covered by winnings, plus a 70% return on the investment which does not include $1,000,000 in profits left in the bankroll to take us through future downturns.

Maximum exposure for the initial bankroll was $181,475, or a little more than 18%.

I do not expect target betting to keep winning forever.

At some point, a win-loss pattern will be encountered that first pushes the strategy to its maximum bet, leaving it at the mercy of an ongoing negative surge that exceeds expectation for the game.

Then, the strategy will cease to be a strategy at all...it will have to wait out the surge and hope that sanity returns before the balance of the bankroll is swallowed up.

In the 300,000+ baccarat outcomes discussed in earlier blog posts, there was just one "crash and burn" and target betting came out way, way ahead in spite of it (see the archives or do a baccarat search).

The certainty is that winning sessions will always hugely outnumber losing sessions if you follow my rules.

The experts warn that the million-dollar bust could happen today or tomorrow, long before you have built up enough profits to avoid actual loss of your original buy-in.

But my way, probability is overwhelmingly on your side. Their way, it's against you every time you belly up to a blackjack table. The choice, of course, is yours!

The (nearly) 75,000 BST outcomes break down as follows:

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

Just for the fun of it, each of the target betting models also tracks results for two versions of the widely derided Martingale, the old-fashioned x2 kind (-5, -10, -20 etc.) and a more aggressive update which brings in more dough with a modified progression: -5, -10, -25, -50, -100, -250 etc.).

The YCW preachers scorn double-up as suicide, warning that "you will hit the table limit, and then what?"

"What," my friends (all of a sudden I'm John McCain?) is a move to a new location where the required NB is permitted. And if at some point you hit a house- or self-imposed green ceiling that can't be defied, then you keep on betting the max. The odds are very much in your favor that the WLP will stabilize and you will recover prior losses and then some.

Once again, I will say that I don't recommend double-up, not because it's a losing method, but because it is too easily spotted and casino pit staff will invariably interfere with its use.

I don't have double-up numbers for all 15 BST sessions yet, but here are the data for the current batch (#15). Notice that target betting is a more effective alternative.

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
Here are the newest BST numbers. I have to stop doing this. But maybe not quite yet?

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

The BST "table-limit" bets enormously outnumber max bets with target betting rules because in the current batch, a tight-spread punter would have been at the limit for the last 1,200 rounds. And since he's in the hole by more than $65,000, he is going to be betting the max until the cows come home.

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.
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"Even with a win rate higher than 99.99%, someone has to lose - and it could be you."

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Back in the good old days when gambling discussion forums were not fatally targeted by spammers (and newspapers still made a profit), the topic of progressive betting brought frequent posts from a contributor who always signed his name with "Ph.D." after it, his presumed purpose being to tell us he was smarter than us, so we'd better shut up and listen.

The other day, I came across an old post from the guy I came to know fondly as "Harvey Phudd" and I offer it to you for your comments...

"The pythagorean theorem is more than 3000 years old, and it is still correct. You are implying that since the mathematics you blithely ignore is more than a century old that that the theorems are invalid. Sorry, the various theorems of probability and statistics that lead to the inevitable conclusion that "money management" or progressions can (sic) change the fundamental expectation of a gambling game are still valid.
"Progressions due (sic) skew results. That is, the chance of walking out at even or better is significantly increased. In some case, the increase is significantly in excess of 99%. No one disputes this. What you don't seem to understand is that the average win, when the progression system wins, is reduced, sometimes greatly, and the average loss, when the system loses, is significantly elevated.
"This is comparable, in the extreme, to a game where there are 2 blue marbles and 999,998 yellow marbles in a jar. A marble is drawn at random. The player wins $1 if a yellow marble is drawn and loses $1,000,000 if a blue marble is drawn. In this case, the player will almost always win this game. At some point, assuming that many players play, a player will lose now and again. The house (the casino) will make money on this game and yes, many players will also make money on this game. Heaven help the poor souls who lose however."

Harvey's argument typifies mythematics, which requires its followers to fudge facts and fiddle numbers and do whatever it takes to support the casinos' ordained right to beat the (stuffing) out of the rest of us.

