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

_
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.
_

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

_
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.
_

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.
_

"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."

_
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.
_

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.
_

Don't blame bad luck when you lose at a casino table game...it's more likely that bad betting did you in.

_
Anyone who walks into a casino hoping to win more bets than he loses is probably going to be disappointed.

But that is exactly how most gamblers approach the challenge of beating odds that they know from the start are against them.

It doesn't make much sense, does it?

It is a demonstrable mathematical fact that if you bet the same amount each time, or choose your bet values randomly, you will eventually fall prey to the house advantage, more likely sooner than later.

And even if you apply money management to the process, responding appropriately to trends for and against you and restricting bet values to a limited proportion of your bankroll, you won't win in the end.

You will simply get to play a little longer.

Casinos are not in the business of money management...player management is their game, and they do what they do so subtly that most gamblers believe that the choices they make are entirely their own.

For example, before a casino in my Nevada neighborhood burned down a year or so ago, its blackjack tables offered a betting spread of $2 to $200.

When it reopened, its fancy new layouts all had table limits of $5 to $100.

To the vast majority of punters, table (or spread limits) are a matter of supreme indifference.

Most people do not spread their bets wider than 1-5, and the bigger their bankroll and their opening bet, the tighter their spread is likely to be.

It is possible for them to make a little money if the house advantage maintains its predicted level for a while and if they press while they are ahead and pull back during a downturn.

They will be in trouble when the house gets a few bets ahead, because they will need an equal number of wins to recover, and because of the game's bias, that may not happen in time to save their meager bankroll.

By imposing table limits, casinos exploit the fact that most players are reluctant to quit a game during a losing streak, especially if the joint is jumping on a Saturday night, and finding another seat might take a while.

So for nearly all of the players who returned to that rebuilt casino in Nevada, their only complaint is likely to be that $2 bets are no longer permitted, not that the maximum spread has dropped to 1-20 from 1-100.

I do not have access to the books at Topaz Lodge, of course, but I can promise you that the house win per player numbers at its blackjack tables are up, in spite of a slump in casino traffic.

The reason is quite simply that $25 players can now only spread 1-4 instead of 1-8, and while spreads that tight are sure to lose in the end, the prospect of a late lucky streak has been summarily halved.

Gamblers are creatures of habit and highly predictable, and casinos depend on their knowledge of human behavior to maximize their profits.

"System" is a word that in the gambling context has become a pejorative, conjuring up images of snake-oil salesmen and the gullible fools they prey upon to profit from their evil schemes.

Outside of casinos, the word is more likely to connote discipline, orderliness, good sense and professionalism, and sundry other attributes.

Inside casinos, only the management is systematic, secure in the knowledge that mathematics, perhaps the most orderly discipline in the known universe, will smooth out minor fluctuations in player behavior and the ups and downs of fate and fortune and deliver a profit at the end of the day.

It comes down to this: a player who does not bet systematically will lose.

It may not happen today or tomorrow, but it will happen in time, as surely as 2+2-5 is a negative number.

And in spite of that undeniable truth, 99.99% of all gamblers will tell you that there is no system known to man that can beat the house advantage.

Here is a different look at the latest pencil log from my BST blackjack trial:


The big numbers in the BST screenshots should come as no surprise by now, and I have stopped providing breakdowns of each step along the way to a final win because by now the point should have been made.

What may surprise some of you is that throughout the session, losing series, defined here as recoveries achieved in spite of more bets lost than won, are in the majority.

It should not come as a shock, but too many people are inclined to assume that luck is the only factor that can make you a winner in a casino, and it simply is not so.

Since none of us can ever know ahead of time if the very next bet is going to win or lose, systematic betting is our only option.

Call it money management if you like - call it grzignflumpf, even - but however you may choose to gussy up or disguise it, a "system" is what is needed here.

Casinos know this and are constantly on the alert for players who do not bet (and lose) the way they are "supposed to."

