Gambling is not sensible, logical or rational. Mathematics is nothing but. So what am I trying to do here? Win sensibly, that's what!

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I have spent most of this week testing my idea that the crippling effect of the baccarat gouge (the so-called 5% commission on Banker wins) can be overcome by arithmetic.

I plowed into the problem well aware that every baccarat book ever written says the game cannot be beaten, and that no less a gambling luminary than Prof. Edward O. Thorp gave up trying way back in the 1980s.

I actually met the man at a backgammon bash in Pebble Beach, Calif., more than 30 years ago, and the author of the best-selling blackjack bible of all time told me then that he had baccarat in his sights as his next gambling target.

Pity it didn't work out for him...

First, a summary of the results achieved when what I now think of as "skim theory" is applied to the 315,000 baccarat outcomes mentioned in earlier posts.

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

The highlighted columns contain results from individual data sets for Player only bets, Banker bets without the "skim" modification, and Banker bets with the anti-gouge LTD adjustment applied.

The surprise to me is that the new method turns out to be an even better bet than staying away from commission wagers entirely (+2.22% of overall action vs. +1.53%).

But I should be used to surprises by now: the good ones help me to do a better job, and the bad ones teach valuable lessons before I bury them forever.

Academic mathematicians and others who oppose the idea that the house advantage in casino games of chance is vulnerable will reject these results. That's their loss, because there is a lot they could learn here if they would only open their minds!

They will doubtless argue that 315,000 outcomes is not a representative sample, or that I somehow managed to massage that huge data set until I came up with a rules combination that beat over 4,000 shoes of baccarat. Sorry, guys.

As always, my methodology has been scrupulously careful, fair and accurate. Any other approach to the challenge would be a waste of time and toil.

The bottom line here is that backing Banker all the way does not have to be a losing proposition in spite of the fact that every win pays less than even money.

Beating one of the most artfully camouflaged rip-offs on the casino floor does not require any change to the rules of target betting other than the deduction of 5% from the value of each win before it is applied to the loss to date (LTD).

My erstwhile baccarat buddy would probably tell me that this new approach is a no-brainer and that he does it already. But unless he has changed his ways in recent years, he doesn't and he won't. His "method" is to apply target betting rules to a point, then abandon them at the time he needs them the most. And as a result, he is a certain long-term loser, with no hope of recovery.

The effect of the "skim" is that a recovery series continues until enough has been won to offset prior losses PLUS all commission due on winning bets throughout that series.

And the rules modification is greatly helped by the fact that over time, there will always be more wins for Banker than for Player (betting under those conditions is a unique experience for me!).

It sounds simple, if not simple-minded, but consistency is the key to beating the house advantage, and that is a very uncomplicated concept.

Hard as I try to get everything right, the one thing I did not build into this week's test is a 105% boost to each potential EOS bet to offset commission due after recovery. I'll get to that later...

Note that the total action required for the modified method to win $6.3 million before commission is fractionally less than the action necessary to make Player a $2 million winner.

And I don't doubt for a moment that even better results could be achieved by letting "The Math" identify a more efficient antidote to the gouge.

I don't want to get into that here because of the academic prohibition against "twiddling and tweaking."

As things stand, the models apply bets that would be rounded up in real play, inflating overall action but hopefully also benefiting the final win. That is one problem with a mathematically accurate, nit-picky approach: precision must sometimes be compromised to a degree to reflect reality, but only after a theory has been proved.

Speaking of reality, here's a chart of the win-loss pattern (WLP) that was disastrous for Player-only bets against the Rodriguez/Jones baccarat sets and led to the one "bust" in more than 50,000 successful recoveries:-


Bear with me a moment and ask yourself if you would stick around for an over-the-cliff plunge like this if you were playing baccarat for real money and a shoe went this far south this fast.

If your answer is No, as mine sure is, the next question that's begged is, Would it make any difference in the long run if you walked away from every egregious "house spike" in the hope of finding a friendlier WLP elsewhere?

The academic defenders of the status quo say no, absolutely not. But both mathematics and common sense say they are wrong when gambling is set aside and target betting replaces it in the equation.