Funnily enough, a believer in progressive betting or money management does not defy ancient axioms, whether Pythagorean or not, because it stands to modern as well as ancient sense that if you lose more bets than you win and bet flat or randomly, you must also eventually lose more money than you win.

My argument is with the assertion by Harvey Phudd and his ilk that a betting strategy that follows known and broadly predictable patterns in random outcomes cannot ever turn negative expectation on its ear.

Hell's bells! In the current BST trials, we're up to almost 75,000 outcomes and as you can see from the summary below, 68% of the series from which we made a handy profit were either negative or neutral, indicating that target betting "should have" lost 37% of the time and at best broken even 31% of the time.

It.
Didn't.
Happen.

Expectation is being in effect reversed in more than 2 series in every 3, and is being exceeded in those that remain.

Harvey is at least expanding the usually rigid, tiny-framed picture a little by saying that progressive betting can win close to 100% of the time but among thousands of players who make money from it, one or more is sure to go broke. It's the billion-bet runaway sim in a different guise.

I can't fight the argument that if a player takes no defensive measures whatsoever, he will lose eventually. But what does it tell us? That stupidity in a casino (often in the form of greed, ignorance, fatigue, distraction, or over-consumption of free booze) is a bad idea? I think most of us knew that already, Harvey.

Harvey concedes that progressions do skew results, and as long as my odds are being skewed to the good, I am in favor of that idea.

In the end, the choice is between negative odds of 495 to 505 (in a 1.0% game such as blackjack) or positive odds of 9,999 to 1 or better (13,328 to 0 in the current blackjack trial!) and I think I can guess which option most gamblers would prefer.

Harvey's million-marble analogy is interesting, but absent a Ph.D. I struggle to get his point. If the "winning" marbles don't go back in the jar, then sure, the odds of picking the right color will diminish with each bet until some sucker is sure to make an expensive mistake. Otherwise, odds that good are far better than those we face every time we get out of bed in the morning.

I know it's just an analogy, Harvey, but are there really people out there willing to risk $1,000,000 to win $1?

I'm comfortable risking a virtual "mill" at target betting because I know that soon enough, accumulated winnings will exceed my original seven-figure stake and I will be able to put it back in the bank and play on with my profits backing me.

Harvey is wrong when he says that average wins are reduced by progressive betting: the diametric opposite is true. And I doubt he meant to say, as he does above, that money management can change negative expectation, even though, for once, he was right.

It may also be true that even if you and me and everyone we know adopts target betting and wins consistently with it until we each fall off our perch, it will not alter the fact that casinos collectively will continue to reap fat rewards from the house advantage.

That has more to do with the nature of most gamblers than the numbers for or against progressive betting. Most gamblers expect to lose, even want to lose, and will do little or nothing to improve their chances, so perhaps they deserve their inevitable fate.

I have been warned on occasion that challenging or tampering with the status quo is immoral and unfair, and that casinos have a divine right to profit from the idiocy of the average gambler.

I say that if house games can be beaten without cheating or breaking the rules in any way, as many people as possible should be taught how to do it.

Here's the latest BST session. And OK, it's time for me to admit to myself that I am addicted to this process! I keep hearing the skeptics cry, "But it won't work next time!" and I have to keep on saying, "Just watch me win again!" And then I do.

(Good news that will be supported in detail in a later post is that almost TWO of ever THREE winning series will end with a single win, rather than the "twin" wins that are required for recovery without the OL and MSL rules in place. OL is short for opening loss, and calls for NB=PBx5 if the first bet in a new series goes south; MSL is mid-series loss and says that if PB is less than or equal to $1,000, the NB=LTD+ rule is repeated).


(Click on the image to enlarge it)

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.
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Another cold and wintry day brings another ray of sunshine for target betting in defiance of the conventional "wisdom."

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(Click on the image to enlarge it)
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.
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Another day, another lesson that tight spreads will kill you. (Once you hit that "green ceiling," there's nowhere to go but down).

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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.
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Take the time to learn the strategy rules, playing against "funny money" games until you are an expert. Then, you will be ready to be a real winner!

