When it comes to reporting on Indian gaming deals in Florida, white man speaks (writes?) with forked tongue!

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I have been watching developments on the gambling front in Florida with some interest lately, not because I plan to waste money on a trip down there but because the fuss and palaver provides clues about the way state legislators think.

After much self-righteous huffing and puffing, lawmakers basically caved to all the Seminole tribe's demands, swallowing whole the bait that 45,000 new jobs will be created and $4 billion will be added to state revenues by game expansions at the tribe's seven casinos.

Today's news item reflects the immediate impact of Florida's concessions to its Native Americans: a blatant attempt by the Indian casinos to gouge players at their blackjack tables.

The deal's publicity push promised $5 blackjack and baccarat, plus no-limit poker and sundry other gambling options, but when it came down to it, low-limit blackjack tables were nowhere to be found.

Worse than that, $25 players suddenly found their tables being switched up to a $100 minimum.

And unlike in Nevada, where low-limit players are allowed to keep playing at low stakes when the table minimum is hiked, anyone attempting to bet below the new limits was told to take a hike.

What amazes me is that none of the stories I have read makes any attempt to address the question of what table limits are all about.

Or why state pols invariably cave to casinos' demands, sucked in by promises of huge revenues that save them from the politically dangerous responsibility of funding services from legitimate sources untainted by moral murk.

Countless studies have shown that wherever it gets the nod (including in Nevada and New Jersey) legalized gambling costs more jobs than it creates and more money than it generates.

But somehow legislators never read those things, or are persuaded not to believe them.

Back to table limits: We can all guess that minimums are bumped up on weekends when demand increases because casinos are crowded, and we can grudgingly accept it as good business.

But the reality is that higher minimums reduce player's spreads, and that's where extra house profits lie.

A $5 player might spread all the way up to (gasp) $50, and even if he chooses his bet values more or less randomly, his 1-10 spread gives him a marginally better shot at staying ahead of the game than if he were to flat-bet at $5.

If the same player with the same limited budget is coerced into opening at $25, his spread will likely still cap out at or near $50, making him a more likely loser.

Of course higher minimums mean more moolah in the house's coffers, but tighter spreads make player losses that much more certain.

There's no good news about spreads in any of my models, that's for sure.

It is absolutely possible to win for a while with a spread as tight as 1-5 or 1-10, and if that were not so, no one would play table games and folks like the Florida Seminoles would lose their Native American shirts.

But the longer you play with a limited spread, the more likely it is that the prevailing house edge will gobble up your bankroll, especially if, like most gamblers, you are challenging the negative odds with inadequate funding.

Whatever your maximum, you will need many multiples of that amount in the bank to enable you to ride out rough spots and come out the other side ahead of the game.

And the narrower the spread, the larger the multiple, with a decreasing chance of success proportionate to the value of the "max." That's because the sooner you hit that green ceiling, the more you will be at the mercy of the house edge.

Overall, with a mere half-million or so mixed-game outcomes in my data set, a spread tighter than 1-2,500 will always lose in the end. It will do nicely for very long stretches, but will ultimately fail.

That assumes, of course, that you follow the dictates of computer simulations and take no defensive action whatsoever when a house spike hits and suddenly you can't win a bet to save your life.

A spread that wide is out of the reach of almost everyone, I realize.

But the harsh truth about gambling games is that they cannot be beaten without a disciplined plan with big bucks behind it.

Then again, a fat bankroll alone won't win in the end, so money is not everything.

Spread is the key, and evidently, those wily Florida Seminoles (whose casinos are actually being run by even wilier pros from Las Vegas and Atlantic City) know it.

Blackjack is far and away the best table game for target betting, because of its doubles, splits and naturals.

But variations on the traditional game, especially Royal Match, should always be avoided like the plague, along with layouts where the pay-out on a natural has been cut from 3-2 to 6-5.

Baccarat lags behind blackjack because wins never pay more than 1-1 (forget Ties and other distractions...they're a rip-off!), and the only sensible way to bet is to back Player only.

I know, I know, Banker wins more often than Player by an infinitesimal percentage. But the tiny edge it offers is blown to bits and then some by the 5% commission on Banker payouts.

The great advantage of baccarat is that it's a high rollers' game offering table limits that are generally far higher than for blackjack.

So when a recovery series drags on and bet values are weighed down with multiple zeroes, baccarat may be the best option for target betting.

Camouflage is a critical element in target betting, and full size baccarat layouts with all manner of high-value chips in play can provide it like no other game.

There are several target betting options that can be profitable when bet values in a new series are relatively low, but because the house edge is much higher (five times higher or more) you should figure to head back to blackjack or baccarat the moment the going gets tough.

Personally, I enjoy field bets at craps in spite of a house edge that ranges from around 2.6% to above 5.0%, depending on the payout for 6,6 (go for 3x tables whenever possible).

As in blackjack, a turnaround bet on the field can hit an x2 or x3 payout, greatly adding to the EOS profit.

I like 3-card poker for the same reason, although target betting has to be modified to accommodate the ante/raise procedure.

An important rule: never, ever bet on "Pair Plus"!

It is very rare indeed to see a player who doesn't put money in that innocent-looking drain-hole, and it is the reason most 3-card poker players are losers.

Bet only the ante, raise only on a Q,6 or better, and when figuring your LTD+ values, you should HALVE your current loss to date, rounding up in appropriate increments (-$275 calls for an ante bet of $150, for example).

The house edge for the game is around 4.0%, or at least 4x that for blackjack. But as long as bet values are at the low end of your sliding scale, the game's ante bonuses (up to 6x!) can make for profitable play for a while.

Again, never waste money on Pair-plus and ignore whatever sales pitches you may hear from dealers and even other players.

Pair-plus makes about as much sense as a Tie bet in baccarat, and in effect it requires you to constantly bet against yourself!

Roulette has its charms when seats at blackjack and baccarat layouts are hard to find, but the house edge of 5.26% makes it a short-term option at best.

Put your money on 1-1 options only (black/red, odd/even, first/last), although I confess that often I do well picking a 2-1 column (usually the first on the left), sticking with it every time, and applying the same LTD/2 rule as for 3-card poker.

Those are the only table games I will ever play in a casino.

My ranking: blackjack, baccarat, craps field, 3-card poker, roulette.

And when the going gets tough, blackjack is always #1, backed up by baccarat when table limits become a problem.

Table limits are, of course, much lower at craps, 3CP and roulette than at blackjack and baccarat, so that is another solid reason to limit your play against games with higher (or should that be lower?) negative expectation.

Follow the target betting rules consistently and you will win consistently too, which always becomes a problem after a while.

Losers get nothing from casino personnel other than forced sympathy and encouragement to lose some more.

Winners are welcome, as long as they eventually become losers - if they keep on winning, they are assumed to be cheats, and hell hath no fury like pit boss who suspects illegal shenanigans.

As a frequent winner, expect to be scrutinized and sometimes even gently harassed.

But don't expect the treatment to let up even after you have been proved honest and upright...winning is itself a sin in the house's book.

Your best allies are the dealers. Treat them well, and they will be less inclined to clue in their bosses on how you are managing to reverse the expected direction of the "chip flow."

Dealers who know you and can rely on you for steady tokes will usually tip you off when they are on a hot streak, a concept that academic mathematicians insist can have no bearing on overall odds but every player knows to be a very real part of gambling life.

You will win steadily and reliably, sometimes attracting the attention of other players even before the dealer takes notice (although dealers are mostly much quicker and smarter than they are given credit for!).

In spite of that, never run away with the idea that you are invincible. You have standard negative expectation whacked, for sure, but sometimes the house edge can go dangerously haywire before it settles back to the norm, and you need to be ready for that.

Pit staff will want to get to know you, but never be flattered by their attention.

Winners attract "comps" because the house wants them to stay where the money was won until it gets lost again, which is how the script plays out for most punters.

