Blackjack can be consistently beaten without a millionaire's bankroll. But beware of "Catch-21" (the "rule" that what you know won't help you win)!

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"Catch-22" author Joseph Heller devised a fictitious military decree that only insanity can get you out of the Army, but if you are sane enough to know you're nuts, then you don't qualify for a medical discharge.

In similar vein is the cliche that insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Does it apply even if the results you get every time are positive?

Personally, my favorite (tangentially gambling-related) funny story involves a conversation overheard in a schoolyard: "My little brother thinks he's a chicken and me and Dad want him to see a psychiatrist. My Mom won't let him - she says we need the eggs."

Defying the conventional wisdom that house table games cannot in the end be beaten, and spending several decades proving that the house advantage can indeed be overcome, qualifies as madness in most people's opinion.

And I would have given up the effort years ago if the numbers coming at me from a succession of increasingly powerful computers, and ever more sophisticated spreadsheet models, did not keep turning the "invincible" house edge on its ear.

Like many of you, I am disappointed that so far a method of winning with little or no risk has eluded me.

But on the other hand, I figure that if casino operators have to front millions (billions!) of dollars to make blackjack, baccarat, craps, roulette and other beatable games available to us, we should try not to resent having to invest a little time and money to win at them!

I have said in earlier posts that the basic principles of target betting can benefit pretty much anyone tackling a casino table game, given a reasonable level of discipline and a bankroll to match.

But nothing I have learned and am attempting to pass on to you for free can do you any good if you believe the academic argument that past outcomes from games of chance, however large the sample or mathematically, objectively impeccable the analysis of them, cannot predict the future.

It's nonsense, of course.

In every other field of human activity, from a baby's first steps to the most complicated scientific research imaginable, the past is our surest guide to what's ahead. We learn from our missteps, in other words.

But not in gambling, say the experts...random numbers (stats, probabilities, percentages or whatever else you might choose to call them) are so uniquely and magically erratic that studying them is fruitless.

Baloney!

Common sense is probably a player's best ally if he expects to win consistently, as long as it (sensibly) rejects the idea that you can't win at games of chance.

And I should say again at this point that anyone who approaches a casino game with a will to win and the mental and monetary means to do it should never think of himself as a gambler.

Gamblers are, by their own definition, losers who say they want to win and might even believe it, but then repeatedly do everything they can to sabotage their own efforts.

Frequent players know that in big picture terms at least, table games are broadly predictable, repeating patterns of wins and losses along with seismic swings north or south of the wiggly line that we think of as "the norm."

What most players don't know is how to effectively exploit those mostly reliable patterns, betting in such a way that more wrong bets than right ones do not in the end mean more money lost than won.

And that, of course, is what target betting is all about.

All that really concerns us is the frequency of paired or "twin" player wins even when the overall trend of wins vs. losses is dramatically in the house's favor.

As long as we are not betting at our maximum level, meaning that we no longer have wiggle room and switching locations will probably not help us, twin wins will quickly get us out of trouble. And if the MSL rule is applicable, a win-loss-win sequence will do the trick.

On average, paired wins occur about five bets apart, enabling disciplined target betting to stay constantly ahead of the game in spite of more bets lost than won over the long haul.

Once in a while, the right pattern will become as scarce as hen's teeth and bet values will soar. But it happens rarely and never lasts for long, making the long-term prospects for target betting consistently positive.

It is simple enough to create an RNG model that will visually confirm the frequency of "twins" in spite of a relentless HA (anyone interested can e-mail me for an Excel example). Much as I dislike "sims" I have to accept that from time to time, they can be useful.

Academics who see themselves as the guardians of the status quo, defending the gullible from snake-oil salesmen like me (never mind that I am not actually selling anything!) insist that progressive betting is suicide.

I insist exactly the opposite, and have proved it again and again, oblivious to claims that since "it can't be done" I must be either crazy or a crook.

