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

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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.
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Gaming regulations in many states favor casinos over players in a big way. So we know whose side the politicians are on!

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It's beyond me how there can be any argument about the critical role spread limits play in casino games of chance. So I am especially baffled by new "gaming" rules in Florida and regulations already in place in other states.

Florida is working on new laws that will permit casinos operated by the Seminoles to offer a full range of table games, but there is concern that blackjack betting should be limited in the $5-$25 range to protect patrons from excessive losses.

Similar rules are already in place elsewhere: Colorado, for instance, limits blackjack bets to $5 a hand, opting for "player protection" rather than boost state gambling revenues by allowing people to bet whatever they want.

This is madness!

Tight spreads and table limits at kindergarten levels may slow down the rate at which some players lose, but the real winners are the casinos.

It is a mathematical fact that the tighter your spread (most people do not dare venture beyond 1-10 and 1-5 is about average) the more certain it is that your win-loss pattern will track the known negative expectation for the game.

I ran some tests against the 80,000 BST blackjack outcomes in my models and did the same for the 114,000 or so rounds of baccarat supplied by Lorenzo Rodriquez, and there were no surprises for me.

But the results provide a useful illustration of what players are up against when they try to beat the odds with a shoestring budget.

First, a couple of summaries:



The assumption that most people make is that the wider you spread, the more you will bet and the more likely you are to lose.

Not so.

Both the spread summaries show that my recommended spread range (1-5,000) requires less action than a 1-250 spread at baccarat and a 1-100 spread at blackjack.

The BST blackjack screen shots have been telling us that since the BST tests began more than 80,000 rounds ago, but a little extra confirmation never hurts.

Sure, if you spread 1-50 or less, you will churn less money than you would at 1-5,000. But you will also lose your bankroll, for certain.

It is an absolute fact that as soon as you hit your maximum bet limit, whether it is self-imposed or a house restriction, you lose your "wiggle room" and are instead totally at the mercy of the house edge from that point on.

So it follows that the higher your max, the better off you are. Only a protracted negative pattern will push you to your limit, if it is high enough. And the longer it takes you to get there, the more likely it is that the "down trend" that got you into trouble will be at least partially offset.

Skeptics love to talk about independence of trials and that old cliche, the Gambler's Fallacy and use them to "prove" that a wild swing in the house's favor may never be counter-balanced.

This is prime mythematics!

Given a 1-5,000 spread, the house edge in a series will have to climb well into double figures percentage wise before the dreaded "green ceiling" will cap bets at the top limit. That's nice for the house, for sure, but it can't go on.

The primary engine of a successful betting strategy, assuming discipline and consistence, is having sufficient chips to ride out an egregious house spike.

Most losers take too little cash to the table, and a prolonged swing against them will wipe them out.

Money cannot buy the pot, but an adequate bankroll combined with an effective progressive betting method will make the house advantage irrelevant time and again.

Here's a dramatic illustration of how tight spreads guarantee long-term losses while wide spreads do exactly the opposite.

The chart combo below applies to a baccarat sample selected at random from the 16 blocks in the "Rodriguez Collection" of verifiable rounds and shoes collected by Zumma Publishing.

Baccarat, for those who don't know it already, is a tougher game to beat than blackjack because it lacks double-downs and splits and 50% "bonuses" for naturals. It's also a yawwwwwwnnn, in my opinion, but I know there are people out there who play nothing else.


I can hear my critics screaming that no one could possibly afford the level of spread that I recommend.

The summaries to the left of each green chart show the action for each spread, along with the average bet value and the hourly win, based upon one shoe per hour (about 75 rounds).

You will see that action (or risk) increases with each step, levels off, and then drops even as the size of the maximum bet heads ever skyward.

The earlier summary above contains another critical column of information - the number of bets of $1,000 or more required at each spread level.

In both data sets, the $5-$25,000 spread range required by far the smallest number of bets of $1,000 or more of any of the ranges in which a $1,000 bet was actually permitted.

