When the dealer keeps beating your 19+ hands, should you sit still and suck it up, or get the hell out of there?

_
Your average academic mythemaniac has a simple answer: Save on shoe leather and stay where you are, because running away can't affect the long-term outcome.

There may be a grain of sad truth in that if you are a blackjack player who bets flat or within a very tight spread (1-5 is as tight as the proverbial duck's bum and many punters think they are being conservative and sensible if they narrow their spread still further).

The reality is that while paired wins are a constant, predictable feature of any house game's win/loss pattern (WLP), trends do occur that lock them out for a while.

Bailing out of the current game and taking your NB and LTD numbers elsewhere can never guarantee an improved WLP and the only way to find out if you made the right decision is to slide a substitute player into the seat you vacated and have him track the hands that came out of the shoe after you left.

All you can ever know for certain is that every deadly negative trend begins with a threatening pattern that gets steadily worse, and to avoid a potential (but not certain) disaster, you must take evasive action before you go broke.

Strategy debunkers love to use runaway sims to "prove" that there's no way to overcome the house advantage at casino table games, and the same tool demonstrates conclusively that paired wins occur about as often as paired losses.

When they stop happening, it is smart to back off and go hunting for a more comfortable WLP, even if the only certain benefit is to your peace of mind...your morale, if you like.

No one should ever gamble if they feel threatened or uncomfortable for any reason, so never hesitate to interrupt play whenever the mood strikes you, and resume it elsewhere when you're ready.

Here's the log from the last BST session in Batch #14.

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
If what you see here had occurred in the course of output from a runaway sim, the essential assumption would be that the "player" (meaning, in that context, the method) would keep on betting wildly without a care in the world, until the negative pattern ended or his money ran out.

In real life, human beans don't like being kicked in the head or stomped on with heavy boots or being robbed at (metaphorical) gunpoint, let alone all at the same time.

They take defensive action.

The most effective response to a house spike is to simply walk away, knowing that interrupting play for a while can never hurt the long-term outcome, which for the target bettor is yet another session win.

I have heard from some players who prefer to pull back to fixed minimum bets for a while, especially when they are in a busy casino on a wild weekend night and hate to give up their seat. I guess it can't hurt to take a breather by treading water when the pressure's on, and the effects of such a move (or non-move!) are hard to model accurately.

What matters is that no one with blood in his veins plays the way runaway sims require them to. It would, at best, be contrary to human nature.

Just remember the DBO rule: Don't. Bend. Over.

Above all, stay cool and calm and don't take a losing streak personally. It will end. And then, as always, you will come out ahead.

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.
_

There's mathematics, and then there's mythematics (the "proven" notion that casino games of chance are ultimately unbeatable!).

_
The only thing that is demonstrable about the (hopefully) random win-loss patterns derived from house-biased games is that a player who bets flat amounts or bets randomly is certain to lose in the end.

It's a simple enough truth, although some academics have felt the need to produce formulae that run to several pages to demonstrate that if you lose more bets than you win, then you must also lose more money than you win.

And if it is inevitable that losses must always exceed wins, the question that has to be answered is, What's the point of playing?

The lure of gambling of course is that it is possible to win in the short term, if you get lucky either by winning more often than you lose, or by accidentally timing your bets in such a way that the combined value of your fewer wins exceeds the combined value of your more numerous losses.

The problem for must gamblers is that the more they win, the more likely they are to keep playing. And the more they play, the more likely they are to lose. If you're a blackjack player (and a fan of satirical novels) you could call this dilemma a Catch 21!

Much has been written down the centuries about what's known as the "gambler's fallacy" or the idea that after an unusually high ratio of losses to wins (a ratio that exceeds the known negative expectation for the game at hand), a win is more likely.

It's not, of course. In a game with a 2.0% house edge, your odds of winning are 49-51, or a tad less than 50-50, every time you make a bet. So a betting strategy that depends on a win being "more likely" at any point in the game is doomed to failure.

Target betting dramatically boosts the next bet (NB) value in response to a mid-series win not because a second consecutive win is "more likely" than a loss, but because if fortune should smile in spite of negative expectation, all prior losses for the series (LTD) will be recovered, plus a small profit.

(If you are new to this method, a series begins with an opening minimum bet, and ends when turnaround or end of series aka EOS has been achieved. If a series opens with one or more successive wins, it continues until a loss, and the value of that loss becomes the LTD, with the NB value = LTD+T. If the streak-ending loss is immediately followed by a win, the series ends and the bet reverts to the opening minimum. If not, it continues per the strategy rules until EOS is achieved).

Mythematicians love to heap scorn on the Small Martingale or double-up betting method, which opens with a 1-unit bet and risks -1, -2, -4, -8, -16 and so on until a win finally comes along, recovering all prior losses with a single successful wager and delivering an overall profit of 1 unit.

The method is derided as suicidal because of the fact that repeated doubling is certain eventually to bump up against the table limit, and if the required x2 bet can't be made, an overall loss is inevitable.

That would be true if a double-up bettor was too dumb to move to a layout with a higher table limit before he got into serious trouble, and in theory, it might be possible for so many successive losses to occur that a $5 bet grows to exceed even the most generous house limit in Las Vegas ($25,000 is about average on "The Strip" these days, and high rollers can add several zeroes to that amount with special dispensation).

It's possible, but not likely. And gambling is all about what's likely, or probable, with blind luck ruled an irrelevance.

Interestingly, there is not a casino I have ever heard of that will permit x2 betting for long. Why? Because it is much more likely to succeed than to fail. And gamblers can never be permitted to win for long.

"Martingalers" can be seen in action in any busy casino if you know what to look for. The guy who muscles into a blackjack game, places two or three consecutive losing bets and then moves on is an x2 bettor in search of a single win. Blackjack is the perfect game for him, because a natural or a successful double/split will greatly boost his bottom line, giving him a final win exceeding his target 1u.

So, target betting is progressive betting, and progressive betting is certain suicide, right? Wrong.

In the current target betting trial, the TA/T strategy is ahead $184,000 or 5.6% of total action against a house edge of 4.6% indicating a mythematically expected loss of $149,000. A Martingale would be $37,000 (10.5%) ahead against the same outcomes. Average bet values and overall risk or exposure are both much lower for x2 betting, but it doesn't much matter because casinos do all they can to block the use of a Martingale.

My target betting method needs two successive wins to achieve turnaround/EOS/recovery, which is twice as tough to come by as a single win. But if you take a typical game session such as this one...


(Click on the image to enlarge it)

...and then highlight the paired (or better) wins, it is easy to see why my method is very tough for the house to beat. You will win more often with a Martingale, with less risk. But since the bad guys won't let you play it, why not win with a method that they have not yet figured out?



There can be some scary gaps between paired wins from time to time, it's true, but they become less of a threat to your bankroll the longer you play, as long as you take my advice and add at least half of each session's profits to your war chest.

Fact is, it is not the house edge that blows most gamblers out of the game: it's their pathetically inadequate bankrolls, coupled with the fact that they consistently fail to fully exploit winning streaks.

You WILL lose more bets than you win, in the long run. So you have to bet opportunistically (and optimistically!) in response to a potential winning streak, knowing that every positive trend has to start with a single win, but not knowing for sure that that win will be immediately followed by another.

I once had a gambling aunt who would tell me: "Luck won't find you, you have to step out in front of it." And that is what target betting is all about. (Auntie Betty once owned a nightclub in London's Soho, and was a died-in-the-wool gambler until the day she fell off her perch; when she won, she gave most of the money away; when she lost, she kept on cranking until the next big hit came along).

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.
_