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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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.

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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.
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"The only thing your fancy charts and lists prove is that you have wasted your life on a mirage. And even if you don't like it, sims tell the truth."

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As Ronald Reagan (not one of my heroes, I admit) famously said to an opponent: "There you go again!"

The two most powerful pointers to a mythematical disinformation campaign orchestrated by the gambling industry are the claims that past outcomes hold no clues to the future, and that simulations accurately reflect real-play conditions.

Come on! Let's use a little common sense here!

The French have a saying that translates to "The more things change, the more they stay the same" and any experienced gambler can confirm that it applies to what happens inside a casino as much as to life in the real world.

There is nothing mathematically unique about random results in games of chance, and learning from experience is as valuable for a gambler as it is for anyone who prefers to keep his money safe.

Simulations, on the other hand, have very little to teach us, because they assume that all players are self-destructive idiots, and you and I know we are better than that.

The long-standing campaign to discourage meaningful research in the field of casino table games smacks of age-old heresy trials at which clerics warned that those who asked too many questions were headed straight to hell.

It really is ridiculous to pretend that the future will not repeat the past. The past IS the future, and if we fail to take the time to learn from it, we deserve to lose.

I should qualify my objection to "sims": those that recreate the random numbers critical to roulette and craps can be helpful; those that eliminate every element of blackjack and baccarat other than the percentage of the house advantage are deliberately deceptive (dissimulations would be a better word for them).

Target betting is at its core the application of good sense to the gambling experience, which for most of its participants is about as removed from reason and wise judgment as an activity can be.

For many, the primary appeal of placing a bet is that it is risky and unwise, and the longer the odds, the greater the thrill of winning.

It's about being naughty and knowing that you are probably going to be punished for it while hoping that maybe this time you will get away with it, and be rewarded for your sins.

No one who feels that way will have much use for target betting, and will side instead with the chorus of "experts" whose message is always the same: You can't win.

You can win. But not without working at it.

I am often criticized for devising a betting method that can only be profitable for players who already have a lot of money.

The truth is that sensible money management is better than the senseless alternative even for weekend punters on a shoestring budget, although generally the best they can hope for is that it will simply make their money last longer.

What the casinos depend on is that gambling is all about choices, and most players will make the wrong choice almost every time.

Target betting, like basic strategy play at blackjack, exists to eliminate choices and replace them with consistent smart moves.

Because gambling is what it is, the smart move is only the right move when you win. But it stands to good sense (common sense) that consistency and discipline are sure to bring better results in the long run than flying by the seat of your pants.

It always amazes me how few gamblers take the trouble to learn the numbers that apply to the games they play, and with a nod to their worst enemy, I hereby offer the following easy acronym: WYNN, short for Watch Your Negative Numbers.

A week or so ago, I was playing blackjack in my hometown casino with a kid whose wrong moves were so frequent that finally the dealer blurted out in a stage whisper, "Are you sure you want to do that?"

He wasn't sure, and from then on the dealer and I between us coached him so successfully that his diminishing pile of chips took a turn for the better, and within 15 minutes, he was back in the black.

Target betting depends on constant awareness not just of the depth of the hole you are in, but that to win, you must always recoup your losses in fewer bets than it took you to get into trouble.

There is nothing delusional about that, and it is not heresy either. You will in the end always lose more bets than you win, so the only way to get ahead of the game is to win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

That requires discipline, confidence, consistency and (sometimes) a lot of cash, and none of those attributes conflict with the laws of arithmetic.

Google "progressive betting" and you will find hundreds of thousands of entries, most of which argue that it is a suicidal method that cannot win.

The truth is that it is the only method (other than dumb luck, which is not a method at all) that can overcome the reality that losing bets will always outnumber winning ones in the end.

House-trained mythematicians warn of the very real danger that at some point, the next bet in a progression will exceed the table limit "and then you are sure to lose" or words to that effect.

Quelle crappe, comme dites les Francaises!

No one without adequate funding should ever consider progressive betting, and for a player with a healthy bankroll, a looming table limit is simply a signal to back out of the game and go find a layout in a higher rent neighborhood.

