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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Some see it as a choice between excitement and monotony. It's not! It's between losing and winning.

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The average gambler's fondness for thrills and excitement (the fun of making badly-timed bets and losing yet again!) is the reason why target betting will never be a major threat to the casino industry.

Most people can't be bothered to "play smart." They would much rather go with the flow, even if it drowns them. To them, logic and practicality are anathema...they have no place at a gambling table, they believe.

I sympathize, I really do. Casinos are designed to exude the allure of temptation and guilty pleasure as effectively as a seductress wafts pheromones at her hapless mate. And money is meant to become almost meaningless, except as a measure of fun.

Some people can spend their whole lives gambling without discovering that winning is actually more pleasurable than losing. They win from time to time, for sure, but they see getting ahead of the game as a signal to take even more chances, having even more fun, until eventually they are back in the hole. Where they want to be.

When players like that come up against a prolonged negative trend (a hot dealer, or a cold table) they see it as a challenge, and keep piling on the bets in the belief that if they keep plenty of chips in motion, their luck will change. Sometimes it does..."and that's why they call it gambling."

The way I see it, dodging what often seems like certain destruction and making a little money against all odds is a whole lot more entertaining than following the script that the gambling industry has written for me.

But that does not mean that I think target betting is invincible. It is not. It needs my help to succeed. And that means knowing when to push, and when to pull back.

Table limits are theoretically a hindrance to target betting, but in practice they provide us with triggers and signposts that help us because we cannot ignore them without attracting unwanted attention. And attracting the attention of people who can interfere with our game plan is something we do not want to do!

I have talked before about rendering house spread limits harmless by imposing spread limits of your own, and the lesson is worth repeating.

Given a $5 opening bet, a spread of 1-20 to a maximum loss of $100 is probably fine, especially in a busy casino where a $100 bet is considered to be chump change.

Walking away from a low-limit table after every failed $100 bet wastes time and opportunity, so it makes more sense to make a mental note of each incomplete series, fall back to a minimum bet, and keep playing until there are enough saved targets to make stepping up a level worthwhile.

Above the bottom rung, a 1-5 spread is about as wide as you should go, following the same procedure as before. And you can keep on "stepping up" until you hit either your own maximum or the house limit.

You will always lose more EOS bets than you win. That is a fact of life, just as it is inevitable that over time, you will lose more bets of any kind than you win. What matters is timing, and target betting enables you to have the right amount of money on the table at that moment when you beat negative odds and win for a change.

Here's the latest BST set:-


This time I suffered brief brain fade and omitted comparisons between $5-$1,000 spread limit results and the outcome for target betting unchained, so here they are...

bst090410a HA/AV -1 = -0.43%, target betting wins $7,408 = +8.14% of $90,987 action, 253 rounds net, avg bet $406, bets of $1,000+ = 17

BST spread limit result loss of ($248) = -0.26% of $93,603 action, avg bet $418, bets of $1,000+ = 66

bst090410b HA/AV 22 = +9.57%, TB +$8,525, +1.92% of $443,235 action, 248 bets net, avg bet $1,979, bets of $1,000+ = 32

BST spread limit wins $8,678 = +13.94% of $62,258 action, avg bet $278, bets of $1,000+ = 40

bst090410c HA/AV = -25.5 = -14.66%, TB +$3,193 = 14.83% of $21,523, 177 bets, avg bet $96, bets of $1,000+ = 30

BST spread limit wins $453 = 1.99%/$22,743, avg bet $102, bets of $1,000+ = 39

This session was a rarity, one in which a tight spread involved less risk than target betting and for once managed to deliver an overall win! Target betting did much better, of course (about $20,000 vs. $9,000) and we expected that...

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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The YCW (you can't win) Brigade will tell you that if you can't be sure of winning, you should never attempt a betting strategy...

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...but if you don't have a plan, you are much more likely to lose.

It is plain to see who benefits most from the gambling attitude promoted by mythematicians, who go on to say: "You should think of gambling as entertainment, nothing more, and only bet what you can afford to lose."

My advice is fundamentally different: "Play to win, but don't play at all if you can't afford to win."

In other words, if a penny-ante bankroll is all you can muster (and there's no shame in that!) then you will probably be better off to trust to blind luck and hope that at worst, you break even.

Beating negative odds requires a bankroll large enough to keep you in the game through the inevitable rough spots when the house edge is temporarily far greater than standard negative expectation.

The latest batch of BST figures is not much different from its predecessors. It shows "the house" getting way ahead in terms of player losses vs. player wins, and as long as the 1-200 spread limit is applied, the result is another loss for the good guys (who don't work for the casino, let's be clear about that!).