All target betting really says is that because you will certainly lose more bets than you win in the long term, you must see to it that you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

Sure, we have been there before, I know. But defying the conventional wisdom demands almost endless repetition of what I see as the obvious but others somehow find controversial.

If you are losing at blackjack, baccarat, roulette or whatever and are betting fixed amounts or randomly choosing the value of each new bet, you must either win more bets than you lose to get out of trouble...or win more money than you lose from now on.

The first option is completely out of your control, and may be achieved if you get lucky. But luck is not something you can count on.

The second option is only partially out of your control. You can determine bet values, but however clever you may be, you cannot know the outcome of each bet ahead of time.

To get around that little problem, you must make certain that when you win, you derive maximum benefit from having things go your way for once.

If you are playing at a 1.0% game such as blackjack, every single bet you place faces the same negative odds (495-505 to 1 against being one way of describing those odds).

When you choose to increase your bet value (and that never happens except in response to a mid-recovery win) you must know exactly how far behind you are, and therefore the precise amount you will need to win to get "out of the hole" plus a small profit.

The optimum rules set I have described throughout this blog is, to some, an aggressive approach that increases risk while proportionately increasing potential profits.

I can prove that to be a false assumption, but must concede that a $25,000 maximum bet and a $1,000,000 bankroll is beyond the reach of most players, whether they think of themselves as gamblers or not.

Just remember that erratic, emotional, irresponsible play will not win without a lot of luck even if there's a million bucks in the bank - high rollers don't win more, they just bet more, and don't hurt as much when they lose!

The solution to the added challenges of "economy play" is to scale back on some of the target betting strategy's more ambitious rules, saving them for that not far-off day when the bankroll has grown enough to make them less scary.

From the top, the optimum opening loss (OL) multiple I recommend is x5, meaning that if the $5 opening bet in a new series goes south, the next bet (NB) will be the previous bet (PB) x5, or $25.

Next is 2L x 3, meaning that if the second bet loses, NB=PBx3 = $75. Right after that comes 3L x 1.33 (you guessed it, after a 3rd consecutive opening loss, NB = $100).

All of the OL rules can be shelved to shield a limited BR, although be warned that the effect of that is to extend recovery time and thereby potentially increase risk.

Target betting's win progression (WP) component is another critical profit booster, and before I go any further, we should revisit the whole question of exploiting opening winning streaks.

If you ask a blackjack dealer the best way to "chase" a winning streak, the probable answer will be a "plus one" progression (+$5,+$10,+$15,+$20) that is the standard house recommendation, and is not surprisingly far better for the house than for you.

Think about it: Three successive wins at $5 followed by a $5 loss puts you $10 ahead; bet the house's way and you will also end up $10 ahead, your only hope being that along the way from $10 to $20, you hit a 3-2 natural or score a winning split/double.

The house likes "plus one" because a high percentage of potential winning streaks play out +$5, -$10, handing the dealer's tray an extra chip more than the conventional +$5, -$5.

Dealers do not always give bad advice: they usually preface every little lesson with the words "The books says..." But giving good advice is not part of their training, for obvious reasons.

The WP xfactor I recommend is 2, but the most critical WP rule in target betting is that you should not do as a dealer would recommend and fall back to a minimum bet after an opening winning streak ends. Bad, bad, bad idea.

Instead, you should treat the losing bet as your new loss to date (LTD) and set about recovering it in full.

Failure to optimally exploit winning streaks costs more players more money than just about anything else that happens in a casino, other than over-indulgence in "free" cocktails! (Greed and stupidity play a big role, too, but that's another story).

The WPx2 rule caps out at +$100, meaning that you don't double after PB=$200 but instead add $100 after every subsequent win.

And when the streak ends, as it always will, the recovery series is written off (with a profit of not less than $590) if the lost bet was worth $500 or more.

I am not opposed to the "plus one" approach, as long as the eventual loss is converted to the LTD and eventually recovered.

Skip that rule, and you will regret it.