The simplest progression is the Martingale or double-up, and players who succeed with it never incur more than three successive losses at one layout before moving on.

That way, they stand a chance of flying under PR (pit radar) while repeatedly turning their losses around and fattening their bankrolls still further.

They tend whenever they can to bet blackjack and field bets at craps, where naturals and x2 or x3 payouts will occasionally make a long-awaited win very profitable indeed.

Those Google citations I mentioned will often argue that a player has to be crazy to start out with a $10 bet and potentially risk thousands to win "just ten bucks" when a win finally breaks a losing streak.

They are written by math-challenged people who fail to grasp that a winning bet worth thousands wins thousands, not "just ten bucks" and achieves what most gamblers can only dream of: recouping all prior losses in a single wager.

In fact, the house's passive "system" is more like a Martingale than anything else, permitting a few players to get thousands of dollars ahead while secure in the knowledge that soon enough, they will lose and all those borrowed chips will be back where they belong.

In theory, a house edge of 1.0% at blackjack means that the casino will see a profit of just $100 for every $10,000 "at risk" - a level of reward that a Martingale player would find less than satisfactory.

In fact, most blackjack players are as bad at the game as the young man I mentioned earlier, and the true house edge is closer to 12% or $1,200 for every $10,000 of action.

Target betting requires knowledge and intuition, hence WYNN: watch your negative numbers, and when the house gets too far ahead, get the hell outta there!

Using my method with all its switches at their maximum setting can be a risky proposition, one that should not be undertaken without a very substantial bankroll.

But forget everything but the LTD+ response to a mid-series win, and the method is routinely more effective than a Martingale without the screaming sirens and flashing red lights that double-up will set off in any pit if a player is dumb enough to get caught using it.

I will say again, I don't recommend a Martingale, not because it is too risky, but because I do not want to be chased away from the games I love to play and WIN AT.

All those target betting switches can provide a long-term boost to profits, but their primary function is as camouflage.

They can be turned on or off or dialed up or down at will, which is one of the many reasons why simulations that feature a suicidal maniac betting exactly the same way ad infinitum are just plain dishonest.

I recommend that the starting point for nervous newcomers to target betting should be LTD+1u for an EOS goal, plus a win progression of x1.5 and MSL set at a modest -100.

If you have forgotten the rules, that means that in response to a mid-recovery win, you would bet LTD+$10 at a $10 table, repeating the formula if the end of series wager goes south for a total of $100 or less. After an opening win of $10, NB would be $15, then $25, $40, $60 and so on, with the eventual streak-ending loss becoming the new LTD.

Those cliff-drop negative trends that runaway sims depend upon cannot apply to a target player because of the spread limits that the rules impose: not more than 1 to 20 after a $10 opener, then not more than 1 to 5 at any one location.

Spread is the most critical factor in any casino table game, which is why the house imposes table limits that are getting ever tighter as the years roll by.

A big bankroll alone will not guarantee an overall win when losing bets outnumber winning bets.

A wide spread (1 to 5,000 is optimum) will make you a winner every time.


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

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(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.
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"Your methodology is a mess and your alleged strategy is too complicated for anyone else to understand. This isn't math, it's madness!"

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How rude!

But I guess when you choose to go public with ideas that challenge the conventional wisdom, you have to be ready to take a little unfriendly heat.

I have never claimed to be a traditional academic mathematician, and I suspect if I were, I would never have leaped into this project in the first place.

Mathematicians as a breed, and I have known one or two, have always seemed to me more interested in getting their heads around other people's ideas than coming up with anything new of their own.

Maybe they feel that this late in the game, there can be nothing new to come up with.

And I have to admit that my methodology, as target betting has evolved, has not been all that it could be.

I am too easily distracted by questions that occur to me in the middle of one aspect of the challenge of overcoming the house edge at games of chance, and as a result, my data is disorganized and hard to follow for people with tidier minds than mine.

I usually finish what I have started, but not in the methodical manner that a trained mathematician would insist upon.

So, here and now I am announcing a spring-cleaning project, which is especially appropriate today because just before dawn, I heard my first wren of the season staking his claim on this little piece of Northern Nevada.