Set target betting loose with an appropriate bankroll, and as before, we end up with an overall win with the total action (sessions A and B combined) greatly reduced. Also per prior experience, we see far more "big ticket" bets when the BST table limit is applied than without it.

So much for "conservative" play!

The BST results have been truly demoralizing lately, without target betting giving up a thin dime.

Here are the current "Batch #s 1-15 to date" numbers:-

Win Rate TD 100.0000%

ALL ahead +$1,715,420 = +5.17% of
$33,161,885 action
$25,000 max
$444 avg bet
$2,299 per hour
5.2 x avg bet


RISK (181,475) = 18.14% of bankroll
return 945%

EOS x 13,403 in 74,620 rounds
Avg EOS 5.6 rounds

AV/HA -5.28% (3,938) -5.28%
Expected ($1,750,087) per gross AV or (597) per net AV of -0.80%
TA/T 2.0 x expected result


+ MAX 12
- MIN -16
ABV $444
$1,000+ 3,536 4.74% of all bets

+ series 4,286 32%
0 series 4,153 31%
- series 4,964 37%
1-win EOS 8,737 65%

Most of the data are self-explanatory. Note that betting my way, big-ticket wagers were less than 5% of the total, and that the win to date represents better than a 5.0% "hold" of total action, against an overall house edge of between 0.8% and 5.28%, depending on the method of measurement.

Sometime soon, I will post average bet and $1,000+ data for a 1-200 spread for all 15 BST models, but it is safe to predict that action will be way up, the result will be an overall loss in line with negative expectation, and max bets will be in the majority, not a rare event at 1 in 20 or less.

I use a "net" number for the house edge (HA) or actual value (AV) which factors in doubles, splits and 3-2 payoffs for naturals. The old-fashioned way is to count hands as either won or lost: do that, and you end up with an HA that's more than SIX TIMES greater than my more inclusive approach.

As you can see, winning series (hey, they were ALL winning series) with more bets lost than won greatly outnumbered series with more wins than losses. Series that were negative or neutral still account for 68% of the total, so "expectation" demanded either a break-even or a loss in all those instances. Sorry, expectation.

The trial opened with a $1,000,000 bankroll almost 75,000 blackjack hands ago, and that has long since been covered by winnings, plus a 70% return on the investment which does not include $1,000,000 in profits left in the bankroll to take us through future downturns.

Maximum exposure for the initial bankroll was $181,475, or a little more than 18%.

I do not expect target betting to keep winning forever.

At some point, a win-loss pattern will be encountered that first pushes the strategy to its maximum bet, leaving it at the mercy of an ongoing negative surge that exceeds expectation for the game.

Then, the strategy will cease to be a strategy at all...it will have to wait out the surge and hope that sanity returns before the balance of the bankroll is swallowed up.

In the 300,000+ baccarat outcomes discussed in earlier blog posts, there was just one "crash and burn" and target betting came out way, way ahead in spite of it (see the archives or do a baccarat search).

The certainty is that winning sessions will always hugely outnumber losing sessions if you follow my rules.

The experts warn that the million-dollar bust could happen today or tomorrow, long before you have built up enough profits to avoid actual loss of your original buy-in.

But my way, probability is overwhelmingly on your side. Their way, it's against you every time you belly up to a blackjack table. The choice, of course, is yours!

The (nearly) 75,000 BST outcomes break down as follows:

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

Just for the fun of it, each of the target betting models also tracks results for two versions of the widely derided Martingale, the old-fashioned x2 kind (-5, -10, -20 etc.) and a more aggressive update which brings in more dough with a modified progression: -5, -10, -25, -50, -100, -250 etc.).

The YCW preachers scorn double-up as suicide, warning that "you will hit the table limit, and then what?"

"What," my friends (all of a sudden I'm John McCain?) is a move to a new location where the required NB is permitted. And if at some point you hit a house- or self-imposed green ceiling that can't be defied, then you keep on betting the max. The odds are very much in your favor that the WLP will stabilize and you will recover prior losses and then some.

Once again, I will say that I don't recommend double-up, not because it's a losing method, but because it is too easily spotted and casino pit staff will invariably interfere with its use.

I don't have double-up numbers for all 15 BST sessions yet, but here are the data for the current batch (#15). Notice that target betting is a more effective alternative.

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Here are the newest BST numbers. I have to stop doing this. But maybe not quite yet?