Next up among "adjustable" target betting rules is the MSL or mid-series loss rule, referring to a second attempt at recovery (a do over) if the first LTD+ bet fails.

It's a major boost to the strategy's long-term efficacy because because most house wins are followed by an opposite outcome, as are most player wins. I recommend an MSL value of $1,000, meaning that a second LTD+ bet will follow a failed turnaround bet if its value was $1,000 or less.

On a budget, you can cut the MSL value all the way down to $100 (the lowest value I would be happy with) or even to ZERO if you have the fortitude to smile through all the series that would have turned around, if only...

The greatest value of the "L" rules is that they make it possible to turn a mounting loss around with a single win, a handy reversal that can occur more than 70% of the time at blackjack!

Blackjack is the best possible game for target betting because of the real (but not absolute) control afforded the player by consistent adherence to sane and sensible basic rules of play.

Skeptics dismiss past results as proof of anything, but against 85,000-plus rounds from Ken Smith's Blackjack Strategy Trainer, I have managed to keep the HA down to well below 1.0% overall in spite of almost always choosing the 8-deck shoe option.

I do that because there are usually far more split and doubledown options against a multi-deck game, and because I welcome the "streaky" nature of output from a long shoe.

If I don't like what I am getting, I can always go somewhere else - a rule that every target betting player should keep high on his list!

The results illustrated below can easily be dismissed as anecdotal or completely irrelevant but I believe they have much more to say about how we can hope to win at blackjack than runaway sims that do away with every single aspect of the casino experience other than random numbers.

Imagine if all casinos offered were heads-up games against a random numbers generator, with rules requiring that you bet from your lowest value to your highest in the same place, and forbidding you from quitting when you felt like it.

If you walk in a straight line across a minefield, paying no attention to where you put your feet, chances are you will be blown to bits before you reach the other side.

If you drive a car very fast down a winding mountain road without touching the steering wheel or the brake and gas pedals, you will probably crash and burn long before you get to the valley below.

If you jump out of a high-flying plane without a parachute you...well, by now you probably get my drift.

So it is with "runaway sims": they eliminate cards, dice, tables, dealers, players, wheels, chips and almost everything else including real time, and are then claimed to accurately represent what you can expect to encounter in a casino game of chance.

They don't.

I am sometimes accused of dreaming up arbitrary rules that by sheer luck prevail against a given set of outcomes, and will never beat another sample of any size.

That might be fair if the rules of target betting were derived from the blackjack outcomes summarized here.

In truth, those rules have been around since the early 1990s and were first published on the 'Net in 1997, while the BST outcomes trounced here date back just a few months (the product of more time at my computer than I care to admit to!).

Take them or leave them.

The same advice applies to all of the charts and summaries published here.

They are warts-and-all slices of objective data that demonstrate conclusively something most people already know: If you bet fixed amounts or randomly, you will lose.

Progressive betting is not suicide, it is survival.

Winning is not always easy, and it gets harder the more you tighten your spread and the smaller your available bankroll.

But at worst, it is a whole lot more fun than losing.

Here's that blackjack data:


The run-through summarized here features target betting's performance top-lining in the chart, with the session results to the right of the line seen headed boldly north-east.

The other blocks of data are from a souped-up version of Oscar's Grind, a standard Small Martingale (-1, -2, -4, -8, +16) and a more aggressive Martingale (-1, -2, -5, -10, +25).

Target betting invariably does best of the alternatives programmed into my models, which are included simply to underscore the superiority of almost any method of progressive betting over a hit-and-hope, seat-of-the-pants approach.

It is important to understand that the deeper the hole you are in, the bigger the shovel you will need to get out of there!

That means freezing the bet value after any mid-series loss, assuming MSL is not in play, and making sure after a win that you press as hard as your BR permits.


Again, the BR has been cut to 20% of the $1m optimum, and the spread has been tightened to 1-2,500 while increasing the minimum bet from $5 to $10.


