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

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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

When crossing a minefield, should you march in a straight line and hope for the best, or tread carefully and make a few detours to stay alive?

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My "spring cleaning project" (tidying up my data files so anyone can understand them) is going well, and I should have more to say about that by the middle of next week.

One topic that the task has brought to the surface again is the extent to which runaway sims differ from what a living, breathing player is likely to encounter during real play in real time for real money in a real casino.

The question at the top of this post sums it up, I hope.

It is fashionable for academic mathematicians to respond to my criticism of RNG game simulations by saying that I don't like them because my betting method cannot beat them.

They are free to bolster their position on the arithmetic of gambling with as many wobbly pit-props as they can find, but the truth is that no one alive plays the way a runaway sim tackles a gigantic sample of random numbers.

I have just started reading Sam Harris's controversial polemic, "The End of Faith," and take great delight in the analogies and allegories he uses to demonstrate the weakness of positions that some very smart people have been taking for centuries.

Mr. Harris and I have different objectives, of course, because I do not deny the existence of the house advantage at games of chance: I simply reject the contention that it cannot be beaten.

I fully accept that because of the house edge, any gambler is certain over time to lose more bets than he wins, and I have always conceded that the only way to avoid that certainty is to stay away from casinos and never place a bet.

Mr. Harris relies on irrefutable logic to back his arguments, and so do I.

Who in his right mind would question the proposition that if you win more when you when than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win will not cost you money in the end?

The argument is so solid that I often forget to add the qualification that of course the product of the percentage by which your average win value exceeds your average loss value must be greater than the product of the house advantage applied to overall action.

In other words, a difference of pennies between the AWB and the ALB simply won't cut the mustard!

Example: A 2% house edge was confirmed at the end of 100 hands because you lost 51 bets and won 49; happily (but not by chance), your AWB at $11 exceeded your ALB at $10 by 10%, giving you an overall win of $29 (+2.8%) rather than an "expected" or "indicated" loss of $21. Had AWB/ALB summed +3% (say, $10.30/$10), you would have won $504.70 and lost $510 for a final outcome of -$5.30 (-0.52%), less than negative expectation but not "less enough."

We must first agree that it is possible to consistently achieve an AWB that tops our ALB sufficiently to offset the house edge that most people think is unbeatable.

If you do not think it can be done, you should be reading someone else's blog right now (or be planning your next losing trip to a casino!).

I mention the Harris book because its premise is that throughout history, countless millions of people around the world have been persuaded to adopt beliefs that make no sense.

Getting gamblers to accept that games of chance are so uniquely magical and mysterious that they have their own special laws of mathematics is no stretch at all in comparison with the tenets that Mr. Harris cites.

The truth is that consistent winning does not take a miracle...just discipline, commitment, and an abundance of cash.

Target betting's primary rule, NB=LTD+ in response to a mid-series win, is on its own enough to achieve the "win more" goal at blackjack, and even betting the field at craps, because both games pay back 100% of the bet on a win, and occasionally more than that.

Blackjack's naturals and the x2 or x2, x3 craps "bonuses" for 1,1 and 6,6 have no equivalents in baccarat, so additional ammunition is often needed to get ahead of the house edge in that game.

Baccarat ranks below blackjack for target betting, but above craps and roulette, which should always be abandoned as soon as a series LTD begins to look like real money.

Logic supports both the OL (opening loss) and MSL (mid-series loss) rules, which seek to exploit the high probability that a house win will be immediately followed by a player win.

The math could not be simpler: isolated wins are the most common outcomes on both sides of the table, which helps the MSL and OL, 2L and 3L rules but works against NB=LTD+.

Paired wins come next, followed as we would expect by triples, quads and so on.

The core rule of target betting invariably pays off well ahead of serious trouble because the NB value is always modestly more than the LTD value, and an eventual win will save the day.

Thanks to the MSL, OL, 2L and 3L tactics, more often than not a target betting player does not even have to wait for two consecutive wins ("twins") - a single right bet will turn the recovery series around.

Given that reality, casino table games are logically less hazardous for a player who can recoup his prior losses in two wins or less than for a fixed-sum or random bettor.