Table limits are one way to reign in players who may have the means and the inclination to "bet the farm" in the midst of a punishing losing streak and recover all their prior losses in a single bet.

Another is to come down hard on punters who are "foolish" enough to revert to the best known - and thanks to the gambling business, most reviled - system of them all, the double up, double down or the Martingale.

Unless we believe in luck, along with Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and other invisible benefactors, we all know that over time we are going to lose more bets than we win.

It that were not so, there would be no casinos.

It therefore follows that the only way we can win in the end is to rake in more money from a smaller number of winning bets than we give up from a greater number of losing bets.

A Martingale does the job very well: -1, -2, -4, -8, +16 delivers a 1-unit or +3.2% win against a house advantage of -3/5 = 60%, average win 16u, average loss 4u.

A Martingale also happens to be unplayable in a casino, except by professionals who spend their time in motion, losing no more than three bets in any one location before moving on in search of the single win that will give them a profit.

They find themselves out on the sidewalk from time to time, but they don't care: there is always another casino just a few steps away.

Nor do they care that "the math" is apparently against them: they are grateful that all but a tiny percentage of gamblers believe that to be so, leaving the field open to them.

Consider an opening bet of $5 and a relatively modest baccarat table limit of $15,000 (the current green ceiling at Harrahs Stateline), then the fact that 12 consecutive losses will be needed before the next bet in the progression ($20,480) will be unplayable.

Now think about the odds against 12 consecutive losses: roughly 0.002% or 2% of 1% or 1 in 4,016.

Next, consider that if our "Martingaler" places and wins a $15,000 bet at baccarat, he is $5,480 "in the hole."

End of story? Of course not! His chances of winning that first $15,000 bet are a little less than 50-50 (49.3 to 50.7), meaning that he will probably lose. But what he now has to ask himself is how likely it is that he can get just two bets ahead of the house ($30,000 less $10,240) after falling 12 bets behind.

Thanks to the house advantage, a force that pulls both ways, those chances are better than good.

The so-called Gambler's Fallacy is the assumption that because an inordinate number of bets have been lost, a win is somehow more probable at this moment than it would be otherwise.

When applied to individual bets, the delusion is well-named as a fallacious disregard of the negative odds that apply equally to every bet, regardless of what went before.

But our Martingaler has just lost 12 bets in a row, then won a single wager, indicating a house advantage for the sequence of -11/13 = 85%.

The known house edge for baccarat is about 1.4%, so how "probable" is it that the house will stay 11 bets ahead indefinitely?

Not very.

It is at this point that a large bankroll becomes essential to the task of eliminating the negative effects of the house advantage.

I have had many a mathematician scold me with a reminder that in theory, an egregious imbalance like the example above need never be offset sufficiently to enable a progressive bettor to recover his losses.

But I have yet to be provided with a real-play example of the house edge running amok without eventually returning to compliance with negative expectation for the game.

There is a good reason for that: It can't happen.

It can take a while, but the house edge cannot stay at 85% (or even close) forever. Remember, we are not betting the farm on a complete counter-swing of the pendulum, just one or two wins.

Mythematicians love to trot out runaway sims to "prove" their specious prophecies, so it seems fair that I offer one of my own, an Excel RNG that signals HELP! when the house edge exceeds 50% and SAVED! when paired wins occur.

For a Martingaler who is betting below his green ceiling, a single win is enough to recover prior losses. For a target player, it sometimes (about a third of the time) takes TWO, otherwise one is all that is needed.

Ask me nicely, and I will send you the file. Meantime, here are a couple of out-takes, and the formulas are at the bottom of this post.



Mythematicians, the guys who will defend the power of the house advantage no matter what, concern themselves with what is possible rather than what is probable, arguing that if a given betting method can fail even once in 50,000 bets, it should not be trusted at all.

In casinos, all manner of wondrous outcomes are possible, but not probable, and the probable outweighs the possible by a percentage just great enough to hand the house a profit at game over.

For example, a royal flush is possible on a $5 video poker machine, paying out $20,000 and making the lucky winner very happy.