For a fixed or random bettor there will often come a point where the hole he is in is too deep for the longest ladder (in the form of a partial reversal of a negative trend). Once he is 20 or 30 bets behind, as in the pattern depicted here, he's dead meat.

But the target strategist is only seriously threatened when he reaches his maximum bet value, which has nothing to do with table limits and all to do with how much money he has behind him.

Until then, two wins in succession will get him out of the hole...a mighty short ladder by any definition. And more often than not, a single win will save his bacon.

So while the mythematicians who manipulate arithmetic in the service of the gambling industry are not exactly telling a lie when they say you can't run away from bad luck, their "truth" does not apply to target betting.

I will be posting some more "over a cliff" sequences for your amusement from time to time. And I use the cliff analogy with good reason, recognizing that seeing into the future is a little easier on the road than it is in a casino.

Imagine that you are driving down a mountain road and you see a sharp curve coming up and what could be a 1,000ft drop straight ahead. Do you apply the brakes and turn the wheel, or do you keep going? The answer (Duh!) is so intuitive that it now has a place in the Merriam-Webster American Dictionary: used derisively to indicate that something just stated is all too obvious or self-evident.

And that takes me back to the heading at the top of this post.

Mathematics is not disconnected from logic and good sense, however frustrating and impractical its precision may sometimes be.

Gambling, the way most punters interpret and apply it, is illogical, irrational, imprecise and ultimately chaotic and hopeless (which is not to say that its practitioners do not keep doing the same things over and over again while hoping for a happier result!).

Arithmetic can beat the house, as we see here. Luck cannot.

The runaway sims that mythematicians use to "prove" that the house edge is ultimately unbeatable rely on rare patterns like the one above to undo a betting method.

A car driven at high speed with the steering and brakes disabled will almost certainly crash and burn.

A safety-conscious, sensible driver knows how to navigate the worst roads and weather conditions and get home (or to the bank) alive.

Which ride would you prefer?

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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Confidence, consistency, cold cash and commitment: The keys to winning at table games can be summed up in two letters, P & S, Progression and Spread.

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Years ago, a Las Vegas resident who promoted himself as the world's #1 expert on casinos and gambling told me that no betting method ever devised could beat the games in his city.

"Even if it could be done, the casinos would find a way to stop it," he said. "All they would have to do is limit spreads."

He was right. The casinos have the edge against 99.9% of all players, reporting a win percentage that is several multiples of the negative expectation at the toughest table game, roulette (5.26%).

Meaning that most players make such dumb choices when they are in a casino having "fun" that they guarantee that they will go home with a lighter wallet.

But the house advantage and the billions in easy money it brings in every year is not enough for the gambling industry.

Whenever casino personnel identify a player who they believe is winning "too often" they first satisfy themselves that he's not cheating...then treat him as if he is.

When mathematician Ed Thorp published his card-counting best seller, Beat the Dealer more than 40 years ago, Las Vegas casinos over-reacted by changing the rules of blackjack to block counters, prompting howls of protest from customers who didn't know how to count cards and didn't care to learn.

Double-downs and splits were cut back, and most annoying of all, shuffles were increased, slowing the game to a crawl.

Pretty soon, the gambling industry realized it had used a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Players willing to study how the game could be beaten and able to apply their new knowledge with skill and consistency were in a tiny minority, and blocking them meant losing revenue from everyone else.

Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, time is money in Las Vegas, and the faster hands are dealt, the more chips are raked into the dealer's tray.

In a matter of months, blackjack's rules returned to normal, and the crisis that wasn't a crisis at all was over.

Running a game is for the most part a passive process that permits the casino to provide the layout (the rope) and let the players do the work (hang themselves).

The house's influence is subtle, limiting the ratio of the highest permitted bet to the table minimum, to reduce the players' ability to recover prior losses while knowing that most punters limit themselves far more severely.

Spread limits are effective only against players who believe that the only way to combat a downturn in a given game is to keep on betting in the same location, hoping that sometime soon the tide will turn.