That's important.

Get smart. Spread tight and you will lose. Spread wide and you won't.

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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If you bet larger sums, you will end up with more action, greater risk, and a bigger loss overall. That's logical, right? Wrong!

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There are times when common sense does not make sense, and it happens a lot in gambling.

Table and house limits are often touted as a way for a casino to reduce its exposure and avoid having to pay out too much if a high-roller gets lucky.

In fact, tight spreads are more often imposed by players upon themselves than by a casino seeking to limit its losses.

And only a self-styled expert who has not bothered to study the numbers would dare to pretend that spread limits are really intended as a defense against big-money players.

The math demonstrates with absolute finality that limits are a weapon that the gambling industry uses against everybody!

Worse news than that is that at least 99.99% of the time, a casino does not need to haul this deadly weapon out of its armory.

Most players bring their own means of destruction with them every time they play, and eliminate themselves from the game long before they can be a threat to the house's bottom line.

Let's be clear.

Tight spreads can only win on those rare occasions when a player makes more right bets than wrong ones.

And thanks to the house advantage, that doesn't happen often.

The purpose of this post is to examine the wisdom of the linchpin of the academic argument against any and all betting strategies, which is a rejection of analysis of past outcomes, however large the sample.

Only in the field of gambling mathematics are we required to accept that what's past has nothing whatever to teach us about the present or the future.

And it is, of course, a wholly unscientific and illogical premise.

We are told that gambling outcomes are so unpredictable and erratic, so totally devoid of patterns or trends that are likely to be repeated at any time in the future, that they have an almost magical, mythical quality (one that has led me to make frequent references to mythematics!).

Utter twaddle! Codswallop, too.

If casino table games were as inconsistent and unreliable as academics (the Math Mob, or You Can't Win Brigade) would have us believe, they would be profitable only in the very long term.

And anyone who knows anything at all about gambling knows that against random or fixed-bet punters, the house makes short-term gains as a matter of routine.

The gambling industry exploits the fact that it is not just players who are predictable, but the games themselves.

The only uncertainty is the outcome of the very next bet. But analyzed in groups, from a handful (no pun intended) to dozens and scores, then hundreds and multiple thousands, outcome patterns are considerably more reliable than the weather.

Imposing narrow betting spreads increases the mathematical reliability of the house advantage. Widening spreads does the opposite, just as logic would suggest.

The catch is that the gambling industry and its house-trained numbers experts do not want us to even take a glancing look at the past, let alone learn from it.

And for some reason, intelligent people who really should know better are happy to accept that gambling is only about the future, and an uncertain one at that.

For many gamblers, not knowing is where the excitement lies, and that is why the best betting strategy in the world will never be a serious threat to the casino business.

One assumption most gamblers make, even those with fat bankrolls and a proportionately greater prospect of profit, is that higher bets and wider spreads must always lead to greater risk and, in the end, bigger losses.

And that simply is not true.

It is not possible to use spreadsheets and formulas to model the behavior of a random bettor because imposing order as a simulation must is the antithesis of a haphazard gambler's path to ruin.

But it is possible to clamp down on table limits and examine the effect of restrictions that players as a whole impose on themselves, either out of ignorance or because their bankrolls are woefully inadequate.

For example, the 80,000 outcomes in the ongoing BST blackjack trial offer an opportunity to discover how many bets of $1,000 or more would be required if the spread limit is set at 1-200 or $5 to $1,000 (higher bets being permitted when double-downs or splits come up, and higher returns applied for player naturals).

In one simple test, I eliminated most of the target betting switches that I recommend in the rules, "playing" a streamlined version of the strategy.

One element I left untouched was the WPx2 rule, which doubles the bet after an opening win in a new series, redoubles to $200, adds $100 thereafter, and ends the series after a loss of $500 or more.