Step one will be to take the blackjack outcomes and break out each separate component of target betting to see how it performs on its own.

That means starting with just the LTD+ rule (the one that makes it possible to win more when you win than you lose when you lose) and then carefully adding and subtracting elements such as the OL (opening loss), WP (win progression) and MSL (mid-series loss) rules.

Once I have the blackjack summary, I will post it here and then move on to the far larger baccarat data sets that together account for about 80% of the "real" outcomes in my database.

I should say once again that I flatly reject the notion that past outcomes from games of chance have nothing to tell us about what we can expect in the future.

There might be something to it if I were building a betting method from scratch using just the outcomes to hand, because there would be a real danger that I would end up with a strategy that works only for those outcomes.

It would be tough, I suspect, to devise a method that beats more than 400,000 outcomes from two very different casino table games, but that is not what I am about here.

Target betting, aka Turnaround, has been in the public domain for a dozen years now, and has existed in my head and in my spreadsheet files for almost two and a half times that long.

The basic idea, the deferral of a recovery bet until a single win ends (or at least interrupts) a losing pattern, owes nothing to the Jones and Rodriguez baccarat samples, or to the 80,000-plus rounds generated with the help of Ken Smith's Blackjack Strategy Trainer.

It's going to take me a while to get all of this done, but I will get there.

I can tell you right now that with all of the frills, feints and dodges stripped away, the LTD+ rule alone turns a 0.81% house edge into a 1.4% player edge, flipping an indicated LOSS of at least $263,000 into a WIN of $454,000.

That alone is impossible, according to those well-trained, tidy-minded, methodical mathematicians I mentioned earlier.

Adding my WP rule, which keeps re-doubling the bet after an opening win in a new series to a maximum of $200, adding $100 each round until the streak inevitably ends, pushes the overall win to $841,000 (+2.46%).

(An indicated loss, remember, is the product of the actual value of the house edge in a given sample, multiplied by the total action from the same sample).

Adding the MSL rule (repeating an EOS bet of LTD+ if the first attempt failed and the value of the lost bet was $500 or less) kicks the overall result up another notch to $1.05 million (+2.69%).

On its own, MSL bumped the final win from $454,000 (+1.4%) to $702,000 (+1.92%).

Adding OL=NBx2 to the bare-bones version of target betting reduced the final win by almost half to $222,000 (+0.79%), but when it was combined with WPx2, the outcome was a win of $886,000 (+3.12%).

And so it goes...

Of course, no betting rule is worth even a nickel if all it does is increase the final win by what could be a onetime fluke.

It has to be effective most of the time and that is something that can easily be tracked with a spreadsheet platform.

Runaway sims, the weapon of choice for self-styled systems debunkers, usually supply as little information as possible - the final result, total action, overall AV/HA and the invariably identical product of loss/action.

One of the purposes of target betting's "extra" rules is to provide a strategy player with a means to vary his tactics from time to time to camouflage what he is up to.

But many of them also serve to boost the overall profit from the betting method.

The numbers I get from existing data sets will not be precisely reflected in future play (assuming that games other than baccarat gave us the means to track every hand and conduct a post-win breakdown).

However, different samples from different games report strikingly similar results, enabling us to evaluate all those non-basic rules individually and collectively.

I can confidently predict that one of the good things that will come out of this spring-clean inquiry is confirmation that while individual "switches" can be turned on and off, together they make the strategy more profitable than it would be without them.

The rules are like a tasty stew, with each ingredient working together more effectively than if it were the only "flavor" in the mix.

And really, what is so complicated about the target betting rules? They become second nature very quickly, and eliminate the stress of trying to decide what to bet on the next round - a goal worth fighting for.

Perhaps their greatest gift (apart from steady profits) is that they tell you when you have won enough, and that it is time to quit the big-money arena and get back to square one.

Winners usually never know when to quit, a dilemma that more often than not makes them losers in the end.

Gamblers want a quick rush - money in a hurry.

Players with a plan know that a slow build with minimal risk is the only way to go.

One thing I should mention about the "new" tests (actually a repeat of work I have done before, with the results presented in a much more orderly manner!) is that I have streamlined bet values to fall in line with the demands of real-time play.

