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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"It's crazy to keep on betting the farm when the odds are against you. No one in his right mind would take the risks you recommend."

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First of all, the odds are always against you in a house game, even for those dedicated but misguided souls who rely on card counting in blackjack.

And in fact, target betting never "bets the farm."

It simply demands a confidence in the numbers - "The Math" - to match the house's well-placed trust in the power of its long-term advantage.

The BST pencil logs that I have been posting in recent weeks provide a dramatic visual confirmation that anyone who bets randomly or relies on a tight spread is doomed to suffer a severe hit to his bankroll.

The state of play in the current BST test (#16, with 4,453 rounds and counting) provides yet another indication that progressive betting, and specifically target betting, is the only way to win.

As I type this, I have a win to date of 6.01% of my total action against a gross house edge of 5.14% and an indicated outcome of -$83,682 (a loss) on action of $1.63 million.

The net house edge so far is a much smaller number, thanks to doubles/splits and naturals: -47.5/4741 = -1.00% (not bad for an 8-deck shoe, but disciplined basic strategy play can work wonders!). The true negative expectation would therefore be a loss of $16,300 vs. my WTD of $97,805.

No magic tricks are required to get this kind of result again and again.

What is needed is acceptance that although each potential turnaround bet faces the same negative odds as every other bet, recovery is inevitable.

An eventual win can be counted on because after a failed EOS attempt and before another try, the target value is constantly updated to make the most of that next opportunity.

And of course, as long as your BR holds up, there will always be another opportunity.

The house has a serious problem when winning more bets than it loses does not automatically result in winning more money than it loses.

Against a random or fixed-bet player, the inexorable gravitational pull of negative expectation (positive for the house, of course) is enough to suck the punter's chips little by little into the dealer's tray.

And human nature is a big help.

A player whose BR is being battered by a prolonged negative trend - a "house spike" is another way to describe it - will very rarely choose a middle course in response: he will either drop his bets down to a minimum, or keep pressing his luck until his money runs out.

Either extreme is helpful to the house, and players who flip erratically from one to the other, as many do, further boost the effects of negative expectation.

Slow and steady wins the race for the house almost every time, and slow and steady is the way to beat those negative odds, with important exceptions that have to be very carefully timed.

Think of a casino house game as a ride on a very long escalator that you are trying to climb in defiance of a slow movement in the opposite direction.

You take one step forward, then move two steps the other way, three forward and two back, and after all that effort, you are back where you started, no closer to your goal.

Since you are determined to get to the top, you learn from past experience and figure out that the best way to beat the downward trend is to keep your head when you are going backwards, wait for a slowdown or (better yet) a reversal, and jump ahead several steps at a time when the opportunity presents itself.

Target betting is above all an opportunistic strategy.

Your chances of winning are no better when you bump up your bet than they are at any other time.

But if your "leap forward" coincides with the escalator moving up instead of down for a while, you have a very good chance indeed of ending up where you need to be.

Some people may find my analogies frivolous or even childish, and they are welcome to stick strictly to the numbers and keep right on losing.

I just know that when you are trying to climb up a down escalator, leaps and bounds are better by far than standing still while going backwards. Oops, there I go again...

To return to simple arithmetic, if you lose five bets in a row and then win one, you are four bets behind. And unless the current negative trend completely reverses itself, you will not make much headway either by betting randomly or sticking with the same amount.

That is what the house depends on for your "contribution" - a reluctance to spread wider than 1-5 at most, and an acceptance on your part that you are probably going to lose eventually.

In the current BST data set, 1,930 winning bets had an average value of $478 and 2,159 losing bets had an average value of $382.

Large amounts in both cases, for sure.

But since you are certain in the long run to lose more bets than you win, the only way you can counter the consequent drain on your bankroll is to make sure that you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

Target betting, which can also be defined as both progressive betting and money management, makes that happen.

In the BST sample, losses exceed wins by 5.14%, spelling certain doom for the fixed or random bettor.

But since my average win value exceeded my average loss value by 25%, that big, fat house edge was no threat to me at all.

You cannot hope to achieve a long-term result remotely like that unless you are willing (and able, with an adequate bankroll) to bet whatever the win-loss pattern demands in order to maintain your upward momentum on that down escalator.

Dithering, sidestepping, hesitating, stumbling and abandoning the strategy in mid-ride will all hand the house your bankroll in the end.

Remember, the house's strategy is a passive one that consists of inviting you into a game, selling you a few chips, and allowing you to do pretty much whatever you want.

The house provides the rope. You do the rest.

You, however, have choices.

And if you have a foolproof method and a little bit of cold hard cash behind you, you have the means to grab control of the game and make the house advantage irrelevant.

In the current BST set, 69% of all successful recoveries were against a negative or neutral actual value (AV), meaning that according to negative expectation, the house should at worst have broken even about half the time and taken my money otherwise.