Mathematicians repeatedly state that trying to run away from a prolonged negative trend is pointless in the long run because the house advantage will always see to it that matters will get worse ("out of the frying pan and into the fire") just a little more often than they get better.

Possibly true for a haphazard player, but logically not so for player in search of an oh so slight offset to a threatening downturn.

There is, it is true, no way of knowing if what might be a long losing streak will reverse itself if we stay put and tough it out instead of bailing out.

So we have to look at the numbers and apply them to any threat situation.

If a downturn continues (and, again, it may not), serious harm might come to our bankroll.

If we choose to suspend play for a while and walk away from a potential threat, the odds are better than 10 to 1 in our favor that we will quickly encounter paired wins, or a well-timed single win.

That is because most of the time, the win-loss pattern in a table game bounces back and forth (-1, +1, -2, +1, -3, +2, -1, +2) with just a slight bias for the house.

Paired wins show up, on average, every five bets or so. Single wins are slightly less than a 50% probability.

Most players bet a very tight spread, pick their bet values more or less randomly, and bet either too much or too little during a prolonged downturn.

They also hope (but mostly do not expect) to win with very little risk, and so they come to the table with an inadequate bankroll that is quickly wiped out if a long losing streak sets in.

Time to drag out a little homily: If you can't afford to win, you shouldn't bet.

Against most players, fluctuations in the win-loss pattern (WLP) do not have to be very great to hand the house the "contribution" it figures it is due.

Against a target strategist, the ups and downs of a gambling game have to be seismic for the house edge to prevail.

The gambling industry has always been very effective in sending players a mixed message which says, "Hey, we're offering you a chance to make more money than you could hope to earn any other way...but chances are you will lose."

Steve Weinberg, credited as the creator of modern-day Las Vegas, was on "60 Minutes" a while back telling viewers that the only long-term winners are the folks who own casinos.

I hate to use the name most people know him by, because to me a casino operator changing his name to WYNN is like a doctor adopting the moniker KYLL: It is insensitive at best!

So I will just say this in response to his cheery You Can't Win message: "Steve, you know better."

It is, however, very important for Mr. Weinberg's chosen business that its customers believe that winning is impossible, and losing is fun.

Money alone is not a guarantee that a player will beat the house edge and boost his bankroll in spite of losing more often than he won.

Money and a plan - the right plan - will invariably get the job done.

Spread, spread and spread are the three keys to success at gambling, which is why a casino does all it can to limit spreads, exploiting the average player's inclination to stick to the same game and keep betting far longer than he should.

And of course a target bettor will face severe challenges from time to time, and that is when he will need his discipline, confidence, commitment and money the most.

His exposure is greatest when he has reached his maximum bet, whether it is self-imposed or mandated by the house rules.

The good news is that in order to push his bets that high, the current house edge will have to have reached a number far above the norm for the game.

The experts tell us that past outcomes can have no effect on future outcomes and smugly quote what is sometimes called the Law of Independence of Trials.

In the short term, it is a powerful principle. Long term, it is hogwash.

When the house edge for a given sample reaches, say, 40% in a 1% game like blackjack (and it does happen, occasionally), we cannot state with certainty that there will be a significant offset in the next 10 or 20 bets.

We can however be sure that a swing against the house must come eventually in order for the laws of real mathematics (as opposed to mythematics) to be complied with.

It may not be - probably will not be - a 100% swing in the opposite direction from the prolonged negative trend.

But it invariably will prove to be enough, as long as the player's cash resources are likewise.

Prospects are helped by the fact that the rules of target betting simply will not permit a player to stay in one place longer than it is safe to do so.

After starting a new series with, for example, a $5 bet (at craps or roulette or even 3-card poker if all the available blackjack tables have a $25 minimum), it is probably safe to spread as wide as 1-20 or $5 to $100 in a busy casino before moving on.

Generally, a 1-5 spread is as wide as you should go in one place, to avoid attracting the unwanted attention of pit personnel ("Thousand in play! Up from $100! Come get him, Boss!").

That means that in a prolonged downturn, you will be moving from layout to layout and even game to game quite a bit before EOS.

And each time you do that, there is better than a 90% probability that EOS is just a few bets away.

There is also a 90% probability that if you had stayed where you were, recovery would have happened in a hurry.