But on average, at least $21,500 will have to be fed into the machine for every $20,000 paid out, making the house even happier.

And more than 98% of the people who play that machine between jackpots will take out considerably less money than they "contributed."

The HELP! SAVED! file is no more representative of an actual game of baccarat than any other runaway sim, but it serves to illustrate the important difference between what's possible and what is probable.

Once in a great while, a serious threat to the bankroll will emerge. But the greater likelihood is that by then, so much money will have been won that the potential damage from the exposure has been reduced or eliminated.

The sim features a Martingale rather than target betting as I prescribe it, but it confirms that if only paranoid pit personnel would permit double-up to be played, even that simple strategy will consistently overturn the house advantage.

Any pit boss you talk to will confirm that progressive betting of any kind, and the Martingale in particular, cannot possibly win in the long run.

But if your response to that is, "OK, then you won't mind if I give it a try," you will quickly learn that what he says is not what he believes.

The standard retort to any defense of a progression is that it risks too much to win too little, a nonsense criticism that would be meaningful only if it did not apply at least as much to every other method of betting, and to the house's exposure, too.

Think about it: the house permits players to bet whatever they want within the limits discussed earlier, anticipating a "hold" that can be less than 2% of total action.

In truth, the house's share of the churn is much higher than the predicted edge for table games, ranging from 1% at blackjack to 5.26% at roulette, but that's because most players bet as if they want to lose.

A player who can walk away with his bankroll intact, plus 2% of his action, does not have a whole lot to complain about - but systems "debunkers" pretend otherwise in defense of an agenda that is never clear.

The Martingale can be said to win "just $5" when a losing streak finally ends with a turnaround win, but it doesn't: It wins all prior losses PLUS $5.

If you are tempted to venture a Martingale, I recommend varying it a little to boost the bottom line: 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 500, 1000, 2000, 5000 and so on.

But do not get too attached to this approach. You will not be allowed to play it for long!

I have been relentlessly scrutinized and harassed over the years, more often than not with a charm that is skin-deep, and that hardly makes sense from an industry that claims to welcome progressive betting.

Before Caesars Tahoe banned me from its blackjack tables (unaware that target betting works almost as well at baccarat, craps and roulette, among other games) my wife and I were invited to a dinner show.

We had been seated barely five minutes when the Maitre D' brought another couple to our booth, explaining that the show was fully-booked and since we had been comped, our help would be appreciated. It was a large booth, so why not?

Almost before he had settled in his seat, our new table-mate introduced himself as "Tony" and boasted that he and his wife were there because of the huge sums he bet at baccarat in the casino's salle privee.

He was, he said, a high roller.

"So, what system do you use?" he asked, with no further preamble. "Mine is really simple: After I win, I bet five chips, after I lose I bet one, and because I never bet less than $500, I am happy if I get only one chip ahead per shoe."

I replied that I preferred blackjack to baccarat, and that I did not have a system - I was just lucky, I guess.

The same question was asked repeatedly - gently, but firmly - through dinner and the show that followed, and my answer was always the same.

Why on earth would a player with a "winning system" be interested in how someone else stayed ahead of the game?

He wouldn't, of course.

But the house would want to know.

For the record, Tony's "system" is a total disaster. Target betting is not.

Here are the primary cell conditionals for the HELP/SAVED simulation:

(A1)=IF(RAND()<=0.49,1,-1)
(B1)=+A1
(C1)=+B1
(D1)=+B1/C1
(E1)=IF(AND(D1>=50%,C1>=10),"HELP!","")
(F2)=IF(AND(B2<0,A2>0,A1>0),"SAVED!","")
(G1)=IF(AND(G1<0,H1<0),A2*MIN(15000,ABS(G1)*2),A2*5)
(H2)=IF(H1<0,G2+H1,G2)
(I2)=IF(AND(H1<0,H2>0),1,"")

That will get you started with a DIY version of my sim.


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.
_ale

"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

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

_
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.
_