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Target betting simply means knowing at all times how much you are "in the hole" in a given series, a series being a string of bets that starts with a minimum wager and continues until a profit has been achieved.

Your objective is to make a steady profit, and because you know ahead of time that in the end you will lose more bets than you win, you also know that the only way you can make money is by winning more when you win than you lose when you lose.

Psychic ability is not required.

What's needed is a set of responses tailored to circumstances and requiring a different reaction to a win than to a loss. In this way, the damage done by a string of consecutive losses will be less than the benefit derived from a similar string of consecutive wins, and over time, the value of your average winning bet will be greater than that of your average losing bet.

For example, 49 wins at $11 will offset 51 losses at $10 and overcome a house advantage of 2% (negative expectation being a loss of $21, replaced by a win of $29 or 2.8% of overall action).

It is not my purpose here to explain in detail why the method works, but to challenge skeptics to try it themselves and discover its merits from their own experience rather than mine.

Step one is to learn the rules below. Step two is to put them into action without risk until confidence (and competence) has been gained. Step three is to take what you have learned into a casino and kick ass.

As long as you are behind in a series, carefully track your loss to date (LTD) until a win comes along, then respond to that win by pushing out a next bet (NB) that covers the sum total of the LTD plus a target profit ($5 or 1 unit is good, $25 or 5u is better).

If the mid-series win is followed by a loss (as it will be slightly more often than not) the loss becomes the new NB value, and the series continues until the next win, when the process is repeated. Eventually, a second consecutive mid-series win will bring an end to the series (EOS), and the bet falls back to the minimum 1u.

Target betting will prevail in the long run with just the LTD+TGT rule in place, but I recommend rules variations that will not only boost profitability but will serve to camouflage what you are doing and confuse the enemy (you know who they are).

After an opening loss, bet 5x the previous bet (PB).
After a second loss, bet PB/2 and do the same after a third loss.
If losses continue, repeat the bet (NB=PB) until a win, then apply the LTD+ rule.

After an opening win, bet 2x (NB=PBx2), and keep doing that after each successive win until the bet hits $200.
When the win progression (WP) x2 limit is reached, NB=PB+$100 until a loss ends the winning streak.
When an opening winning streak ends with a loss, NB= the lesser of PBx2 or PB+$100 and LTD=PB.
If losses continue, freeze the bet (NB=PB) and continue doing so until a win calls for the LTD+TGT rule.

Doubled wins (meaning any wins greater than the value of the original bet) do not affect the NB value, but doubled losses change the NB value to match the prior loss (-1, -1, -1, -1x2, -2, -2, -2x3, -6 and so on).

After a push (about 9.0% of all bets at blackjack), double the bet (NB=PBx2) to a maximum added value of $100, and do the same after a dealer natural except if a 2x bet would be due anyway (see above), in which case, add $100 (NB=PB+$100) on top of the doubled value. Treat any dealer 21 as a push, and respond accordingly.

With this method, bets can increase very rapidly, sometimes to amounts that are prohibited by the table limit at the layout where the series began. Whenever that happens, move to a higher-rent layout, and continue the series as before.

(If you are playing against Ken Smith's BST app, you will have to deal with a $1,000 table limit, which is also a 1-200 spread limit, assuming a $5 opening bet for each new series. Freeze the bet at NB=PB until you recover, and as you record each outcome in a log, console yourself with the knowledge that with a less house-biased table limit, each twin-win pattern would rocket you out of the hole and into profit! And please, send me scanned copies of your logs if they're legible - I will be happy to process them at the correct betting levels).

Higher bets mean greater risk, at least in your first few hours of target betting play, but they also mean recovery of past losses in fewer bets than it took you to get into trouble and in the end, bigger profits.

Always add at least half of every session's profit to your bankroll, enabling you to grow stronger and tougher to beat.

Whenever you feel uncomfortable or threatened in a given location, move and take your NB/LTD numbers to a new layout ("the math" will be unaffected). Never break the strategy rules, never touch alcohol during play, and never take losses personally, because they are always temporary.

And...keep reminding yourself that if you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win won't hurt you. It's sound logic, and irrefutable arithmetic. Now get out there and win.

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.
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