But since your NB would have had to have been inside the danger zone, who cares?

Runaway sims that depend on robot "players" wandering blindfold into a minefield require us to believe the preposterous without question.

Some people do that every day of their lives. You don't have to...

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.
_

"Just who are you preaching to? Even if your ideas about beating the house edge made sense (and they don't), no one could afford to use them!"

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This is a criticism I hear from time to time, and my only answer to it is that making money is never cheap, except in everyone's dreams.

Setting up a business on fabled Main Street, for example, requires a huge outlay on premises, remodeling and inventory, just for starters, and often profits are not seen for years.

Building a casino costs billions these days, and since some players manage to win now and then (sometimes in the millions) the house has to keep huge sums handy to cover downturns and stay ahead.

There is no mathematically supportable way to beat the odds at games of chance without occasional risk, and betting a wide spread is inevitably expensive before it can be profitable.

Your own data show occasional enormous losses that wipe out hundreds of hours worth of winnings. That kind of disaster could happen any time, possibly in successive sessions. That means that your strategy could be suicidal. Admit it: you are working for the gambling industry.

Casino table games are all about probability. It is possible for target betting to lose because its win rate is less than 100%. But it is not probable.

In simple terms, you are looking at favorable odds of far more than 5,000 to 1 if you bet progressively using the target betting rules, and the odds against two successive losses are therefore at least 25 million to 1.

It has always seemed strange to me that the so-called systems debunkers whom I often refer to as mythematicians insist that if a betting strategy can lose just once, it must be worthless.

The house has the best system of them all, a passive strategy that encourages players to bet and behave in a certain way, but does not force them to put money on the table or tell them how much to wager. But even the house loses occasionally.

What happens with target betting is that even in the face of occasional "high exposure," profits come in rapidly and consistently, just as they do for the house.

Sometimes, winning is harder than usual, just as it is for the house.

And once in a very great while, the team has to take a hit, just like the house.

All of the figures posted here and elsewhere in support of target betting are honest and accurate, and all of them demonstrate that very infrequent setbacks are quickly recovered.

Your chances of being killed in a car crash in the U.S.A. are estimated at around 20,000 to 1 against. Does that guarantee that you will be road kill before the end of your 20,000th trip? Of course not!

What you get from auto safety data is much the same as the message derived from target betting trials, and that is that your risk of crashing and burning is too insignificant to preclude either driving a car or betting in a casino!

That assumes, of course, that you drive safely and sensibly on the road, and that you defy the odds in a casino by using target betting to win consistently.

Sounds like you never heard that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Your "proof" is not proof at all because your data are subjective and suspect at worst, and anecdotal and irrelevant at best. You can't use prior outcomes to develop a betting strategy that will work against future outcomes.

I am comforted that insanity is never defined as doing the same thing again and again and expecting the same result, which is what I do with each new target betting trial.

It is also why I recommend to those who are rightly at first skeptical about my ideas that they don't take my word for anything, but instead apply my method to "future outcomes."

They will quickly learn that they have nothing to fear, and much to gain.

It makes no sense to dismiss past outcomes as non-representative.

Even casinos do not do that!

A new game or a rule change to an old game might initially be tested against what I always refer to as runaway sims because they totally eliminate human control and restraint.

But that is never more than a first step.

A casino will insist that a new game must be tested against real players in actual "gaming" conditions before it has a chance of being introduced to the floor.

The gambling industry knows very well that people do not play like computerized robots, and that sims therefore cannot accurately reflect reality.

Face it, no one with the kind of money you say is needed to make target betting work would put it at risk the way you want them to. Gamblers may not be the smartest people on the planet, but they are not the stupidest either. They know that if you want to win, you have to protect your bankroll. You say the opposite.

"Conservative" betting is almost as dangerous to a player (please, let's not call him a gambler) as greed, which is Punter's Enemy #1 in a casino.

The house always wants people to bet conservatively because the math says that they are more likely to lose that way.

The ideal player, from a casino's point of view, is someone who bets a narrow spread (never more than 1 to 10), pulls back when he is losing, and responds timidly to a potential winning streak.

Table limits (spread limits) exist entirely to encourage players to be cautious in their betting habits, so that when they start losing, it is far more difficult for them to bet their way out of the hole.