Any player who does not exploit winning streaks, rare as they are, is missing a critical opportunity and probably deserves to lose!

With target betting's 1-5,000 spread limit in place, there were 3,796 bets of $1,000+, amounting to less than 1 in 20 (4.56%). Target betting won $293,000 overall in spite of two busts, retaining 0.67% of its overall action.

The gross HA was 4.76%, cut to 0.67% (a coincidence) by doubles/splits and naturals.

With the 1-200 spread limit applied, TB LOST a little over $100,000 (-0.32% vs. the HA of -0.67%) and was "in the hole" most of the time.

The most damaging effect of the spread limit was that $1,000+ bets were needed 26,735 times, or almost every third bet (32.13%).

The problem is of course that the quicker you bump up against your "green ceiling," the less likely you are to win in the end because at that point you are totally at the mercy of the house edge.

The tight spread run-through generated total action of $31.24 million, required an average bet of $388 and lost the equivalent of $125 for every hour of play.

Betting wide won $290,000 from $43.7 in action, needing an average bet of $542 but WINNING $363 an hour.

Overall action was higher with the wider spread, as expected. But the difference (40%) was far less than suggested by the considerable gap between a maximum permitted wager of $1,000 and one of $25,000.

I will have baccarat comparisons soon, but here are more detailed summaries of the blackjack results. First the "tight" application of limits, then the "wide" one.

(Click on an image to enlarge it)

Runaway sims produce meaningless, deliberately disingenuous results because they assume absolute inertia on the part of a player under pressure. To some extent, the same problems plague my spreadsheet models, even though the outcomes that they analyze are derived from "real" play.

"Busts" are always a bone of contention, because I argue that a non-suicidal player would not stick around when a potentially deadly downturn develops, and academics insist that bailing out of a bad run is ultimately pointless.

That fact is that prolonged series occur less than 10% of the time when target betting rules are fully and consistently applied, and when a potentially fatal pattern is avoided, the odds are better than 10 to 1 that more favorable conditions will be found when play resumes.

The odds can also be said to be 10-1 that the win-loss pattern will improve if you stay where you are. But smart gambling has to be about a "better safe than sorry" approach.

With target betting, all you are looking for by way of a more "friendly" environment after a bail-out is two consecutive wins, and often, a single win will save the series.

For the random bettor, it may be statistically a wash, because a player who is, say, five bets behind will often need an equal swing in the opposite direction to get out of the hole.

The whole point of target betting is to win more in fewer bets than you lost in a greater number of bets.

Here's how target betting did against the same set of blackjack outcomes with the rules fully deployed:-


Worth noting is the big drop in the average EOS number (the number of hands or rounds it takes to go from opening bet to recovery). bove, it's 5.1, as it was when the rules were modified for the spread limit comparison. The "tight spread" reading was 6.7 rounds.

You should also know that the risk assessment or maximum exposure number shown here is a "worst case" estimate, indicating that at one point, the strategy had to put almost $400,000 on the table to achieve eventual recovery.

Because target betting wins almost all the time, the bankroll keeps growing stronger, and in this test the true exposure was less than 20% at $182,000. At the point when the most money was at risk, the method had already more than doubled the bankroll.

You will see in the next screen shot that the big bucks were in play in session #13, about 60,000 rounds after the first bet, and with a profit of almost $1.2 million providing the fire power.



Watch this space for the same rules set applied against first the "LR" baccarat outcomes, then the much larger "LJ" sample (the initials indicate the verifiable sources of both data sets).

Lastly, my answer to the question, Why are you posting all this information? Are you looking for big-money backers, or what...?

This blog is intended primarily as an information resource for players who genuinely want to learn how to beat the house at its own games by overcoming the effects of the house advantage.

Secondly, it is a record of the work I have done down the years, serving as proof that my research is both unique and meticulous.

I went the backer route years ago. Twice.

Both "money men" were good company and fun to work with, to a point.