Never angle for comps. You don't need them, and their price is too high.

(Losers are sometimes "comped" too, but only the ones who keep returning for more punishment, demonstrating that they have money to burn and are looking for a light!).

You will be tracked during play once the spotlight is on you, but you do not have to make the house's job easier by giving them your name.

If you can, shrug off overtures from glad-handing pit personnel and say you are just passing through and no thanks, you don't want a Privileged Player's Premium card, or whatever.

Anonymity is a much better way to go, although it gets harder to achieve the longer you keep winning.

Play quietly and politely, keep your head down, and resist the temptation to tell wayward players how to improve their game, even if they ask for your advice (and they will).

Just remember that losers make the games possible. You need them as much as the house does.

In spite of negative expectation, you really do have the math on your side.

Although each bet theoretically faces the same negative odds, there are other numbers at work in a gambling game that work in your favor.

Among them is the demonstrable fact that for both sides in a game, more wins are isolated than are followed by a second win.

That's bad for you when you are bumping your NB value in response to a mid-recovery win. But, more often, you are betting (with the OL, 2L, 3L and MSL target betting rules) that the house will comply with expectation and lose on the heels of a win.

It is a fact that you will lose more potential turnaround bets than you win, thanks to the house edge.

It is also a fact that because you keep adjusting your NB values to match and exceed the loss to date right after a mid-series win, that small disadvantage will only very rarely be a problem.

You know you are going to lose more bets than you win.

It follows both logically and mathematically that in that case, you must ensure that over the long haul, you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

Have I said that before?

Blackjack players will often tell you that the house advantage lies in the fact that you, the player, have to decide the fate of your hand before the dealer does. So if you draw a "stiff" (two cards that have to be hit) and then bust, the dealer wins even if he turns out to have had a worse starter hand than yours.

The "bust first" rule is a factor, certainly, and it bolsters the house edge significantly. But not nearly as substantively as the simple fact that the dealer has a lot more money to back him than you do.

The house can take a licking for an awfully long time, and will probably be rescued by its flimsy numerical edge long before it has to cry Uncle.

All a flat or random bettor can do is soldier on when times are tough, and pray for a miracle.

The target player needs neither prayers nor miracles.

As a target strategist, your best weapon lies in the fact that you set bet values, not the house.

The house will always, in the end, win more often than you. But you get to determine how much it wins when it wins and how much it loses when it loses.

That is true for every player, but it consistently makes the difference between winning and losing only when target betting is part of the picture.

Target betting shows you how and when to exploit control that most players don't know they have.

Random players hit their personal limits very quickly, and from then on will usually need to win more often than they lose because the odds are that that is the only way they can hope to win more money than they lose.

Your bets freeze in a downturn but will, when appropriate, keep rising to stay one step ahead of the LTD.

And that makes it really difficult for the house to beat you in the end.

In the good old days, pit bosses often used index cards on a chest-level desktop to track the activity of players who were either regulars requesting a rating, or of special interest for some other reason (an excess of "luck" for example).

One column of cards would track losers, and the column beside it would be for winners.

Usually, a card moved into the losers column would never move out of it, making it easy for the pit staffer to mentally tally one set of cards against the other and guess the current state of the house's bottom line.

What they would rather not do was move a card from lose to win, then lose, then win, which is what will happen again and again to a target player who stays in the same blackjack pit for too long.

Keyboard clicks have mostly taken over from squiggles on index cards, but either way, the moral of this tale is: Keep moving.

Most of the time, recoveries will come in six bets or fewer, and profits will accrue at a gentle pace that does not attract much attention.

Paired wins are less frequent than isolated wins, for sure, but on average they are rarely more than a handful of bets apart.

However, when a series drags on for ten or more rounds and the bets begin to look like real money, never be tempted to show the pit how clever you are by achieving EOS under the watchful eyes of the same crew that saw you place your piddling opening bet.

Betting from $5 to $500 in the same general vicinity is a bad idea.

I did that several times too often before I determined that profits and a low profile mattered more than demonstrating how deep a hole I could get out of.

Cash, not kudos...that's the rule!

If you really want empathy (especially when alternate layouts are temporarily hard to find) it is best to suspend play against a challenging series that would usually require a move, keep the LTD/NB numbers in your head, and drop back to a minimum bet.

You can accumulate several "deferred" series if you choose, saving them for another casino or another day, and your (temporary) losses will keep at least one pit crew happy for a while.

The folks in the next pit you visit will likely have a lot less to smile about.


The screenshot composite above is from the current BST blackjack session, which as I type this is a little over half done (I don't play as often or as long as I used to, on the grounds that my point was made long ago!). The numbers you see are not "proof" of anything, just an example of what can be achieved with target betting. Three of the four sessions had more losses than wins, and the other was a virtual break-even. In each case, the state of the bankroll after the last hand belies those numbers (and unlike many no-dough apps, BST does not permit players to alter their bankrolls!). I suppose it's possible that similar results might be seen if a simple Martingale were used against Ken Smith's elegant little app, but I have my doubts. I also suppose that cheating is an option. But it isn't for me. As I always say: What for? Target betting is easier and more reliable than cheating could ever be!

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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Can target betting make you a winner without a million-dollar bankroll? Absolutely, because anything is better than trusting to luck.

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I have been doing this long enough to be more amused than insulted by comments such as "You are an innumerate fool" or "You're so stupid you couldn't find your ass in the dark with both hands, let alone a way to win at gambling."

Swimming upstream is always tougher than going with the flow, and if everyone made a habit of challenging the conventional wisdom, our world would be even more chaotic than it already is.

Still and all, I frown a little, then quickly get over it, when I am accused of somehow selling the gambling masses down the river by failing to come up with a means of beating the house with minimal risk.

When I started out on this "hopeless" odyssey a few decades ago, I did so with the conviction that if arithmetic makes the house advantage possible, then arithmetic must be the best weapon to use against it.

Countless hours of computer-enabled research coupled with extensive real play have confirmed that I was right. And so were all the wise men who have been saying since cavemen first rolled bones and bet on them that it takes money to make money.

Luck doesn't get the job done, and big bucks alone don't either, as many a high roller has discovered at great cost (let's hear another round of applause for the late Kerry Packer!).

The math is the math, so there is nothing I can do about the fact that the widest possible spread from your opening bet value to your maximum is the only viable antidote to losing.

It's not as if the gambling industry does not know this already. I have never claimed to be a brilliant thinker, just a stubborn plodder on a mission, and the spread limits in place in every casino on the planet confirm that spread matters more than bankroll.

Trouble is, like love and marriage, you can't have one without the other. If you plan to spread from $5 to $25,000 whenever a prolonged negative trend in the win-loss pattern demands it, you will not get far if a single "max" loss will wipe out your bankroll.

It is a sad fact that every attempt to get get around target betting's long-term bankroll requirement is likely to weaken the strategy to the point where it becomes even more dangerous than tossing our large bets at random and hoping to get lucky.

Academic mathematicians harp endlessly on their theme that analysis of past game results has nothing to tell us about the future. They are talking flat-out nonsense, of course, but they have a job to do and the gambling industry is grateful to them.

That said, I took all my BST blackjack outcomes (now more than 85,000 rounds) and plugged in a couple of major target betting modifications, knowing in advance what would probably happen.

First, I cut the permitted spread from 1 to 5,000 to 1 to 1,000, leaving the bankroll at a cool million bucks.

Then I reinstated the recommended spread, and instead cut the bankroll or "bust" limit by four fifths to $200,000.

The benchmark was a 1-5,000 spread and a $1 million BR using a target betting rules set that suffered a couple of busts in 85,000 rounds but still turned the house edge on its ear, delivering an AV of +1.02% against a net HA of 0.69%.