It is a very simple matter for arithmetic to demonstrate the folly of narrow spreads, and you can be sure that the gambling industry knows that.

Nothing that I have published here or elsewhere in the dozen years since I first posted the principles of target betting for free on the Internet is new to the casino business.

Casino operators know very well that progressive betting is the only way to consistently and reliably overcome the house advantage, and they go to extraordinary lengths to discourage it.

I tell the "experts" that they should try progressive betting for themselves before helping the gambling industry disseminate more deliberate disinformation about how it can't possibly work.

It does work, and casinos hate it.

As for high rollers, most of them have survived expensive lessons on the hazards of trying to "buy the pot."

Big bets alone can never guarantee success at games of chance, and "whales" earned that nickname from the gambling business not because of the size of their bankrolls, but because they keep on taking a dive, then resurfacing for another go-around.

Las Vegas casinos love to put out press releases about the huge sums won by a high roller in from Hong Kong or the land down under. But you will never see publicity about a "whale" who dumped $10,000,000 at baccarat (or whatever) before limping home.

That's because winners bring in losers; losers are bad news, except for the bottom line.

Money alone will not beat the house advantage.

Money and a plan - a plan I call target betting - will always get the job done.

Losses will occur. But winnings will always exceed losses.

As I keep saying, the only way to stay ahead in a casino is to win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

There is nothing revolutionary (or insane!) about that idea: It is wholly logical, sensible and scientific.

If you keep on winning back your losses in fewer bets than it took you to fall behind in the first place, the house edge becomes meaningless.

So...here are the latest BST blackjack results. More of the same old same old!


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.
_

Math orders the universe, so you can be sure it won't wait outside while you are betting the farm in a casino.

_
On the face of it, it's tough to argue with the mathematical rationale that "proves" that the house advantage at casino games of chance cannot be beaten in the long run.

So most people don't bother to try.

The logic goes pretty much like this: Even if you bet Banker all the way at baccarat, winning more often than you lose, the 5% commission on all wins will see to it that your are in the hole at the end of the day.

That's because each time you win, you are paid a little less than even money, but every losing bet is 100% in the toilet.

Here is an example of what you can expect in, say, three years of playing baccarat for five hours a day, five days a week:

Total rounds excl. ties 315,049
Average bet value ABV $527
Banker edge 1.36%

Total action $166,047,465
Total wins $83,588,338
Total losses ($82,459,127)
Gross win $1,129,211
Commission on all wins $4,179,417
Net outcome, a LOSS of ($3,050,206)

This is not good news!

What happened in the scenario above was that bet values were in effect randomly selected, and the "Banker edge" was simply not enough to offset the 5.0% gouge.

Winning more often than you lose is a rare privilege in a casino, especially after sitting through more than 315,000 wagers!

But if the so-called "5%" commission at baccarat is going to leave you with a whopping liability that's almost 4x your total win, what's the point?

Now let's try the same scenario with target betting applied at every step to ensure that (sing along with me) you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

Total rounds excl. ties 315,049
Average bet value ABV $527
Banker edge 1.36% (4.46%)

Total action $166,047,465
Total wins $86,837,610
Total losses ($79,426,415)
Gross win $7,411,195
Commission on all wins $4,341,881
Net outcome, a WIN of $3,069,315

AWB/ALB 109.33% vs. W/L +1.36%

There is nothing magical or mysterious about the results achieved in the second scenario. It's just math.

Note the two numbers after Banker edge, above. The first is the actual value (AV) derived from dividing the difference between the greater number of wins and the lesser number of losses by the total number of outcomes. The second is (money won minus money lost) divided by (overall action).

Now check out the AWB/ALB percentage (for average winning bet divided by average losing bet). That is target betting's sole objective.

The bottom line was a healthy positive number in the second scenario because although the total bets won (as opposed to the total money won) was the same in both examples, target betting won far more chips than haphazard wagering did, and lost fewer.

What we see here is discipline (a PLAN!) at work. And I think we can agree that winning is better than losing.

I revisited the baccarat data and plugged in the missing requirement that all potential EOS bets be boosted by 5% to cover commission due on a turnaround win.

Here's how it looks:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
I am still inclined to recommend that betting Player only and avoiding commission is the best way to apply target betting to baccarat if you really must stray from the blackjack tables.