Didn't happen.

More than 60% of all recoveries were achieved with a single win, not the two consecutive wins (twins!) that I often refer to.

The numbers for all 90,000 blackjack rounds to date confirmed the pattern: 68% of all turnarounds had a zero or negative AV, 66% of recoveries were 1-win turnarounds.

Baccarat is a tougher table game to beat than blackjack, but the 202,130-round Jones sample produced some familiar numbers: 65% negative or neutral EOS, 73% 1-win turnarounds.

The Rodriguez/Zumma numbers also toed the line: 66% negative/neutral, 73% 1-win.

These results cover a sample of 400,000 rounds derived from two very different casino house games.

They are possible because win-loss patterns are in "big picture" terms absolutely predictable.

That does not mean, and never will, that we can know the outcome of the very next bet. But the broader and wider our net, the more sure we can be about what we will find in it.

The house believes in and thrives on the predictability of games of chance.

Players should do the same.

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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A little progressive betting perspective here, and some thoughts on why robots can't ski, and gorillas can't putt...

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In a situation where you have lost several bets in a row or losses outnumber wins so much that you are in a deep hole, you have two recovery options:

Increase your bet values in the hope that going forward, a smaller number of wins will undo the damage done by a greater number of losses, OR
Keep betting the same amount each time, and cross your fingers that soon, the number of wins will exceed the number of losses, resulting in a profit.

Advocates of card counting will tell you that the only winning method is to set bet values according to the high/low ratio of the cards remaining to be dealt in the deck or shoe, and to control the spread to avoid attracting attention.

Counting only applies in blackjack, of course, and even then has to overcome the fact that a "rich" deck is only fractionally better for the player than for the house, if at all.

I have always questioned the message that comes across in pretty much every book about gambling that was ever written and in all mathematical papers on the subject: "Sorry, suckers...you can't win."

The truth is that you can win, and win consistently. But not if you play like a fool.

Over the years I have used several analogies to help illustrate the unscientific idiocy of applying clumsy runaway sims to the nuanced art of gambling well, and two of my favorites are the golfing gorilla and the robot on skis.

The golfing gorilla putts the way he drives, so in spite of the pinpoint accuracy of his long shots, he can never win a game.

The robot on skis sometimes gets to the bottom of the slope in one piece, but more often he ends up in a crumpled heap, defeated by such subtleties as trees and rocks, moguls and other skiers.

The reality of gambling is that you are, in the end, certain to lose more often than you win.

And if you don't bet in such a way that the sum total of all your wins exceeds the sum total of your greater number of losses, you are perforce doomed to lose more money than you win.

What is required is a combination of progressive betting and a keen sense of self-preservation.

Mathematicians argue that "damage control" is a waste of time and effort because negative expectation applies equally to every bet, so running away from a losing trend is as likely to make matters worse as it is to improve them.

They reject my contention that prolonged negative patterns are a relative rarity in games of chance, even though the runaway sims that mythematicians depend upon confirm what is in any case plain common sense.

A runaway sim will show a betting strategy nosediving into ruin after a pattern of losses than no human being would tolerate.

Like the golfing gorilla and the skiing robot, sims blunder into certain failure, unable to shift balance, steer away from trouble, or modulate their "stroke."

What I am hoping readers will take away from this blog is the realization that the technique I advocate can be applied with skill and subtlety, adjusting to changing circumstances and modifying the rules to match resources.

As in golf and skiing, sometimes brute force is appropriate, and sometimes precision saves the day.

There is an alternative, of course. It's called losing.

I have posted an Excel RNG file to make it available for download. LTD+1 RNG.xls uses a simplified set of target betting rules to demonstrate that a clear house advantage can be consistently beaten. Hit the recalc (F9) key several times, and you will see far more frequent overall wins than losses. When the green line dips drastically south of the Zero line, go look for the pattern that did the damage and ask yourself if you would stick around for such a battering if you were making the decisions rather than a robot on skis or a gorilla with a 5 iron! If you don't believe that a move has a better chance of helping than hurting, freeze the RNG values above the killer series, then watch the problem disappear. Life's like that, too: bend over, and you will be badly beaten; take steps to protect yourself and you (probably) won't. The odds in your favor are better than 7 to 1 in this situation.

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'd think a strategy that gives players favorable odds better than 5,000 to 1 would be a serious threat to casinos. Why it isn't...

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Gamblers are their own worst enemies. Casinos know that, exploit it, and are grateful.

Blackjack is probably the most documented game in gambling, or was before the current poker craze caught on. That's because it is the only "house game" in which how a player plays his hand is almost as important as how he handles his money.

Poker, of course, is not a house game: the casino takes a percentage or "rake" from every pot or applies a fixed charge per round, but participants are betting against each other.

That's the main reason poker interests me only as a spectator sport, and even then not much.