Reducing the spread by 80% increased the overall action from $62.8 million to $181.4 million, and blew away a win of $640,000 (+1.02%), replacing it with a LOSS of $1.9 million (-1.04%). The number of bets over $1,000 shot from 5,800 or 6.7% to 36,590 (42.6%), confirming that what might seem to be "conservative" play can often prove fatal.

When the bankroll was slashed by the same 80%, from $1m to $200,000, the blackjack models told a very different story. Action dropped from $62.8m to $32.3m and the overall win improved from $640,000 (+1.02%) to $1.58m (+4.9%). The number of $1,000-plus bets required fell from 5,800 (6.7%) to 4,600 (5.4%).

All of this is so much hot air, not because the academics are right when they dismiss prior outcomes as "anecdotal" and "irrelevant" but because most players will never be able to finance a 1 to 5,000 spread and a $1,000,000 BR.

Most emphatically, that does not mean that profitable target betting is forever beyond the reach of a "low" roller.

The only alternatives to progressive betting in response to a losing streak (omitting never making a bet at all as an option!) are flat or fixed-sum betting, or random betting. And neither of those non-tactics has a prayer against the house edge in the long run.

A while back I introduced the acronym WYNN for Watch Your Negative Numbers, and it's good advice that can help you overcome a persistent negative trend.

Let's say that after ten rounds of blackjack, you are betting an average of $10 and you are $60 in the hole. It does not much matter that the house is currently enjoying a 60% edge in a 1.0% game. All that counts is that if you keep betting at the same level, you will need six wins just to break even and chances are, it won't happen.

If all you do as a step towards target betting is accurately track your loss to date (LTD) at all times, knowing that you need to win more when you win than you lose when you lose to offset the effect of losing more often, your game will improve.

The rule of thumb is to freeze your bet after a loss, just in case that loss is the first of several, then bump the bet in response to a win, in the hope (never the certainty) that the reverse is true.

Because of the house edge, your boosted bets will lose just a little more often than they win.

But that will not set you back in the long run because you will always know what your win target is, and will adjust your post-win bet values accordingly.

I have yet to tackle a casino table game with $25,000 bets and a million-dollar BR behind me, and because of that I have been told that everything I have been doing for the past 30 years is "an intellectual exercise" with no real-world relevance.

Not so. For one thing, my research has taught me that betting like almost everyone else does, spreading no wider than 1 to 10 and praying a lot, is a fool's game.

I know how to win, and I do it more often than I lose - and before you ask, the wins add up to more dough than the losses!

The trick is to use a weapon that is summarily excluded from all computer simulations, a handy-dandy little thing called intuition.

I don't stay in a game if things are not going my way, with the result that I probably spend more time on the hoof than I do with my butt in a chair.

I know very well that many of target betting's bells and whistles (OL, 2L, 3L, MSL and WP among them) depend on a fat BR to work their magic, and if I am playing on a budget, I have to set them aside and rely on my gut more than I would like.

The truth is that most of the time, the to-and-fro of a table game like blackjack is a gentle motion, with wins and losses fairly evenly distributed and the house edge exerting a slight tug south of the horizontal.

Guess what: winning streaks are a good thing and losing streaks are not. Obvious, right? Maybe, but when I watch other players, I am amazed at how few of them think to pull back or tread water in a downturn and press their bets when there is a prospect of a positive trend.

In routine play, I spread as wide as I can and carry a BR that is at least ten times my maximum bet.

But if I am a few hundred dollars ahead and a downturn hits, I am happy to abandon the recovery series and walk away a winner rather than follow the target betting rules to the letter and risk being wiped out.

I usually try to apply at least the LTD+ rule in response to a mid-series win, but sometimes I will reduce my potential risk by limiting the bet "bump" to one or more successive parlays.

I hate to do it, but gambling is (among many other things) about cutting your coat according to the available cloth!

Just remember, the longer you play, the more likely it is that you will succumb to the house edge and lose more bets than you win.

If you plan to come out ahead, you have no choice but to minimize losses and maximize wins.

Assuming you are not psychic, you must therefore treat each loss as the first of two or more losses, and each win as the opposite.

Again, you will be wrong just a little more often than you are right. But keep WYNN in mind, and you will be able to overcome the house edge and make a little money.

If you hope to make a lot of money, you are bound by the rule that decrees that you have to speculate to accumulate.

The less money you have, the less money you will make.

Most gamblers are done in by flat betting or self-imposed tight spreads.

The house does not want you to spread wide, hence the table limits.

Ask a pit boss, and he will tell you that table limits are there so that penny-ante players will not be intimidated by fat cats who make their bets look like chicken (scratch).

That is nonsense.

The idea is to monetarily "corral" players and discourage progressive betting that the casinos know will routinely defeat the house edge.

Limits also take advantage of the fact that recreational gamblers (there's an oxymoron for you!) don't like to move from table to table, especially once complimentary cocktails start doing their job.

And most players set their own upper limits, limiting their chances of overcoming a prolonged downturn.

It is rare for me to see a weekend punter betting wider than 1-5, unless he is in the death throes of a lousy run and is in a hurry to put himself out of his misery.

Think spread, spread, spread the way a realtor thinks location, location, location.

Do that, stay sober, and keep your head down and you are more likely to go home a winner than any of the players around you.

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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Occasional losses are inevitable as long as there is a house advantage (and there always is). Target betting makes those losses very rare indeed.

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Sims tell lies. We all know that. But when they say things you want to hear, they're so cool.

Opponents of any and all betting methods that challenge the supremacy of the house advantage in casino games of chance are crystal clear in their interpretation of the "laws" of mathematics.

If the actual value (AV) or house advantage (HA) applicable to a representative sample of outcomes is a negative percentage, then a player's losses against those outcomes will closely approximate his total action multiplied by the HA.

So 1,000 bets against a negative HA of 2.0% with an average bet value (ABV) of $10 will result in a loss of $200, give or take a chip or two.

There is no room for equivocation here: "Any amount bet against a negative expectation must have a negative result."

Luck can upset the house's applecart for a while, but it is a temporary phenomenon according to the law(s) of large numbers, and the axiom can be boiled down to three little words...you can't win.

That means that the following sim-generated results could not have happened:




They did happen, against outcomes supplied by a random number generator (RNG), with all five indicated progressive betting methods showing a profit after 1,000 rounds in spite of a very substantial house edge.

Last time, I posted a summary from 150,000 RNG outcomes that showed target betting well ahead of the game in defiance of the "laws" of arithmetic as interpreted by the gambling industry and its very smart experts.

And to be fair, their pessimistic view of a gambler's long-term prospects is logical as long as the punter bets fixed amounts or bets randomly.

If he bets progressively with a very specific target in sight, negative expectation will be thwarted at least 99.99% of the time, making results like those above and elsewhere on this blog commonplace.

The methods summarized here include the standard Small Martingale, which doubles the bet after any loss until a win is achieved, delivering a profit equal to the value of the opening bet, and a souped-up Martingale (-5, -10, -25, -50, -100, -250, +500) that gooses win values in proportion to an increase in overall risk.

Target betting heads the list, of course, with OG referring to a version of Oscar's Grind that departs from the rules laid out by Tom Ainslie in his book.

Mr. Ainslie claims that "Oscar" has been a steady winner for him year after year and is endorsed by one of gambling's premier mathematicians. But I have been far less lucky whenever I have applied it against one of those sims that systems debunkers love so much.

The OG shown above doubles the bet after a win, to a maximum value of the loss to date (LTD) plus one unit.

The Ainslie version adds one unit after a win, ensuring that recovery after a prolonged downturn will be long and arduous indeed.

Mr. Ainslie recommends abandoning a recovery attempt and starting over if the LTD hits 20 units (-$100 at a layout with a $5 minimum). That rule makes getting ahead a very iffy proposition.

OGT spices things up a little by making the win target not one measly unit, but 10% of the maximum loss in the current series. So if the method is $500 "in the hole" at one point, the win target is $50, and so on.