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

The BST "table-limit" bets enormously outnumber max bets with target betting rules because in the current batch, a tight-spread punter would have been at the limit for the last 1,200 rounds. And since he's in the hole by more than $65,000, he is going to be betting the max until the cows come home.

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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"Even with a win rate higher than 99.99%, someone has to lose - and it could be you."

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Back in the good old days when gambling discussion forums were not fatally targeted by spammers (and newspapers still made a profit), the topic of progressive betting brought frequent posts from a contributor who always signed his name with "Ph.D." after it, his presumed purpose being to tell us he was smarter than us, so we'd better shut up and listen.

The other day, I came across an old post from the guy I came to know fondly as "Harvey Phudd" and I offer it to you for your comments...

"The pythagorean theorem is more than 3000 years old, and it is still correct. You are implying that since the mathematics you blithely ignore is more than a century old that that the theorems are invalid. Sorry, the various theorems of probability and statistics that lead to the inevitable conclusion that "money management" or progressions can (sic) change the fundamental expectation of a gambling game are still valid.
"Progressions due (sic) skew results. That is, the chance of walking out at even or better is significantly increased. In some case, the increase is significantly in excess of 99%. No one disputes this. What you don't seem to understand is that the average win, when the progression system wins, is reduced, sometimes greatly, and the average loss, when the system loses, is significantly elevated.
"This is comparable, in the extreme, to a game where there are 2 blue marbles and 999,998 yellow marbles in a jar. A marble is drawn at random. The player wins $1 if a yellow marble is drawn and loses $1,000,000 if a blue marble is drawn. In this case, the player will almost always win this game. At some point, assuming that many players play, a player will lose now and again. The house (the casino) will make money on this game and yes, many players will also make money on this game. Heaven help the poor souls who lose however."

Harvey's argument typifies mythematics, which requires its followers to fudge facts and fiddle numbers and do whatever it takes to support the casinos' ordained right to beat the (stuffing) out of the rest of us.

Funnily enough, a believer in progressive betting or money management does not defy ancient axioms, whether Pythagorean or not, because it stands to modern as well as ancient sense that if you lose more bets than you win and bet flat or randomly, you must also eventually lose more money than you win.

My argument is with the assertion by Harvey Phudd and his ilk that a betting strategy that follows known and broadly predictable patterns in random outcomes cannot ever turn negative expectation on its ear.

Hell's bells! In the current BST trials, we're up to almost 75,000 outcomes and as you can see from the summary below, 68% of the series from which we made a handy profit were either negative or neutral, indicating that target betting "should have" lost 37% of the time and at best broken even 31% of the time.

It.
Didn't.
Happen.

Expectation is being in effect reversed in more than 2 series in every 3, and is being exceeded in those that remain.

Harvey is at least expanding the usually rigid, tiny-framed picture a little by saying that progressive betting can win close to 100% of the time but among thousands of players who make money from it, one or more is sure to go broke. It's the billion-bet runaway sim in a different guise.

I can't fight the argument that if a player takes no defensive measures whatsoever, he will lose eventually. But what does it tell us? That stupidity in a casino (often in the form of greed, ignorance, fatigue, distraction, or over-consumption of free booze) is a bad idea? I think most of us knew that already, Harvey.

Harvey concedes that progressions do skew results, and as long as my odds are being skewed to the good, I am in favor of that idea.

In the end, the choice is between negative odds of 495 to 505 (in a 1.0% game such as blackjack) or positive odds of 9,999 to 1 or better (13,328 to 0 in the current blackjack trial!) and I think I can guess which option most gamblers would prefer.

Harvey's million-marble analogy is interesting, but absent a Ph.D. I struggle to get his point. If the "winning" marbles don't go back in the jar, then sure, the odds of picking the right color will diminish with each bet until some sucker is sure to make an expensive mistake. Otherwise, odds that good are far better than those we face every time we get out of bed in the morning.

I know it's just an analogy, Harvey, but are there really people out there willing to risk $1,000,000 to win $1?

I'm comfortable risking a virtual "mill" at target betting because I know that soon enough, accumulated winnings will exceed my original seven-figure stake and I will be able to put it back in the bank and play on with my profits backing me.

Harvey is wrong when he says that average wins are reduced by progressive betting: the diametric opposite is true. And I doubt he meant to say, as he does above, that money management can change negative expectation, even though, for once, he was right.

It may also be true that even if you and me and everyone we know adopts target betting and wins consistently with it until we each fall off our perch, it will not alter the fact that casinos collectively will continue to reap fat rewards from the house advantage.

That has more to do with the nature of most gamblers than the numbers for or against progressive betting. Most gamblers expect to lose, even want to lose, and will do little or nothing to improve their chances, so perhaps they deserve their inevitable fate.