Given an LTD of -$875, for example, you would not fumble a pile of chips together to match that amount...you would push out $1,000 and be done with it, happy at the prospect of a $125 series profit if all goes well.

In all the past models, bets of clumsy amounts have been permitted, because this has always been as much a matter of proving the conventional wisdom wrong as of taking a bite out of the gambling industry's over-padded bottom line.

After all, how much can I do on my own?

That is why target betting is in front of you right now: I want as many people as possible to learn it, gain full confidence in it, and then use it to chip away at a business that has somehow managed to find respectability by exploiting the greed and ignorance of others.

Wall Street's bubble kept ballooning for years with excessive doses of disinformation and deception pumped into it day after day, and we all know what happened.

Target betting will not destroy (or even much discomfort) the gambling industry, because most punters are happier flying by the seat of their pants and losing than learning how to win consistently.

But as the old joke says about 10,000 lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean..."It's a pretty good start."

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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In the commonsense dictionary, gambling is just another word for losing, and losing is not what target betting is all about.

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Yesterday's e-mail brought a tentative suggestion that maybe a syndicate backing target betting to 1/10th of the recommended bankroll might stand a chance of making a profit.

It might, but it is not something I would be willing to support.

I sympathize with everyone who says that I have arbitrarily chosen a BR value that no one but the highest of high rollers (high in both senses of the word!) would dare to risk.

All I can do is point yet again to mathematical models that demonstrate that the widest possible spread and a BR to match together reduce long-term risk rather than increasing it.

Better yet, an optimum spread/BR combo promises greater profits at a faster pace, paying down an initial investment far more rapidly and building the strength of the bankroll so that threats are much less devastating.

And there will always be threats.

Win-loss patterns are broadly predictable, even if we can never know which way the very next bet is going to go.

And one of the things we can be sure of is that once in a while, we will have to work extra hard for our money.

My critics and I clash all the time over the question of whether or not a player can affect his long-term fate by relying on intuition and experience to apply judicious damage control when conditions get rough.

I am not interested in lectures about independence of trials and probability because I hear what they say and I have no quarrel with them.

A random bettor is just as likely to jump from the frying pan into the fire as he is to land in a safer haven.

Not so the target player, who only needs two consecutive wins to get out of trouble and more often than not will be saved by a single win.

With each fresh loss, the haphazard gambler becomes more likely to be a loser.

Without a plan that adjusts to every possible eventuality, luck is the only winning option, and anyone dumb enough to rely on luck had better be ready to pay a high price.

Both sides of the argument can go blue in the face repeating their conflicting mantras, but target betting at least is supported not just by past outcomes but ongoing tests against rounds as yet unplayed.

Here's my response to yesterday's query, followed by the latest BST set.