In each of the above summaries, EXP shows the amount each method "should have" lost in compliance with the HA x Action formula promoted by the gambling biz.

As you can see, it didn't happen, which is not to say that it never will.

The estimable Wizard of Odds, by far the most eloquent of all the casino shills plying their trade on the Internet, describes his decisive debunking of a betting strategy devised by a challenger with the lyrical name of Daniel Rainsong.

I have no knowledge of Mr. Rainsong's method and have been unable to track him down, but my guess is he wuz robbed.

The sim that beat him imposed a spread limit of 1,024 to 1, which might not have stymied Mr. Rainsong's strategy but would be a big problem for mine.

Mike "Wiz" Shackleford, self-billed as an international casino consultant, was able to offer Mr. Rainsong a seemingly generous house edge in his "billion bet sim" because he well knows that it is a deficiency in the critical combination of spread and bankroll, not the value of the HA below double digits, that seals a player's negative fate.

Hell's bells, he could have set the runaway sim's HA at zero and still have "beaten" the Rainsong method. But that, of course, would have given his game away.

Like many gambling industry insiders, the Wiz is well aware that inadequate bankrolls and tight spreads are the stuff that fat house wins are made of.

An even-money game (the sort that does not exist in any casino) would draw out the house's winning process a little longer, it's true. But it is short-term negative spikes against the player that put the wind up inexperienced players and wipe out piddling bankrolls, not gouge-level HAs.

The great joke in gambling is that most punters would be defeated by a game that actually gives them the edge!

That is why casinos routinely report game win percentages that far exceed the known HA for blackjack, baccarat, craps, roulette and the rest.

Think of the billboard slogan that suckers could be reading as they pedal-to-the-metal towards their certain doom in Las vegas: "We'll give you a player edge, but we'll STILL kick your ass."

Spread is the whole ball of wax for progressive betting or for ANY winning method, and a 1,024-1 limit is a deliberately deceptive gift to anyone claiming that the house edge is unbeatable.

It is a non-issue for most gamblers, for whom a 1-10 spread is too much excitement, as well as a guarantee that they will lose unless they get very, very lucky.

Casino operators have known since the beginning of time that capping the bet spread is the most effective way to protect the house edge.

That is why table limits ($5 to $500 at a blackjack layout, for example) exist, and why pit personnel are on the lookout for players who gradually escalate their bets until they achieve a turnaround win and then start over.

"The math" demands that the sooner you hit your upper limit, whether it is house-imposed or your choice, the more likely you are to fall victim to negative expectation.

Conversely, the more wiggle room you are permitted, the greater is the probability that you will be able to win more when you win than you lose when you lose, thereby overcoming the otherwise inexorable ill effect of losing more often than you win.

It is a challenge to work a casino with target betting, and it can only be done by keeping as low a profile as possible.

My policy has always been to spread no wider than 1 to 50 at a bottom tier casino (say, $5 to $250), and no wider than 1-5 at any one layout once the bet has reached $100.

Above the bottom level, the rule of thumb remains 1-5 at the current layout, and drops to 1-10 in any one casino.

The theoretical effect of this sliding scale is a whole lot of to and fro between layouts and casinos, but theory has a habit of evaporating when real life takes over.

Because the odds against you do not change much from deck to deck or game to game, a recovery series made problematic by "local" limits can be suspended until better conditions are available. But that will not happen often.

As your bankroll grows, it becomes easier to stay calm and confident when the pressure is on, and respond appropriately.

In spite of all of the Wiz's claims to the contrary, computer simulations are not a substitute for real play because they exclude the most critical component of gambling, the human element.

They also eliminate cards, dice, wheels, dealers and real time.

I have on occasion been accused of being an agent of the casinos because I offer players an alternative to losing that cannot possibly help them in the long run.

All I can say to that is that anyone claiming that games of chance cannot be beaten is a far more effective shill for the casinos than I could ever be.

Bet flat or bet randomly and you will lose.

Bet progressively according to the rules that I have been providing free of charge for more than a decade, and the odds will be dramatically in your favor rather than fractionally against you.

Either way, the arithmetic is very simple.

Against a game with a 2.0% house edge, you have a 49% chance of winning any bet and a 51% chance of losing it, whether you use target betting or not.

That means that each and every time you place an LTD+ bet in the hope of turning a losing series around, you will probably lose it.

But because your bet values keep changing to match the LTD (and because you either win or lose 100% of your bet, not some cockamamie amount in between) you can be confident that eventually, you will beat those negative odds.

On average, target betting with optimum parameters applied will turn a recovery series around in just over five rounds.

Both versions of the Martingale will do the job a little faster, but their greatest drawback is that they are unplayable in most casinos (pit staff will interfere with their use because they know they represent a real threat).

Tom Ainslie's inch-by-inch version of Oscar's Grind needs an average of 30 rounds to get out of the hole with the 20-unit bust limit omitted. It cuts that number by more than half with the limit in place, but struggles to make a profit, obliterating its gains with a succession of $100 bailouts.

Oscar's Grind could easily be a creation of the casino industry because the limits Mr. Ainslie advocates guarantee that it will fail while deluding the player into thinking that he is in control.

It is a progression, to be sure, but a halfhearted and nervous one that is no threat to the house advantage.

Capping the bet at $100 (assuming a $5 opener) will accelerate the bankroll's downfall and might even be more dangerous than betting random amounts within the same range and hoping for a little luck.

A veteran dealer at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas once told me that Frank Sinatra, a blackjack enthusiast who liked to take over an entire table, would stuff his pockets full of chips and walk away when he won but was not required to pay off his marker when he lost.

That, I admit, may be the best betting strategy I ever heard of. Target betting is the next best thing, far superior to any version of Oscar's Grind!

It all comes down to the comparative frequency of wins and losses, or the win-loss pattern (WLP), and the demonstrable mathematical truth that for both sides in the game, isolated wins are more common than streaks.

For a random player, the WLP whisks his fortunes back and forth like a falling leaf in a gentle breeze, a win here, two losses there, a win, a loss, two wins, three losses.

In essence, the target player bets against the house being able to sustain a winning streak, which is subtly different from putting his money on his own luck.

Most gamblers backing what they hope is a player winning streak do so diffidently, often failing to recover the chips they lost when the WLP went against them.

Target betting's primary objective is to recover past losses in fewer bets than it took to lose the money in the first place.

It is "axiomatic" that if the house cannot take a bite out of your bankroll by winning more often than you do, than the house has a problem.

When all of target betting's rules are in play, the strategy will recover prior losses with a single win more than 70 percent of the time (not as impressive as a Martingale's 100 percent, but usually not as dangerous or as obvious, either!).

Until the strategy's top limit bet value is reached, two consecutive wins will do the job.

Once the "max" is on the table, target betting is as much at the mercy of the house advantage as any other method.

But in order to get into a hole that deep, the method must have been battered by a spike in the house edge that will at some point have to be at least partially offset in order for the known laws of math to hold true.

Let's say that the house edge went haywire for a while, putting you 12 bets "behind" in in 30 rounds, for a series HA of -12/30 = -40.0%. Ouch! All of a sudden, you are at your limit, and the only thing that can save you from certain death is the size of your bankroll (and your intestinal fortitude).

How likely is it that the house spike will continue, or that the next few dozen hands will not contain enough player wins to get you out of the hole? Not very.

Negative expectation for the game is, say, 2.0% (higher than blackjack, but easier to work with when it comes to arithmetic). We know that at some point in the future, the 12 bets you are now behind will be mixed in with upcoming wins and losses until the overall house edge for a sample beginning with the first bet in the current series drops from 40.0% to a number much closer to 2.0%.

In theory, the WLP could bounce gently to and fro without any significant streaks either way for the next 570 bets until the overall house edge settles at the level where it is "supposed" to be.