I have been warned on occasion that challenging or tampering with the status quo is immoral and unfair, and that casinos have a divine right to profit from the idiocy of the average gambler.

I say that if house games can be beaten without cheating or breaking the rules in any way, as many people as possible should be taught how to do it.

Here's the latest BST session. And OK, it's time for me to admit to myself that I am addicted to this process! I keep hearing the skeptics cry, "But it won't work next time!" and I have to keep on saying, "Just watch me win again!" And then I do.

(Good news that will be supported in detail in a later post is that almost TWO of ever THREE winning series will end with a single win, rather than the "twin" wins that are required for recovery without the OL and MSL rules in place. OL is short for opening loss, and calls for NB=PBx5 if the first bet in a new series goes south; MSL is mid-series loss and says that if PB is less than or equal to $1,000, the NB=LTD+ rule is repeated).


(Click on the image to enlarge it)

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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These pictures tell 201,000 stories: baccarat bets that target betting beat, creating the new gambling term un-negative expectation

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First of all, how about suspending disbelief for once and accepting my word that I had nothing whatever to do with the compilation or order of the outcomes summarized below (more than two years of play for a full time gambler!).

I have said in some of the related material that Lee Jones sent me the data as a set from two "systems tester" books put out by Zumma Publishing. Today I turned up some more archival material that tells me my memory played me false: the Jones data were packaged as "real-play shoes from casinos around the world."

What matters is that I did not originate the data set, and it can be verified by contacting Mr. Jones directly - he has his own proprietary method for winning at baccarat which I know nothing about other than that, unlike silly me, he's selling it rather than giving it away!

Another friendly statistician, Lorenzo Rodriguez, sent me the Zumma Publishing data, and I will post the results from his material next time. Years ago, I keyed in all the Zumma outcomes myself, then lost them in one of too many computer crashes (thanks a lot, Gateway).

I will let the screen shot panels speak for themselves...

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There is an awful lot of material here, too much for most people to want to study, and a powerful turn-off for those looking for an easy way to get rich in a casino without risking real money.

That's a good thing. In the 30-plus years I have spent on this challenge, I have learned that consistent winning does not come easy, and that whoever first said that it takes money to make money (it wasn't King Midas, that I know - he had it way too soft) was, er, right on the money.

I also learned that anyone who says "progressive betting can't work" is either a liar or an idiot. Think about it! Losing is by its nature (because there are always more losses than wins for even the smartest player in the long run) a progressive process.

When you are, say, five bets behind the house, you will not recover prior losses by betting the same amount or less unless your luck flips and at some point the ratio of losses to wins reverses.

Catching up on a losses-to-wins basis is, at best, unlikely and the probability is that you will continue to lose more often than you win as you struggle to recover.

So, betting less or betting the same won't save you. Betting more might do the trick, but not if you do it randomly, because you're up against the rule that says any amount bet against a negative expectation must eventually have a negative result.

All that's left, then, is money management and its objective to minimize losses and maximize wins so that the deficit between the number of wins and the number of losses overall does not translate to money down the drain.

I have in previous posts spent some time on the Martingale or double-up method, and dismissed it solely on the grounds that casinos will not permit its use for long.

It serves primarily as an example of what can be achieved by the disciplined application of a rule or set of rules. Mythematicians deride it because of the certainty that however long the odds, at some point it will encounter a losing streak long enough to push the next bet above the table limit.

In fact, that's not a problem for a player with balls and a bankroll to match: table limits are progressive, too, and you just have to keep moving within escalating limits until you hit that critical single win!

Most of the time, a Martingale will keep raking in profits with a bet ceiling of $5,000 and a variation on the standard double-up: 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000, 2500, 5000 and favorable odds of better than 1,000-to-1.

House-trained academics tell us that 10 losses in a row does not mean 10 wins in a row is "more likely" or that the number of wins will ever catch up with the number of losses. But because of the gentle influence of the house edge, which is always a very small fraction of 100%, the longer you play, the more likely it is that your negative and positive numbers will come substantially closer to balancing out.

When a positive trend arrives, you will be betting your maximum, which you did not reach until you were nine bets behind. You always want your average win value to exceed your average loss value by a percentage that is greater than the house edge for the series and this is one way to do it.

I say again, you will have to keep moving because no casino will let you bet a Martingale in one location for long. And if pit staff pick you out as a double-up punter even after you have tried to cover your tracks, they will steer you towards the nearest exit as quickly as possible.

Target betting is a better way to win.

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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