My aim is for every punter on the planet to win a little, and the house - all casinos everywhere - to lose a lot. We know that they, at least, can afford it!

In spite of all the good advice that can be had about blackjack in particular, very few people bother to learn the fundamentals of good play, and fewer still remember the right moves when the pressure's on.

Back in the '50s and '60s, when card counting began to catch on, the casinos panicked and began to dream up all manner of dodges to thwart players who had the bad manners to try to win.

Then they realized that the measures they had brought in to defend against a tiny minority of players were irritating everyone else. They did the math, and concluded that there was more money to be made from keeping the masses happy than could be saved by defeating the disciples of card counting.

I tried card-counting way back when and became pretty good at it. But in the end it falls foul of the fact that a "rich" deck (one with more 10s than the expected ratio) is often as good for the house as it is for the player, and over time expectation remains negative.

Other problems with counting are its narrow betting spreads (the experts warn against anything wider than 1-10) and its requirement that you have to stick around and keep playing against one deck or shoe - you cannot keep moving, as I recommend whenever the bad guys are getting all the good hands!

Of course I accept that adults have the right to do whatever they want with their money, and if their choice includes defying preposterous odds in the hope of making a big killing, it is none of my business.

Or to put it more selfishly, the more losers there are, the more opportunities there will be for winners to get in the game. And judging from the folks I get to meet every time I visit a casino, for them losing really is fun.

So, back to the heart of it all: tight betting spreads, and most importantly, narrow spreads that players impose on themselves, do much, much more to boost a casino's bottom line than the piddly percentage values of the house advantage at any given game.

Most players bet against themselves and still manage to lose. All the house has to do is provide a game, along with an occasional "free" drink. Give 'em a rope, you might say.

The latest BST sessions produced some numbers that I find interesting, and I hope you will too. Most people will ignore them!

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
Again, it's all about spread limits, which really are the nitty-gritty when it comes to beating the odds (forget about card counting, rabbits' feet and all that other hocus-pocus!).

As reported in the session summary, a 1-200 table limit (far wider than most players would dream of betting) results in 1,088 bets of $1,000-plus, the "plus" applying to splits and doubles, an average bet value of $792, and a hefty overall loss.

In contrast, against the same outcomes, target betting delivers a win worth almost 10% of total action, 73 bets of $1,000-plus, and an ABV of $208, or less than one third of the average bet required by so-called "conservative" play.

Over and over again, the BST table limit defeats by-the-book play, but the same outcomes are easily beaten by target betting.

The casinos are of course paranoid about anyone who beats them consistently, and so target betting does run into trouble now and then, not from what comes out of the shoe but from the people in the pit behind it.

It doesn't matter much in the long run.

Suppose that you are target betting and a canny pit boss keeps his distance until you are in a deep hole before stepping up and asking you to leave.

You are, say, $10,000 down, with a $2,000 bet due, and all of a sudden, you're out of the game. No problem. By now, you will be ahead of the overall game by tens of thousands, and a little patience is not going to leave you broke.

Just save the current NB/LTD numbers for another time, another place. In the gambling business, there is always someone, somewhere ready to take your bet.

In my book, I talk about two concepts, team play, which is self-explanatory, and tier play, which isn't.

Human nature often makes team play more hazardous than it ought to be, but the general idea is that if you hit a road block like the one I just described, you just pull out your cell phone and text the critical numbers to another player, who picks up the ball and runs with it until recovery is achieved.

Tier play splits casinos into different categories: $5-$200, $200-$2,500, $2,500 to $10,000 and $10,000-plus, for example.

At the "D" or lowest level, every time you lose a bet of $200+ you abandon the series, and start over with a minimum bet, gradually accumulating a block of NB/LTD numbers to be played out at level "C" later. And so it goes on.

Skeptics have suggested that the tier concept I describe is no different than betting a tight spread with, in many cases, far higher opening bets than I usually apply to target betting trials.

But that's just not true.

What the strategy does is not just tell you how much to bet, but when to stop...and those last three words describe a winner's biggest dilemma.

Target betting does as its name indicates. It provides a player who's "in the hole" with a goal to meet, then tells him to reduce his bet once he gets there.

Every haphazard or random player that ever was has tales to tell about the time he got way ahead, then lost everything because he kept his bets too high. Do that, and you are at the mercy of the house advantage. And if the WLP has already been unusually kind to you, chances are that you are due for more losses than wins.

Don't confuse this with the famous Gambler's Fallacy which holds that after a string of losses, the very next bet is "more likely" to win. It isn't. But in a situation where eight bets out of ten have been losses, giving the house an edge of 60%, it is safe to surmise that during the next several bets, there will be more wins than losses. Maybe.

Remember, with target betting you don't need 8 wins to recover your losses from 8 wrong bets. Just a couple will do the trick, and with the MSL rule applied, one win will be enough.

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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