But both of them had far less hard cash at their disposal than they claimed when they initially contacted me, and both sought to undermine the principles of target betting to (as they wrongly saw it) minimize their exposure.

Caution and restraint have their place in gambling, but generally they work more in the house's favor than the player's.

"Scared money never wins" is an old Las Vegas cliche, and it's the truth.

My early backers were, like most gamblers, looking for quick profits for minimal risk, and I had to tell them that they were deluding themselves.

The analogy I used was an oil-drilling survey of a gigantic field that showed that 99.99% of the reserves were at 5,000ft or deeper, with a few little puddles or pockets at 500ft.

Target betting's backers wanted to keep drilling 500ft wells all over the place, hoping for a brief gusher, because digging deeper costs a lot more money before the big payday.

Drill deep, and you will have profits forever. Do the other thing, and dry wells will far outnumber "wet" ones. And even the mini-gushers will soon dribble away.

Remember, it takes money to get money. And knowledge and experience, discipline and commitment are a big help, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the #15 summary:-

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

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

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

Very few gamblers do that.

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

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

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

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

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

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's it for now.

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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Waiting for the other shoe to drop could take a lifetime (and it may never happen at all!)

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The assumption that mythematicians like to cling on to and batter us about the head with is that if you are certain to lose more bets than you win in the long run then you must also be doomed to lose more money than you win.

They don't care that models and data summaries covering millions of outcomes with a clear overall house edge include countless thousands of profitable series that consisted of more losses than wins.

They just keep chanting that the sample, however large, was "not representative" and warn that at some point, the sum total of all losses must exceed the sum total of all wins. So, beware, insolent peasants, and be ready to pay your dues.

Here's the latest BST log:

Click on the image to enlarge it
It's true that from time to time, a win-loss pattern will set in that has a succession of isolated wins (wins immediately followed by one or more losses). And if the PB value is outside of your MSL ("do over") range, two wins separated by one loss will not save the day before the cavalry rides over the hill in the form of "twins" (two wins in succession!).

The horrors of long stretches in which the NB keeps jumping skyward with each failed EOS bet diminish dramatically as your confidence grows. But it never hurts to keep in mind that you are playing a game in which the odds are almost always against you.

As I explained in the summary, table limits usually extend the battle to climb out of the hole because without wiggle room in your bet values, the green ceiling forces you to keep betting the max until the WLP switches to a more positive trend.

But that assumes you do not have the option to back away from the layout that has put you in the hole, and resume play at a location where you can continue to strictly follow the target betting rules.

Here are the target betting bets applied by the spreadsheet model to the outcomes in the pencil log shown above. The final totals differ from the numbers at the bottom of the log because the recommended responses to dealer naturals and dealer 21s are not applied. I'll fix that at some point, but my purpose here is to keep on demonstrating that more lost bets does not translate to more lost dough!


Click on an image to enlarge it
The blocks of numbers in the spreadsheet line up with the checks and crosses etc. in the log, so if you print out the three images, it should be fairly easy to match them up.

As always, there were numerous turnarounds that delivered a profit from a negative situation, and overall, the house edge was almost 2.0% gross, confirming that more hands went south than north, so to speak.

The NET AV was +2.79%, demonstrating once again that properly-applied doubles/splits really do deliver a player advantage. We already knew that a 3-2 pay-off is better for the bottom line than a 1-1 pay-off!

Real math (as opposed to mythematics) is reassuringly predictable when it comes to data from games of chance. An analysis of recovered series will invariably show that one third contained fewer wins than losses, one third had an equal number of wins and losses, and one third had fewer losses than wins. Surprise!

The bigger the sample, the more precise the distribution becomes. This set (the outcomes from 090309) made a liar out of me, temporarily, with 45 positive series, 18 negatives, and 21 break-evens, but that's not the norm. The current trial sample (all bets against Ken Smith's BST app) are also out of whack (547/369/315) but the distribution will settle down eventually!

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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