Interesting!
I have been posting baccarat-related data on the blog lately.
SPREAD is the critical factor, far more important than total bankroll, although of course the two are related (you can't have one without the other!).
To be more specific, a $1,000,000 bankroll is not in itself a guarantee of success with TA, any more than a $5,000,000 bankroll is sure to win without a PROVEN progressive money management method.
A spread of 1-5,000 ($5 to $25,000) and consistent application of the TA/Target rules, however, is a guarantee, assuming adequate funding.
I don't recommend a bankroll of less than 40xMax but have test data that suggests 20x might be adequate.
I have never posited viability for a $100,000 bankroll! I'll attach some numbers from my baccarat and blackjack data sets so you can see why.
The great frustration inherent in bucking the conventional wisdom is that any test outside of an actual casino environment must assume that a player would have no reaction whatever to a prolonged negative trend.
Sims fail if they are denied that unscientific "assumption of inertia," and so sims have little or nothing to tell us: they simply cannot recreate real play conditions, because they necessarily exclude the human element.
The data set I use has some of the problems associated with RNG-based sims, since each evaluation of minor changes in the strategy's parameters has to be applied to all 400,000-plus outcomes and that would be an impossible task in real time.
What's good about my data is that every outcome is derived from actual play and most are verifiably objective, since the two baccarat sources (80% of all the outcomes) are unconnected with me (they might even be hostile to me, since I have developed a betting method that is vastly superior to either of theirs!).
Anyone considering any form of investment in my method, whether using it in actual play without my involvement or participating in a syndicate like the (one) you propose, should understand that I do not offer success against my (expanding) data set as PROOF of anything.
What we get from applying different versions of the target betting strategy to such a large sample of outcomes is a powerful INDICATION of what works and what doesn't.
My critics often claim that I developed TA by tweaking the rules against a fixed data set until I stumbled on a combination that would beat that sample, and that sample alone.
Given that the strategy has been out in the open on the Internet since 1997 and the data set I am using today post-dates that publication, along with the fact that the TA rules are essentially the same, I believe I have earned the right to ignore the skeptics!
Potential investors are strongly advised to test the strategy rules for themselves against outcomes as yet "un-played" with the help of any of the countless online simulations of casino table games.
I use Ken Smith's blackjack strategy trainer (http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bst/bst.htm) because I know it never repeats the same card between shuffles. I have yet to find a similarly trustworthy baccarat app, but I am sure they are out there.
Properly applied, TA works very well for blackjack (of course!), baccarat, field bets at craps and even money bets at roulette, and I have had some great results against 3-card poker of all things.
What I am saying here is that no one should take my word for anything.
And as for the presentation you suggested, I would hope that the blog would do a good job of convincing a potential investor/winner that target betting the TA way offers a viable, reliable and exciting alternative to losing. This response to your suggestion should also be helpful, and you have my permission to pass it on if it will benefit your new idea.
The potential for TA is huge. But the backing for the strategy has to be real, not ephemeral.
Those who study and then apply the target betting method are always rewarded with confirmation that it is indeed possible to "win more when you win than you lose when you lose." More importantly, they learn that doing so is the only way to overcome the negative bias in casino table games, and flip the house edge into a player edge.
It does not take an Einstein to figure out that if you lose, say, 2% more bets than you win, but your average winning bet is 10% greater than your average losing bet, negative expectation becomes irrelevant and a positive end-of-game result is inevitable.
Blackjack is an easier game to beat than any of the alternatives, and it is not uncommon to see an AWB/ALB value of 130% or more. Given an overall house edge of 1.0% or less, an overall player win is a mathematical certainty.
You will see from the (blog data) that a max of $25,000 and a bankroll of $100,000 can succeed repeatedly. It is entirely possible that in real play, results would be even better than the baccarat and blackjack data sets indicate.
I would, however, be unable to confidently predict long-term success for an initial BR of $100,000.
The mathematical support for a higher BR to back the recommended max can be found in every model that indicates a serious threat. In order for a max bet to be reached in any series, the house edge must have run amok, which it does rarely but reliably. It then becomes inevitable that there will be an opposite win-loss pattern (WLP), or in Wall Street parlance, a "correction." Otherwise, it would not be possible for the overall house edge to average out at known negative expectation levels, which it always does.
The offset is very rarely equal to the downturn that preceded it, but it does not have to be. That's why TA works. And works, and works...
I have to fall back on my 'old faithful' analogy describing an oilfield survey that shows 99.999% of the black gold is at 5,000ft with occasional small pockets at shallower depths. If you keep on drilling 500ft wells, hoping to save money, you might see a little oil now and then. But the drilling costs will always outstrip your profits.
Better to drill one deep well and be done with it - that way, you will be swimming in oil for life!
As you know, games of chance are all about probability. If you know the numbers and have the confidence and resources to back what you know, those games can be consistently beaten. If you keep backing off and fiddling around with the strategy rules, they can't. That's the bottom line.
The thousands of summaries and analyses I have generated over the years are the antithesis of gambling. But that does not bother me one bit, because gambling, as most people define it, is the antithesis of winning. So why gamble?
The question that is unanswered by my control data set is the effect of a player responding to table conditions by suspending play before a recovery, and resuming betting elsewhere. The losses shown in the target betting summaries occurred because the house advantage reached and then exceeded 30% vs. the negative expectation of <1.0% for blackjack and <1.4% for baccarat.
Would you stay in your seat when the house has streaked that far ahead of you in a given series? Of course not!
And it would not just be a question of intuition, because it simply is not possible in real play to bet from $5 to $25,000 in one place (assuming you were crazy enough to want to!).
A player would have to back away from a prolonged recovery according to the dictates of common sense: perhaps $5-$200 would be an acceptable spread at the bottom level, but thereafter, it would be best to stick to a 1-5 spread in any one location. That tactic alone would make losses like those we see in the models far less likely.
As always, the math supports what I am telling you. Target betting needs just two consecutive wins to turn a recovery series around, and in most (65%+) cases, a single win will do. WLPs without an early dual win are a 1 in 10 rarity, which means that every time a strategy player walks away from a potential threat, the odds are 10-1 in his favor that he will walk into a favorable pattern.
Last year, a cable channel ran a series called "Man Against Las Vegas" in which a disorganized, erratic egomaniac tried to recover claimed prior losses of $3,000,000 with a $1,000,000 bankroll and a TV camera crew at his elbow. It made me spit nails! I didn't watch the show for fear of fatal apoplexy, but I read all about it online and gnashed my teeth vicariously.
The MALV dingbat lost a big chunk of his money, as he deserved to, and the series was not renewed because his failure was an embarrassment to all concerned.
With TA/Target he would have cleaned up, dammit.