Above, we still have a $200,000 BR, but the minimum is up to $25 and the spread is 1-1,000.


And here's what we get with all target betting's bells and whistles in play: one crushing loss, then a sustained string of wins suggesting that serious threats are so rare, they can almost - almost - be discounted.

Note that none of these data summaries conform with the so-called conventional wisdom, which would probably accept 85,000 rounds as a reasonably representative sample, and require that the final outcome be within range of the product of action multiplied by the 0.85% HA.

Expected or indicated results - what "should have" happened are plain to see in all the summaries.

The HA is, to target betting, a mere nuisance.

My version of Oscar's Grind (owing very little to the disaster recommended by the author of a best-selling book called "How to Gamble in a Casino"!) at least managed to do a little better than break-even.

But we are not about breaking even, are we?

We want to win. And we know how!

The most effective antidote to the house edge is making bet values as variable as your BR permits, keeping in mind that variable does not mean random!

Target betting rules do all a player's thinking for him, and that in itself lifts a huge burden (although some critics have suggested that I have taken all the "fun" out of gambling by replacing spontaneity with discipline).

Tom Ainslie's glacial interpretation of Oscar's Grind keeps bet values on an upward climb, it's true.

But because it lacks a win progression and adds just one unit in response to a mid-recovery right bet, it is doomed to comply with the HA in the long run.

My upgrade of Oscar applies a +1 WP and permits the bet to be doubled after a mid-series win until turnaround is within reach, so it actually makes consistent headway.

But in spite of the turbo-charge, OGX (short for Oscar's Grind Extra) falls far short of even the most cautious version of target betting.

Against the BST blackjack data set, "Ainslie's Grind" ended up losing 0.67% of its overall action, which was at least a slight improvement over the net HA of 0.85%.

Maybe that's why Mr. Ainslie's book is not titled "How to WIN in a Casino"!

OGX came in at +0.63%, not quite flipping the HA into a significant player edge, but making a contribution to expenses.

The tamest, most toned-down version of target betting delivered a win equal to +3.65% of its total action.

As an old-time mathematician would put it: "Q.E.D."!

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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Can target betting make you a winner without a million-dollar bankroll? Absolutely, because anything is better than trusting to luck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is nonsense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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Occasional losses are inevitable as long as there is a house advantage (and there always is). Target betting makes those losses very rare indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bet flat or bet randomly and you will lose.

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

Either way, the arithmetic is very simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An international math superstar's assessment of sims as models of human behavior: "Absolute rubbish!"

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Last week's edition of Newsweek includes an article which I interpret as vindication for my longstanding skepticism about the validity of computer simulations as predictors of human behavior.

Paul Wilmott is described as a leading quant, meaning that he specializes in developing new principles of quantitative finance that can be safely applied to the complex world of economics.

It seems he agrees with me that because mathematics cannot predict human behavior, mathematicians recklessly created models that ignored it entirely, with the disastrous results that we are all now living through.

Economics and gambling are alike only when it comes to the speculative nature of stock trading, but human nature has a powerful influence in both fields, and ignoring it is both deceptive and dangerous.

To celebrate Mr. Wilmott's dismissal of most financial models as "absolute rubbish" I decided to boost my database of blackjack and baccarat outcomes past the half-million mark by writing a new "sim" of my own to give me 150,000 new rounds.

That might seem foolish or hypocritical, but I had every reason to be confident that target betting would come out ahead this time, just as it always has.

I would love to be able to claim that there was not a loser among the 20 models of 7,500 rounds or 100 shoes apiece, but it didn't work out that way.

Here's the bottom line:


Given my dismissal of sims as proof of anything other than the disingenuous agenda of house-trained mythematicians, I can hardly trumpet the above summary as a victory for the principles of target betting.

But like my critics, I have to be grateful for the speed and convenience of computer game simulations while doubting their relevance to real play in real time by real people risking real money.