But the effectiveness of the 5% "skim" makes a compelling case for flexibility, and it is certainly true that the more options you permit yourself in a casino, the more likely you are to win while maintaining a low profile.

Field bets at craps can be lucrative, even-money bets at roulette too. Even 3-card poker can boost your bankroll, if you ignore Pair-plus and halve your LTD before making a potential EOS bet (ante the first half and bet the rest if you have a hand worth backing).

But whenever a series starts to get serious you should back away from a high-HA game and take your chips and your LTD/NB numbers to a friendlier game: blackjack or baccarat.

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 million-dollar question: Is damage control just another gambler's fallacy, or can ruin be avoided intuitively?

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Human intuition or decision making is the critical element that the You Can't Win brigade omits from the runaway simulations they use to "prove" that the house advantage at games of chance is ultimately unbeatable.

They also eliminate cards, dice, wheels, tables, money, dealers and real time, and then pretend that a high-speed computer simulation based on a random number generator (RNG) is "exactly the same as a real game."

Once upon a time, I was able to ask who would be gullible enough to bet actual cash against a game that used RNG output to simulate blackjack, baccarat or roulette, and I was confident that the answer was clear.

Then the casinos came out with giant flat-screen TVs featuring curvaceously UN-flat, life-sized "dealers" and slots for suckers to push their money into. And by golly, some people do play these so-called games, lured perhaps by cleavage that they can drool over without getting their faces slapped.

The mythematical defense of sims is that at some point, a fatal negative pattern of losses and wins will occur in real play that is exactly like output from a RNG, and vice versa, and ruin will be unavoidable.

It is, as I have said before, like arguing that a car that crashes with no driver at the wheel and with the gas pedal and brakes disabled is inherently unsafe.

Sorry, guys, but gambling is a human activity and the human element really does matter.

Simulations are useful only because they run at very high speeds, saving a huge amount of real-time research, and can give some indication of how a new game (or a method of betting) will perform.

But when the Wizard of Odds and other experts sponsored by the gambling industry claim that casinos rely on simulations to evaluate new games or rule changes to old ones, they are being deliberately disingenuous.

Sims have a role to play, but is always a preliminary one.

Casinos know very well that the only tests that really matter have to be conducted out on the floor, and nothing new ever gets the green light until it has been exhaustively evaluated under real-play conditions.

I have gone to great trouble over the years to amass as many blocks of outcomes from actual play as I can, and target betting has so far recorded only one million-dollar crash-and-burn in more than 500,000 rounds of baccarat and blackjack (more than five years of play for a full time gambler, if such an animal still exists).

The pattern that caused target betting to crash and burn looked like this...


If you were to see a "deadman's drop" like this in real play, one that went on to give the house a 33.33% edge in 114 bets in which 34 more wagers went south than didn't, you would not wait for rock bottom.

You know for sure that if you were sitting at a baccarat or blackjack table and the shoe turned that vicious that fast, you would decide it was time to take a break long before your bankroll was in serious jeopardy.

As it happens, this spectacular nosedive followed eight consecutive wins that raked in $1,090 in profits before the ninth bet, for $500, lost.

For years, my rule for blackjack has been to keep redoubling during an opening win progression until the bet hits $200, add $100 each time if the winning streak continues, and accept a loss of $500 or more as EOS, happy to end the series with $590+ in extra chips, and fall back to a minimum opening bet at a different layout.

Blackjack is the perfect game for target betting because "natural" pay-offs that exceed the value of the original bet (adding 50% or I'm not playing!) and well-timed splits and double-downs make it much more profitable than baccarat.

To make up the difference, I set the win progression cut-off much higher at $1,000 vs. baccarat, and that made the rules set vulnerable in just this one instance out of more than 60,000 successful recoveries.

The first baccarat trial, bust-free after 37,062 recoveries, delivered a virtual profit of $1.97 million and retired the original $1 million buy-in. The second baccarat series had one bust in 18,446 series and earned a little more than $110,000 (better than a break-even but not by much!). The current blackjack trials stand at a funny-money win to date of $1.75 million and counting. That's a total win of almost $4 million for five years' work, chickenfeed for a CEO but a big improvement on negative expectation.