But that is very rarely the way things go in games of chance. Much more likely is a pattern resembling one of the three red-line charts shown above: more downs than ups, but enough ups to save the day for you and your bankroll.

For most players, falling just a handful of bets behind sets them on a slippery slope that cannot be escaped without a calculated exploitation of every potential winning streak.

Bumping the bet in response to every win will at times increase the speed of the downward slide. But it will also make a very rapid recovery possible.

I spend a lot of my casino time watching other players from a respectful distance, because seeing them succumb to a WLP that I know I could easily have beaten is almost as satisfying as winning myself.

Don't get me wrong, I get no pleasure at all from seeing strangers lose their money. But there is nothing I can do to help them, and monitoring their avoidable missteps at least provides one of us with a positive outcome!

If you want to win consistently, you first have to accept that over time, you are going to make more wrong bets than right ones, and decide what you are going to do about that.

If you are $50 behind and plan to stick with a bet value averaging $10, then you know you will need five more winning bets than losing ones in the near future just to break even again. How likely is that? Again...not very.

By freezing your bet after a loss, you are, in a sense, betting that the house will continue its winning streak for a while.

When you bump your bet value in response to a mid-recovery win, you are up against the same negative odds that apply to every bet but recognize that a ping-pong volley of bets of equal value is not going to get you out of the hole.

The great irony is that much of the time, betting as wide a spread as you can afford will put you at less risk than betting smaller amounts over and over again as you slowly slide deeper into the mire.

Along the way you have to set aside the standard gambler's dream of rich rewards for little risk, and think instead the way the house does.

Be happy to pocket a win that is just a few percentage points of your total action, remembering that that is how the bills get paid in the casino that surrounds you.

Don't be greedy, don't be noisy, don't get cocky and above all, keep your head down.

You will win far more money far more often than the average gambler. But that does not mean you are unbeatable.

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.
_

Casino table games offer you just three choices. You can lose, get lucky, or make sure that you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

_
For once, a short post, reminding readers that you should test the rules of target betting for yourselves rather than taking my word for anything.

I am telling you the truth, but I do not expect you to believe me without proof of your own making.

Without progressive betting, you will lose. That's a fact. With it, but without target betting, you may also end up in the red.

The data and screenshots posted here are not submitted as proof. They simply illustrate what you can achieve in your own way and in your own time against games of your choice if you follow the rules of target betting.




I have laid out what I consider from experience and lengthy research to be the optimal rules for the strategy.

But until you build your confidence, and along with it, your bankroll, you are of course free to make whatever "customized" modifications you see fit.

I do not recommend cutting too far back on the LTD+ rule, the core of target betting, because instead of recovering prior losses in one or two bets, you will need three or more, and your chances of success diminish proportionately.

The math works like this: isolated player wins occur roughly twice as often as paired wins, triples happen half as often as pairs, and so on.

Safer modifications affect the opening loss (OL) response, which I generally set at PBx5 but which can be cut all the way back to no increase at all. My 2L setting is PBx3, followed by 3L at PBx1.33, assuming an opening sequence of -$5, -$25, -$75.

I play a win progression (WP) of PBx2 in response to an opening win, and keep it up until $200, after which NB=PB+$100 and a loss of $500 or more is written off with a disappointed sigh and a fallback to a minimum bet.

The data disc that comes with the book that will grow from this blog offers readers an opportunity to test my ideas and their own against samples of outcomes that can be changed with the tap of the recalc key.

Included is a warning that no simulation can be claimed to accurately and honestly replicate actual play (the only advantage of sims is that they save time and money).

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.
_

"Proof of wins is meaningless. Anyone can win once in a while. All that matters is that when your system loses, it loses BIG!"

_
I cannot over emphasize how important it is that anyone interested in learning the principles of target betting should not take my word for anything.

Gamblers are too ready to believe whatever they are told, but this blog is not aimed at them.

My audience (I hope!) consists of smart people who enjoy playing casino table games but do not consider that losing at them is inevitable.

They are not gamblers. They are players. And believe me, there is a big difference.

I was asked some time ago about the viability of a $100,000 target betting bankroll against baccarat, and my response was that while it stands a pretty good chance of making a steady profit, I would not recommend it.

I said that because target betting is not about taking chances. Its objective is to win, and the likelihood of success depends not on luck but on optimal use of available resources.

The switches or settings - the rules - of target betting each play a vital role in helping us towards our long-term goal, but only one of them is absolutely indispensable, and that is the LTD+ response to a mid-recovery win.

Even that can be modified to lessen potential strain on a limited bankroll, but once we start doing that, we need to be aware that recovery may take longer and deliver a smaller profit.

Last time, I introduced the acronym WYNN for "watch your negative numbers," and while I intended to poke a little fun at the best-known casino operator on the planet, the message was absolutely serious.

Most of the models displayed in past posts show a bankroll of $1 million and a win capability of at least $1,000 an hour at blackjack (less at baccarat because James Bond's favorite game pays even money at best).

Trimming money-making tactics necessarily cuts into anticipated revenue while reducing risk somewhat, and that requires a significant reduction in the "bust" limit, from a cool million to $250,000 or less.

After all, a 75% drop in the rate of return is only acceptable if it also permits a proportionate cut in the risk, or "level of investment."

I am generally inclined to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" point of view, but I do recognize that it is easier to say (or type) the words one million dollars than it is to put the indicated sum into play in a casino.

All of the models in my database are available to anyone who asks nicely to see them, and very few indicate a level of exposure greater than 50% of the notional bankroll.

With all target betting's bells and whistles clanging and shrieking, an exposure of 10% or less is not uncommon, and the strategy wins at such a rapid clip that the initial investment quickly becomes a distant memory.

The whole idea of target betting is to build resources as efficiently as possible, because as the bankroll gets fatter, the chances of long-term failure diminish.

What my critics refuse to accept is that human beings do not play like the mindless robots that are at the heart of any computer game simulation.

An excess of caution can often be more dangerous than outright recklessness, but a skilled player develops intuition that becomes more reliable as time goes by.

Personally, I can never prove that the dealer who shakes his or her head as I approach a blackjack table, warning me away from a current "hot" streak, will have actually saved me any grief. But I certainly appreciate the friendly thought, and very rarely ignore it.

So it is with a negative trend that was not preceded by a red flag waving: If it feels right, I will move before I reach my predetermined spread limit, and I certainly will not stick around past that point.

The argument that in the long run, "damage control" stands less than a 50-50 chance of escaping potentially deadly playing conditions and leading to a quicker recovery is deliberately and cynically specious.

And the claim that improved conditions were just as likely to have come along if the player had stayed put and taken his punishment like a man is irrelevant: table limits are a reality, and where they are not a factor, a target bettor has his own rules to follow.

The arithmetic tells us that no one, however clever or lucky he may be, can escape the effects of the house advantage in the long run.

In terms of wins vs. losses, with the latter inevitably expressed by a larger number than the former, that is true and it is foolish to believe otherwise.

And it follows that anyone who bets fixed sums or determines the value of his wagers randomly must in the end lose more money than he wins as a consequence of losing more bets than he wins.

It must then also be true that for the fixed-sum or random punter, damage control will over time prove to be pointless, because it can have no effect on the overall percentage value of the house edge.

Target betting succeeds against the house edge and the dire expectation it entails because dramatic win-loss pattern (WLP) swings in the house's favor are not the norm.

And as long as the target player has not yet reached his maximum bet value, he will be able to recover all his prior losses in far fewer winning bets than the number of "wrong" wagers it took to gobble up the chips that were temporarily sucked into the dealer's tray.

Even when his "max" has been reached, the target player has "the math" on his side.

Usually, the house needs a sustained advantage of at least 25% in order for a target bettor's bankroll to be seriously threatened, and a negative trend that is a dozen or more times greater than expectation for the game cannot last indefinitely.