It would take me at least a month to record and collate 150,000 outcomes of baccarat, which has to be the most laborious table game ever devised, and even my soon-to-be-replaced laptop was able to come up with this data set in barely 15 minutes.

The first thing to notice is how similar most of these sets are to the baccarat data independently supplied by Messrs. Jones and Rodriguez.

As regular readers will know, my quarrel with sims is based on their requirement that the "player" they pretend to emulate must bet exactly the same way whatever the current conditions. Like a suicidal lunatic, in a word.

No defensive tactics or damage control can be applied in the otherworld of runaway sims. And perhaps the silliest conceit of all is that, in a sim, it must be possible to bet from the house minimum to the house limit in one place.

The defenders of the status quo insist that damage control is in the long run irrelevant, because the inexorable nature of the house advantage makes the probability of a beneficial effect slightly less than a 50-50 proposition in the same way that each bet is slightly more likely to lose than to win.

What this assumption willfully ignores is that progressive betting changes the odds from less than 50% to better than 90%, as shown throughout the earlier blackjack/baccarat data set and in the new outcomes summarized above.

That's an improvement from less than 1 chance in 2 to a much friendlier 10 chances in 11!

Target betting will always show a profit if a recovery series lasts for 10 rounds or fewer, even if more bets were lost than won in that series.

In the latest set, 91.4% of all series fell into that "easy win" category.

That's not to say that series lasting longer will lose - there was just ONE "bust" in 28,798 series in the new sample, indicating a win rate of 99.9965%.

My experience is that real play almost always offers better conditions than any simulation, even if that substitute for reality is based upon actual outcomes recorded in a casino.

The problem is, of course, that even "real" results become sim-like when they are plugged en masse into a model, with a betting strategy then strictly applied with no reliance on a human response to potential threats to the bankroll.

It is a classic rock-and-hard-place dilemma, confirming that the only truly relevant test of a betting strategy is real play by...etc.

The gambling industry knows that essential truth better than any mathematician!

Paul Wilmott happens to be the loudest and most visible among countless 20/20 visionaries who were either silent or unheard in the run-up to the economic tsunami that, according to an estimate I read on the Net today, has wiped out more than $1.3 trillion in Americans' personal wealth in less than a year.

The only good news is that a big chunk of that washed-away wealth was in the hands of casino moguls like Steve Wynn, Sheldon Adelson and Kirk Kerkorian after they had leeched it from the misguided fools who actually earned it before flushing it away in Las Vegas.

To the thousands of Wall Street wonks whose jobs were sucked away by the ebb tide, I can only suggest that target betting in a casino offers them a better shot at rebuilding their bankrolls than their former workplace ever will again!

And target betting is also a whole lot less complicated and dangerous than any of the fancy fiscal formulas that flew ever higher before succumbing to the force of gravity and falling to earth.

What sims ignore is that once a player recognizes that progressive betting is the only way to win consistently, a wide array of tactics become available to him or her.

And while a million-dollar bankroll may be ideal, it is not essential: the principles of target betting can be adapted to more modest resources, and will always offer the player better long-term odds of success than flying by the seat of his pants.

Luck might serve him better in the short term. But luck never lasts, for either side of the gambling equation.

The new RNG summary offers a wealth of useful insights that are not rendered totally meaningless by the unreliability of sims.

For instance, a standard Martingale and my souped-up versions of double-up and Oscar's Grind all did well against the new sample, each reversing the effect of the negative expectation that would have doomed a flat or random bettor challenging the same outcomes.

There may be skeptics out there who will say that 150,000 rounds is "not a representative sample" but they will be tooting a hollow tune: very few "recreational" gamblers will place that many bets in an entire lifetime.

The bottom line is that all of the results I have reported in this blog are impossible according to the conventional wisdom, meaning that either the conventional wisdom is wrong or I am a fraud.

In the new non-fraudulent sample summarized here, 14 of 20 sets of 7,500 outcomes ended with more bets lost than won, and more than 64% of all series "should have" ended with a negative or neutral result.