It would be easy for me to change the baccarat results to eliminate the "bust" then claim that target betting was unbeaten against hundreds of thousands of real-play rounds.

But that would be cheating, and I don't believe in that (not because I am a saint, but because it is simply not necessary!).

For the record, changing the win progression rule to match my blackjack strategy would have turned a baccarat crash-n-burn into a win equal to 5.0% of the action for that same data set.

House-trained academics have a notion that systems promoters always have an excuse when their method crashes in ruins, and eliminate the problem simply by changing the rules.

So target betting's single loss of its bankroll stands in my book, reducing my method's win rate from 100% to -1/69,272 recovered series = 99.9985564%.

I generally claim a 99.992% win rate for my betting method, equal to favorable odds of 12,500 to 1. If I am in a cautious mood, I fall all the way down to 5,000 to 1 in a player's favor, figuring that even that has to be preferable to negative odds of 495 to 505 if you're a little lucky and play blackjack well.

And then there's the obvious wisdom of not claiming a 100% win rate, but instead encouraging the casinos and their tame experts to go public over and over again with "proof" that target betting cannot beat a runaway sim and is therefore worthless.

Let's face it, if gambling industry brainiacs can show for certain that the strategy is worthless, then they have no legal argument for banning its use in their casinos.

As for the ability of a thinking human being to recognize potential danger before it becomes deadly and take steps to avoid it, "simsters" know well that evasive, self-protecting tactics are difficult (meaning inconvenient) to model.

I have done it with what I call an interactive sim, which relies on the famously unreliable Windows RNG to spew out losses and wins with a randomness that may be questionable, but is at least out of my control beyond my insertion of a clear house edge of 1.4%.

In real play, several factors are likely to prompt a player to quit a series before recovery, then resume betting at the appropriate level elsewhere. A sim can't imitate boredom, hunger, fatigue or a need to pee, among other human responses, but table limits play a key role and they can be factored in.

The way it works is that the sim starts and ends series after series as a "live" player would, but the spreadsheet platform enables a human to scroll down, identify a spread limit trigger, and respond to it.

The job is done by "freezing" all of the outcomes or rounds up to that point, then refreshing the RNG to simulate play continuing at a different layout.

This is done whenever a spread limit trigger arises, and my assumption is first that at a $5 table, a $100 bet is as high as a real player would be able to go without attracting unwanted attention. After that, the rule is a spread of 1-5: lose a $500 bet after starting out with a minimum wager at a $100 table, and move on, then a $2,500 bet, and so on.

Series very rarely drag on for long (the average EOS comes in less than six bets) so this is not nearly as complicated or tedious a procedure as it sounds.

The point is that flesh-and-blood players do not suffer the kind of downturns that the robot at the heart of a runaway sim is required to ignore in order for the routine to "prove" that no betting method can ever beat the house advantage. It is simply not human nature to take a relentless beating when real money is at stake without taking appropriate evasive action.

Runaway sims are dishonest. But in some ways, that's not a bad thing for a cool, calm and disciplined player who knows how to beat the odds and win consistently.

Here's the latest BST blackjack data (playing the $500 win progression rule!).

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
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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Mixed messages: The mythematicians say there's no way to win, while casino ads say, "Come! Play! Win! And isn't it great that losing is such fun!?"

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(Click on the image to enlarge it)
I aim to try to keep future posts shorter and let new charts and screen shots speak for themselves.

My target betting material repeats a win rate estimate of 99.992% for the TA/T rules, suggesting favorable odds of better than 10,000 to 1.

This is confirmed by the current on-going blackjack trial, which shows TA/T without a "crash and burn" loss in 12,318 series or about 69,000 bets.

My friends the mythematicians like to say that any sample of outcomes that shows the house edge being soundly thrashed is by definition non-representative, and that either fraud was involved or the method that prevailed will be ruined by the next batch of outcomes of similar size.

This back-and-forth has been going on for years, and will probably never end.

Just hold on to the thought that the casinos need players to believe that only luck can make them winners, and so the fate of their bankroll is out of their control.

Poppycock! Know your game, learn the rules of target betting and (in blackjack) play strictly by the book, and the house advantage will become an irrelevance.

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

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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