But a surprising number of gamblers play that way. Badly, in other word.

Players with a plan know where there's a table limit, there is a higher one not far away. If the next bet needed exceeds the table limit, there is a simple solution: Go play somewhere else.

It is an indisputable fact that both flat and random betting must eventually fall foul of the house edge at all games of chance.

It is also true that most players who are "in the hole" will fall into a pattern of robotic fixed betting, or will randomly hurl good money after bad by cranking up their wagers.

The hole will get deeper and deeper and the ladder (the bankroll) will get shorter and shorter, until eventually there is no way out.

Haphazard betting won't work. Flat betting won't either.

That makes progressive betting the only alternative.

And the realities of gambling also ensure that progressive betting will be relentlessly targeted for derision by anyone whose livelihood depends on promulgating the conventional wisdom that in the end, you can't win.

Blind luck can make you a winner for a while, but as we all know, luck never stays around for long.

Never forget that losing is a progressive process, because with each loss, the amount you are "behind" gets larger.

Betting the same amount each round against a negative trend will not enable you to recover, unless of course the win-loss pattern (WLP) changes and you are able to win more bets than you lose.

Betting less won't help either because even a prolonged winning streak will not get you out of trouble.

Again: Progressive betting is the only viable alternative. And the irony is that as long as you apply a disciplined, consistent plan, progressive betting is also less risky than any other option.

Say what?

It's like this: The vast majority of players tackle casino table games with far less money than arithmetic indicates is necessary to prevail against the house edge.

So in spite of the fact that the house advantage has to be relatively tiny in order to make occasional overall wins by players possible (without them there would soon be no customers) its relentless grind against an inadequate bankroll almost always proves fatal.

"Underfunded" players lose. Again and again. And losing is a very expensive way to have fun.

Progressive betting demands more up-front money, for sure.

But it very quickly builds the bankroll with recovery after recovery.

And as time goes by, ruin becomes a rapidly-diminishing threat.

Look at it this way: If you can't afford to win, you shouldn't play. Why even think about taking on the house if you know you probably don't have enough money to get the job done?

All of the BST logs posted here demonstrate that table limits serve the house, not the player.

No big surprise to some of you, but many people do not think about the fact that the quicker you get to your green ceiling, the more likely you are to be a victim of the house edge.

In blackjack session after session, playing up to the table limit and never beyond resulted in up to twenty times the number of high-value bets that unrestricted target betting required, and in consequence, far higher average bet and overall action values.

More action always means more risk. That's a gambling given.

Here are data from the current BST blackjack set (#15):

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
What we see here is that a betting spread tighter than 1-1,000 (the BST limit is 1-200) is certain to lose, over the long haul.

The two optimum spread ratios are $10-$25,000 (1-2,500) and $5-$25,000 (1-5,000).

$25,000 bets? That's madness! No, it's not.

It was never my hope, or my intention, to come up with a betting method that would permit a weekend punter on a shoestring budget to go home with his pockets bulging with casino cash.

That just is not possible, unless blind luck intervenes.

A successful player (not a gambler) has to think like the house, with big bucks up front and complete confidence that disciplined betting and The Math between them will make him a winner.

Look at the action numbers in the summary above and you will see far higher action/average bet figures for narrower spreads than 1-5,000, with a 1-500 spread losing after requiring risk that was almost ten times greater than the bet levels that optimum target betting needed to WIN!

A fluke, say the skeptics. A sample of just 7,300 hands is "not representative"! The data shown are anecdotal, meaning that they apply to this set of outcomes and have no relevance to future bets.

OK, so let's look at the summary for more than ten times as many outcomes (all the data sets in the current BST trial).

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
Bigger numbers, same story.

In coming posts, I will provide data from the two extended baccarat trials of target betting, the Jones outcomes and the Rodriguez sets covering more than 315,000 rounds over which I had no control, and that are verifiable at their independent sources.

Not representative? Of course not! One thing you learn when you challenge the status quo is that any sample of data, however large, that upends the YCW (you can't win) conventional wisdom is always non-representative and anecdotal.

Here's more BST fun and games...



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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