That is why a strong bankroll is an essential weapon against the house. It will not be needed often, but like the big guns on a battleship, it needs to be there just in case.

None of this means that it is possible for a wealthy player to simply "buy the pot."

Money is very useful in a casino, sometimes even essential. But money alone will not guarantee a long-term win, as many a misbegotten high roller can testify.

Money and a plan...now that's a winning combination. As long as the plan is target betting.

So, to get back to the opening point of this post (and to repeat the advice in the blog's introduction), don't take my word for the value of target betting.

Learn the rules, and test them in your own time against games of your choice.

You can be sure of losing more bets than you win.

But you will still make money, even if the chips are not real.

Let's face it, if the house cannot win in spite of raking in your cash more frequently than it has to pay you off, the house has a problem.

You don't. And that is all that matters.

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.
_

Irrefutable logic supports target betting as the best way to win consistently at casino table games. So yet again, the conventional wisdom is wrong!

_
(The truth is that when the word conventional precedes "wisdom" it is more often than not a synonym for false or erroneous. Remember the flat earth theory? Or all the "expert" assumptions about house prices and Wall Street?)

This has never been an argument about whether or not the house advantage exists in games of chance. Of course it does, or the games themselves would not exist.

And I have never disputed that the house edge is the undoing of at least 99.9% of all gamblers: anyone who bets either relatively flat or random amounts is sure to lose eventually.

I am accused of being innumerate or (my favorite) discalulic, because I can prove the obvious over and over again.

And in the minds of many who consider themselves smarter than the rest of us, when the obvious contradicts the conventional wisdom, then the obvious is obviously wrong.

You would think that the following statement is too logical to run any risk of being disputed:

If the combined value of a smaller number of winning bets exceeds the combined value of a greater number of losing bets, then the negative expectation derived from (L-W)/N or losses minus wins divided by number of bets is not relevant to the end result.

In other words, "If you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win will not hurt you."

But by golly, stalwart defenders of gambling's status quo contradict the notion all the time.

There is, they claim, no way to prove the "win more" concept, because past outcomes from games of chance are always anecdotal or subjective and can never be used to predict the future.

Never mind that the target betting principle can be applied successfully to any sample of outcomes of almost any size from any honest and objective source.

Or that using just the "LTD+" rule and none of the camouflage against countless outcomes as yet unplayed will confirm that target betting - progressive betting - makes the house edge irrelevant.

My critics keep falling back on the argument that if you lose more bets than you win, than you must in the end lose more money than you win.

And that makes me wonder exactly who those critics are, since casino operators everywhere know full well that their games can be beaten and are constantly on the lookout for players who threaten the house's bottom line.

I take comfort in the fact that those who are skeptical of target betting contradict themselves and each other all the time.

For example, the hundreds of thousands of real-play outcomes that I offer as indicators of target betting's power over the house advantage are routinely dismissed as anecdotal and mathematically suspect.

But when I confirm that there were two "busts" among 59,901 recovered series (a win rate of 99.997%), the response I get is: "Aha! That proves that your ideas are nonsense!"

Target betting has so far achieved a "hold" of 8.1% against 84,000 rounds of blackjack with a collective house edge of between 0.74% and 5.7%, winning $306,530 when it "should have" lost at least $27,000.

It won about the same amount against 202,000 rounds of baccarat, in spite of an indicated loss (house edge of 1.19% x total action) of $101,000.

It "tanked" twice in an additional 114,000 rounds of baccarat, confirming that target betting is not a 100% winning proposition, and therefore should not be treated as such by the gambling industry.

I look at it this way: Odds of better than 29,500 to 1 in my favor are logically and irrefutably superior to odds of 49-51 against me.

The caveat that we all need to be aware of is that the application of any rigid set of rules to a very large sample of outcomes, retroactively or in advance of play, contravenes normal human behavior.

Likewise, the pretense of accuracy, honesty and relevance for a runaway sim that denies the "player" any response to conditions and circumstances is disingenuous.

The Wizard of Odds, for example, is a well-funded shill for the gambling industry. His website touts his $20,000 "systems challenge" and its reliance upon a billion-bet simulation to "prove" that the house advantage is always unbeatable.

But what does any sim - let alone one that claims to represent at least 10,000 years of continuous betting! - have to do with real play? Answer: Nothing.

I have been using variations of target betting for more than 30 years now, and my application of the flexible rules depends on the current level of two things: my confidence and my bankroll, which while connected do not always move up and down together.

There is not a player alive who would sit through the kind of punishment that is routinely dished out by simulations that eliminate not just the critical human element but cards, dice, tables, wheels, balls, chips and real time.

Sim proponents like the Wizard of Odds (a great moniker when it was first used by someone else on TV in the '70s) would have us believe that human behavior can have no long-term effect on the probabilities that apply to gambling games.

That makes about as much sense as a claim that a rider cannot control a horse, or that a speeding car will crash with or without a driver behind the wheel who knows the difference between the gas and the brake pedal.

For a flat or random bettor, it may be true that "damage control" will make matters worse about as often as it improves them.

But a target player can recover prior losses in a fraction of the time it took for him to get into trouble in the first place. And a win-loss pattern that will cause him serious problems is, at worst, about a 10% probability.

The truth about the random game outcomes that we call hands, rounds, spins or rolls is that while they are individually unpredictable, in concert they form patterns and trends that are reliable and cyclical.

We know, for example, that most wins for either side, player or house, are immediately followed by an opposite result, that half as many are paired, and half as many again constitute a three-bet "streak." It's called arithmetic.

And in spite of all the "expert" claims to the contrary, the rules of probability keep a tight rein on the pattern variations that can occur in the course of a game of chance like blackjack, baccarat, craps or roulette.

There are exceptions to every rule, but they are rare enough to be of almost no consequence.

Here are some results that the conventional wisdom says are impossible, or at best fraudulent:


The good news for you and me is that the results above (for baccarat and blackjack samples with the optimal target betting rules applied) are scrupulously accurate, and confirm a consistency that is mathematically predictable.

The more complex the target betting tactics become - with the objective of increasing win values while camouflaging the strategy from prying eyes - the wider the variation between one positive outcome and the next.

And since additional strategic switches necessarily increase overall action and, by extension, potential risk, it makes sense to add them gradually, as the bankroll grows stronger.

Adjusting a betting method intuitively to suit circumstances and/or available resources is not something that "sim" supporters like the Wizard of Odds will ever permit.

Their systems-busting weapon of choice will only work for them if the "player" at the heart of them behaves like a suicidal idiot.

Like hurricanes in The Hamptons, aberrational departures from probable win patterns hardly happen.

But they will occur, and the player response to them before they can prove fatal becomes absolutely critical, while being blithely ignored by the Wiz and his ilk.



As the caption above points out, casinos themselves are much less impressed by computer game simulations than they are by real-time research out on the floor.

No new game, or modification to the rules of an old one, will ever happen without reliable data "from the field" to support its predictable contribution to the house's bottom line.

The summary below confirms that when the non-essential (but very effective!) target betting switches are turned off, session outcomes fall within a much more narrow range.


One of the jobs of a blog like this is to state the obvious the way the "experts" do ad nauseam, so let me say that given an average per-session win of around $10,000, it makes very little sense to persist with a million-dollar "bust" limit.

I would urge readers to take a very close look at this summary, and pay particular attention to the numbers on the far right, which track the win per round for each session.

Those numbers are, you will see, mostly within a percentage point or two of one another.

They confirm the consistency and predictability that I felt confident must exist in win-loss patterns in games of chance when I began this quest in 1978.

The "sore thumb" above, of course, is the double-whammy red splat next to sessions 14 and 15 from the Rodriguez baccarat data set.

Damage control would not have been merely optional in those two instances, it would have been strictly enforced by the casino's own table limits.

That being so, would the huge losses indicated in the summary have been possible in real play?