Instead, more than 73% of all series scored a profit after just one win, a minor miracle made possible by a combination of the OL, 2L, 3L and MSL rules of target betting (click on the rules link at the top of the blog for a refresher course).

The average end of series (EOS) win came in less than six bets.

As expected (and required by the overall house edge), more EOS attempts failed than succeeded. But because the win target is constantly updated to match the loss to date, that was not, in the end, a problem.

Target betting with the above parameters applied is an aggressive approach suited only to a large bankroll, but the actual exposure was barely 50% of the recommended $1 million.

The average win per 7,500 rounds was more than $110,000 or about $1,000 per shoe of baccarat.

Target betting turned a negative expectation of 0.97% (low for baccarat, but that can happen) into a positive result equal to +1.54% of total action.

SM, SM+ and OG (see below) all did better than target betting, in percentage terms, but delivered smaller funny-money profits.

Target betting is intended to win more when it wins than it loses when it loses in order to overcome the inescapable house advantage in casino games of chance, and against the new sample, the overall average win value exceeded the average loss value by 5%. That was more than enough to trump the house edge.

The AWV/ALV percentage for the 19 winning sets was 115%.

The average bet for target betting was $529, although only 5% of all bets (7,440 out of 150,000) exceeded $1,000.

The averages for SM, SM+ and OG were $51, $217 and $74 respectively.

The final target betting win against this irrelevant and unreliable sample of outcomes (it came from a sim, so how else can I describe it?) was equal to a little more than $800 per hour of play.

Exposure of the bankroll exceeded 10% in 9 of the 20 sets of baccarat outcomes. I will apply "bare bones" parameters against the same data sample sometime soon and post the results.

The "expected" result from this set, given a -0.97% actual value (AV) and target betting action of $79.35 million, was a LOSS of $773,000 in contrast to a WIN of $1.22m.

The overall win rate for target betting was 99.9965% or 1 loss in 29,798 series.

My critics will continue to insist that none of this could have happened without sleight of hand. That is because in many cases their livelihood depends on denial.

More about the alternatives to target betting featured in the above summary...

SM is the much-maligned standard Martingale (-1, -2, -4, -8, +16), which is very effective but almost always unplayable because of the vigilant paranoia of pit personnel.

SM+ is my adaptation of SM to deliver a little more than $5 in profit from a $5 opening bet: -$5, -$10, -$25, -$50, +$100). It is also virtually unplayable, although scrutiny can sometimes be dodged in a busy casino by betting no more than 3 wrong bets at any one location.

OG is for Oscar's Grind, which as far as I know is the only betting strategy ever endorsed in a mass-market "how to" book about gambling.

That alone makes the method suspect, since gambling books as a genre are intended to encourage people to play more while reinforcing the message that losing is ultimately inevitable.

I applaud OG for freezing the bet after a loss, thus helping to confound the enemy. But author Tom Ainslie's rules (NB=PB+1u after a win, bail out after a 20u loss, and do not apply a win progression) are in my view a prescription for certain failure.

Mr. Ainslie claims he has paid for countless Caribbean gambling trips with Oscar, which makes him a very lucky fellow. Whenever I model his rules, I drown in red ink!

My "OG" applies a win progression of PB+1u after an opening win, and as with target betting makes the streak-ending loss the LTD. After that, the mid-series win response is PBx2 to a max of LTD+1u rather than Mr. Ainslie's wimpy PB+1u.

As I said earlier, a player who embraces the unique efficacy of progressive betting as an antidote to the progressive (or regressive) process called losing has multiple options that range from mildly confident to supremely cocky.

Any one of them is better than playing and losing the way the gambling industry expects you 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.
_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The honest answer: little or none.

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

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

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

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

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

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

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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"Your methodology is a mess and your alleged strategy is too complicated for anyone else to understand. This isn't math, it's madness!"

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How rude!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so it goes...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gamblers want a quick rush - money in a hurry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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