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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There's good news and bad news. Target betting prevails against yet another nasty BST sample. And finally, thanks to baccarat, we have...a loser!

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The conventional wisdom (along with the laws of probability, which do not always dovetail with the CW) requires that no betting method can win forever, and finally target betting has met a data set it really didn't like

My method has never been touted as 100% bullet-proof, and this first ruination outside of the deliberately deceptive world of runaway sims puts its win rate quite a bit higher than the 99.9920% I have used for years as a guideline preceded by the words at least.

As things stand everywhere outside of New Jersey, casinos are permitted to bar a player for any reason, and winning just a little more than probability indicates is one of them.

I have long dreamed of accumulating enough profit to be able to launch a legal challenge to this patently unreasonable state of affairs, and I suspect that a foolproof way to win would not be well received. Not that a 99.9920% WR is likely to be popular, either!

First, the latest blackjack data set...

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
I have daubed green ink all over the pencil log this time to highlight the paired (or better) wins that make it possible for target betting to overcome the fact that in this sample as in many others, there are far more losses than wins.

The term conventional wisdom can be defined as "what most people believe," and it has long been clear that where casino gambling is concerned, most people are wrong.

That is a bigger advantage to the house than the house advantage itself, and whenever I take time out from winning to watch other people's betting habits, I am reminded that while ignorance may be bliss, it can also be very expensive.

Logic confirms that if you can repeatedly turn a profit from a small series of bets in which you lost more often than you won, then it follows that over a very large number of contests, you will do serious damage to the house edge and might actually (perish the heresy!) reverse it.

If you bet flat or fixed amounts and losses outnumber wins the way Loser's Law ordains it, you will certainly lose more money than you win. That's just simple arithmetic.

But if you bet in such a way that you consistently and predictably win more when you win than you lose when you lose, then the house's bottom line will run with red ink and yours won't.

Red ink ran the wrong way for target betting in just one series out of almost 58,000 (315,000 rounds!) of baccarat supplied by two sources over which I have no control, along with no desire to alter the data they sent me.

The strategy was more than $900,000 (in Monopoly Money) ahead when the bleep hit the fan, and ended up with a +0.13% profit on turnover or action vs. an overall house edge of 0.92%.

The good news is that the setback was temporary, and was in due time more than offset by $1.97 million in wins with relatively few brown-trouser moments.

And then, of course, came seventy-odd thousand blackjack rounds against Ken Smith's BST app, and almost $1.6m in funny-money winnings.

The win rate (WR) therefore stands at 1-(1/70,000) = 99.9986%. I'm so sorry it's not 100% but, hey, we're in a recession right now.

The Rodriguez data set looks like this:

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
The crash'n burn came with the target betting rules set as indicated. When OLx was eliminated, while leaving WPx2 and MSL-1000 intact, the ruination turned into jubilation with a win of +4.7% of action. That's a big endorsement for the entire LTD+ after a win concept that is at the very core of target betting.

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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