All the other numbers in the summary answer that question: No way.

Another question that is begged, of course, is the effect on all the other results of spread limits enforced throughout exactly as they would have had to have been in the losing sessions.

The honest answer: little or none.

That is because prolonged negative trends are rare events, and the chances of one of them continuing from suspended play into the very next session are slim indeed.

In the next post, I will put up results from the baccarat+blackjack database with a $25,000 to $250,000 spread limit applied.

Ignore any experts who tell you that what I am doing here amounts to experimentation with anecdotal data until a winning strategy is found.

Right now, all we are concerned with is the application of a target betting rule that has been in the public domain for a dozen years, plus an end-of-series rounding up rule which is nothing more "experimental" than a nod at reality.

Given a winning previous bet (PB) of $5,000 and an updated loss to date (LTD) of $775, would would your next bet (NB) be?

If your answer is $775, you are not wrong, exactly, just a little out of touch with the demands of real play...

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.
_

"What can be asserted without proof can also be refuted without proof."

_
The quote above is from Christopher Hitchens, an author and philosopher who has the temerity to suggest that evidence is an important prerequisite for belief.

Those who doubt the existence of the house advantage at casino games of chance need only venture money and time to gather their own evidence that, barring blind luck, winning does not come easy.

It is also mathematically demonstrable (a pencil stub and the back of an envelope will do) that if you lose more bets than you win, you will most likely lose more money than you win.

But credulity begins to strain past breaking point when the mathematicians who bolster the gambling industry's disinformation machine insist that the numbers that support the house edge can under no circumstances be used to render it ineffectual.

A pencil and a scrap of paper confirms that if you can consistently win more when you win than you lose when you lose by a percentage significantly greater than the prevailing house bias, losing more bets than you win will not cost you money.

If in 100 bets against a 2% house edge your 49 winning bets bring add more chips to your stash than your 51 losing bets take away, you will end up ahead of the game in spite of negative expectation.

And if you can keep doing that again and again, you will soon become your local casino's worst nightmare.

Academic mathematicians (most of whom are way too smart to gamble), insist on a series of gambling axioms that beggar belief.

One is that blocks of outcomes from casino house games (blackjack, baccarat, craps and roulette among them) are uniquely random and therefore have no patterns or cycles that can be studied, and then relied upon to predict future results.

Another is that computer simulations based on random number generators (RNGs) very rapidly produce outcomes that closely match those that will be encountered in a real-time game of chance.

A third is that because of Rule #1 above, any sample of past outcomes, however large or objective - verifiable and unpolluted might be another way of putting it - is anecdotal and therefore totally irrelevant to any study of gambling, which is in itself a fatuous undertaking.

There is no evidence to support any of those contentions, but the position the "experts" take is much like a firm parent wagging a finger at an errant child: "It's so because I said so."

First, patterns.

Here are screenshots from two iterations of an Excel file that uses the Windows RNG to supply 5,000 outcomes in objective order with the house edge set at (-)1.5%.

(Click on an image to enlarge it)

SS#1 ended up with an actual house bias of more than 3.7% overall, which happens. Often.

Target betting relies on paired or "twin" wins to achieve turnaround for a recovery series, and you will see that in spite of the house bias, there were almost as many paired wins (339) as there were paired losses (343).

The simulation does not "double dip" meaning that three wins in a row do not count as both a double and a triple. This confirmed by the "streaks total" numbers on each side, which closely approximate the total number of wins and losses, each pair consisting of two bets, each triple, three bets, and so on.

Given 5,000 rounds, there were more of each category of losing streaks (pairs, triples, quads and so on) than there were matching winning ones, which we would expect in a sample with a high house edge overall.

In the second SS, there was a negligible house edge, which also happens. Not often enough.

There, twins, triple wins, quads and so on matched or exceeded the frequency of their "opposite numbers" but all in all, the difference was not worth much.

The file generates a new set of 5,000 rounds with each tap of the F9 recalc key, and anyone who would like to study it more closely is more than welcome to e-mail me for a copy.

I know I am safe in using a low-grade, less than perfect RNG because mathematicians everywhere love them to PCs (sorry) and will bravely stand up for them as accurate simulations of a real game.

So now to that second preposterous claim: the one about RNGs being reliable indicators of how an actual casino table game will apply its known pro-house percentage.

For anyone betting randomly or wagering flat or fixed sums, a prolonged negative trend or pattern is very likely to prove fatal, and it is possible that any attempts at damage control will ultimately fail.

"Damage control" in this context means either reducing bet values to ride out a negative trend of unknown duration, or walking away from a beating in progress hoping for a friendlier pattern at a different layout or game.

The same does not apply to a target player who has full confidence that as long as he has not yet reached his maximum bet value, two consecutive wins will get him out of trouble.

What makes the use of RNG output against a betting strategy both disingenuous and reprehensible is the knowledge that human beings have an essential role to play in the gambling process.

Any RNG-reliant sim, mine included, demands the assumption that a player would make no attempt to defend himself against a prolonged negative trend, either by varying his betting policy or walking away from the game and resuming play elsewhere.

Add this to the fact that sims also exclude cards, shoes, dice, wheels, dealers, money and real time, and the mathematicians who depend on them as indicators of actual play do not seem so smart after all.

I am much more comfortable with actual output from real games, so here is a streak analysis of a block of 5,000 bets taken at random from the BST blackjack trial that is still ongoing. (OK, not wholly random, because I took today's date, 0517, and extracted outcomes 517 through 5016 from BST blocks #5 and #6).


As you can see, there's not a whole lot of difference between the blackjack analysis and those for two RNG samples set at a 1.5% house edge. I would have preferred a clear negative expectation, but this is what happens when you select data at random: 4,884 rounds from BST05 and 16 from BST06.

Repeating patterns are everywhere in the course of any game of chance. But unless you know how to be ready for them so that you can use them to your advantage, that knowledge will be of no help to you.

You will not be able to see them coming, so you must bet in such a way that whenever favorable patterns occur, you will derive maximum benefit from them.

Successful betting, like so much in life, depends on good timing. But "good" does not have to mean "accidental" if you have a plan.

Skeptics often point to the size of the recommended bets for target play, usually because they do not understand that a narrow spread and a low maximum will invariably result in more action - and therefore more risk - than the levels I call for.

Here are some more patterns, tracking maximum wagering in two very large samples of baccarat outcomes, plus 80,000 or so rounds of "real" blackjack against Ken Smith's Blackjack Strategy Trainer.

Once again, any one set of data looks pretty much like any other...





The summaries at the bottom of each of these panels probably provide enough information for most readers.

Those of you who are more detail oriented might want to know the following:-

- The numbers in the second column refer to lines in each separate sample with the overall actual value (AV) to the right, indicating how many bets the "house" was ahead at the moment when the bet level hit the max.
- The AV for the series can be deduced from the next two columns to the right, which show first the series starting line, then the AV at that point.
- Skeptical mathematicians will often claim that there is no reason to hope that once the bet limit has been reached, robbing target betting of its "wiggle room", an egregious negative trend will abate sufficiently to permit recovery. This is invariably not the case, as columns 6 (ending line #) and 7 (AV at that point) confirm.
- The reason for predictable offsets to a very unusual house spike is shown in column 8, in bright red numerals: the series-to-date house edge at the moment when the first "max" bet was required. The average is around -50% and since generally it requires at least 25 bets to dig that deep a hole, numbers that large do not happen often.
- The next column to the right shows how much deeper the "hole" became before recovery was achieved. Usually not much, but once the max has been reached, the bankroll must be large enough to withstand an occasional ongoing slump before turnaround.
- Next comes the number of bets in the whole series, followed by the number of rounds it took to get into trouble in the first place.

The three separate summaries are very similar in many ways, confirming that outside of our inability to predict the outcome of the very next wager are options that enable us to win consistently in spite of the house advantage.

I have gone to great lengths here to refute the idiocy of some mythematical assertions with evidence, rather than without it, as Mr. Hitchens suggests in the quote at the top of this post.

Mr. Hitchens specializes in skewering traditions and attitudes that he believes have no basis in reality and no place in modern times.

The standard academic prohibition of the study and use of past outcomes is perhaps the most idiotic gambling axiom of them all, worthy of his attention if he were ever to turn it to earthly matters.

We cannot predict the outcome of the very next bet, or any one bet at any one point in the future.

We all understand that, with many of us falling back on the old cliche, "that's why they call it gambling..."

But when bets in quantity are studied collectively rather than one by one, distinctive patterns always emerge, as they must.

Denying the validity of analysis and its potential for prediction in "big picture" terms is both illogical and unscientific.

What on earth could make gambling's math distinct from any other kind of math? Nothing, that's what.

Perhaps there is one very good reason why house-trained mathematicians seeking to support the "you can't win" conventional wisdom refuse to accept the relevance of prior outcomes.

The study of what's past will invariably prove them wrong.

And wrong is something an academic (especially one with an agenda) hates to be.

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.
_ttern

"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.
_

Confession time. As the latest BST set wraps up, an error is flagged. Target betting still reigns supreme, but tight spreads get a modest boost!

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When I launched this new online venture, I chose to let it evolve in chronological order, with my (occasional, but inevitable!) mistakes doing their part to comply with the warts-and-all nature of blogs.

The problem arose in the batch of BST blackjack sessions that just concluded because compliance with the BST 1-200 ($5-$1,000) table limit was not tracked as fairly as it should have been.

One of the big differences between target betting and tight-spread play (accepting that for many people, a 1-200 spread is far from tight!) is that the strategy player betting in real time will never abandon a series before recovery.

He will often suspend play in mid-series, but EOS is always required before the bet value can fall back to the minimum to signal a new contest against the house edge.

My models are all set up to "play" the same way, and that caused a problem for BST limit tracking because with a low table limit, recoveries took forever.

That, of course, is the whole purpose of house-mandated spread limits. The idea is that maximum bets should be kept low so that a player is likely to get into trouble sooner, and then after a while, it will be impossible for him to get "out of the hole" if bets are maintained at that level.

In BST #15, for example, the $1,000 limit player slipped deep into the red at round 323 and did not get out of it for 1,950 bets (about 13 hours of play!). The recovery was a minor miracle in itself, but the good times did not roll for long: at round 3,300, trouble returned, and when the set wrapped up at round 7,834, BST TL was more than 163 maximum bets behind.

It would take more than a minor miracle for recovery to be achieved again under those circumstances.

I corrected the anomaly by permitting BST TL to call it quits at the end of each session, win or lose, just as a hamstrung limit player would have to do in real play (if Peter Punter gets his clock cleaned to the tune of say $20,000, he goes home and licks his wounds, then starts afresh the next time he's dumb enough to go back to the casino for a repeat thrashing).

The effect of the correction was to make BST TL a less dramatic loser than before:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
Thanks to target betting, the $1,000 limit bettor (let's call him Max Grand) came out of the series of blackjack sessions with a loss that was just 0.19% of his total action, improving considerably on the net house edge of 2.0%.

Max had to make 1,989 bets of $1,000 plus ("plus" being acceptable because of splits and double-downs) vs. high-limit target betting's 398. In other words, the BST table limit did its job and forced Max to risk more overall before his inescapable end-of-session loss.

Max's total action was fractionally less than TB's, indicating that although TB ventured into high-roller territory only one fifth as often as Max, when he did so, his bets were bigger on average.

The critical information from the above summary is that Max lost a little more than $5,000. TB won $148,000, or 5.25% of his total action vs. Max's -0.19%.

The summary below explains how TB was able to win while Max tanked:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
According to gross negative expectation of -5.82%, TB "should have" suffered a loss of $164,000. Net AV was a hair worse than -2.0% indicating a best result for target betting of -2.01% x action of $2,817,105 or a LOSS pretty much equal to Max's: -$5,665.

Didn't happen. And the reason it didn't happen is that TB's lesser number of wins (3,357) had an average value of $442 while his greater number of losses (3,813) had an average value of $350.

The whole point of target betting, as you know, is to Win more when you win than you lose when you lose so that losing more bets than you win won't hurt you.

TB's average win value exceeded his average loss value by +26% vs. a gross house edge of 5.82% and a net house edge of 2.01%.

I think we can all agree that 26% greatly exceeds both 5.82% and 2.01%.

Result, happiness for TB and misery for poor old Max.

As always, skeptics will point to those average bet values and scream blue bloody murder about the "big" numbers. None of the "experts" out there seem to have heard that in a casino (as in the rest of the world) it takes money to make money.

What's the best fiscal policy: risk less and lose almost every time, or venture a little more up front and win every time? You decide!

I am not about to apply the BST TL revision to all the other BST blackjack sessions (1-14) because the job has to be done manually and all I will end up with is a repeat of what we saw at the end of Batch #15.

The spread summaries remain fair and accurate because their purpose was to explore what would happen at different spread limits, starting with Peter Punter's standard 1-5 and working up the ladder.

Here's the #15 summary:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
Again we see that a spread range of less than 1-1,000 is doomed to fail in the long run.

Casinos know that, which is why no layout exists that permits bets from $5 to $5,000.

It is certainly possible to spread that wide if a player is willing to start out with a minimum bet in one place and hop up the ladder by as many rungs as recovery requires, switching games as needed.

Very few gamblers do that.

A prolonged negative turn will bring out a stubborn streak in most players that glues them in place, when the smart thing to do would be to turn tail and RUN.

It will be a while before I have all of the baccarat spread data, but right now, my hope that baccarat's lack of doubles and splits might make it a little less of a challenge than blackjack is NOT being borne out (with just 5 of the 45 baccarat sets processed, 1-1,000 remains the magic number).

In light of all of the data I have collected and analyzed in 30+ years of target betting, I don't see how self-styled gambling experts can pretend objective honesty when they claim that progressive betting cannot win in the end.

Never mind that no other betting method (fixed or random betting being the only alternatives!) has a prayer against the house advantage.

Here's how an old-fashioned Martingale would have done against the #15 outcomes:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

In case this is your first visit to the TB blog, I will say again that I do not recommend double-up as a long term antidote to the house advantage, primarily because casino pit staff will always spot it quickly and step in to interfere with its use.

That does not mean that the method is sure to lose. Far from it. My SM+ variation boosts the EOS profit from a single $5 unit to multiples that, er, multiply as a slow recovery drags on. The rule is -5, -10, -25 (not -20), -50, -100, -250, and so on.

As you can see, neither Martingale version comes close to achieving target betting's win rate.

Finally, the all-bets-to-date summary at the end of #15:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
The data above are self-explanatory, I hope, but I will pick out some highlights:

• Target betting won a total of $1.78 million or 5.12% of total action.
• The gross AV for 78,000 rounds of blackjack was -5.33% and the net AV was -0.78%
• Given the AV numbers show, target betting "should have" lost between $270,755 and $1.85 million. It didn't.
• Target betting's average bet throughout was $445.
• The strategy's average win value was $518 and its average loss value was $402, achieving its goal to "win more when you win than you lose when you lose."
• Target betting had a funny-money bankroll of $1 million that was less than 20% exposed.
• The strategy made 28,328 attempted recovery, EOS or turnaround bets, and LOST them 50.7% of the time, in keeping with the house edge for the game.
• EOS was achieved with a single win more than 65% of the time (mostly thanks to the OSL and MSL rules, but sometimes because of well-timed naturals, double-downs and splits).
• Bets of $1,000 or more were necessary less than 4.5% of the time through 78,000 rounds of betting.
• Target betting rocks...

That's it for now.

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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