_
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.
_
Showing posts with label negative expectation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label negative expectation. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Monday, May 11, 2009
"Your methodology is a mess and your alleged strategy is too complicated for anyone else to understand. This isn't math, it's madness!"
_
How rude!
But I guess when you choose to go public with ideas that challenge the conventional wisdom, you have to be ready to take a little unfriendly heat.
I have never claimed to be a traditional academic mathematician, and I suspect if I were, I would never have leaped into this project in the first place.
Mathematicians as a breed, and I have known one or two, have always seemed to me more interested in getting their heads around other people's ideas than coming up with anything new of their own.
Maybe they feel that this late in the game, there can be nothing new to come up with.
And I have to admit that my methodology, as target betting has evolved, has not been all that it could be.
I am too easily distracted by questions that occur to me in the middle of one aspect of the challenge of overcoming the house edge at games of chance, and as a result, my data is disorganized and hard to follow for people with tidier minds than mine.
I usually finish what I have started, but not in the methodical manner that a trained mathematician would insist upon.
So, here and now I am announcing a spring-cleaning project, which is especially appropriate today because just before dawn, I heard my first wren of the season staking his claim on this little piece of Northern Nevada.
Step one will be to take the blackjack outcomes and break out each separate component of target betting to see how it performs on its own.
That means starting with just the LTD+ rule (the one that makes it possible to win more when you win than you lose when you lose) and then carefully adding and subtracting elements such as the OL (opening loss), WP (win progression) and MSL (mid-series loss) rules.
Once I have the blackjack summary, I will post it here and then move on to the far larger baccarat data sets that together account for about 80% of the "real" outcomes in my database.
I should say once again that I flatly reject the notion that past outcomes from games of chance have nothing to tell us about what we can expect in the future.
There might be something to it if I were building a betting method from scratch using just the outcomes to hand, because there would be a real danger that I would end up with a strategy that works only for those outcomes.
It would be tough, I suspect, to devise a method that beats more than 400,000 outcomes from two very different casino table games, but that is not what I am about here.
Target betting, aka Turnaround, has been in the public domain for a dozen years now, and has existed in my head and in my spreadsheet files for almost two and a half times that long.
The basic idea, the deferral of a recovery bet until a single win ends (or at least interrupts) a losing pattern, owes nothing to the Jones and Rodriguez baccarat samples, or to the 80,000-plus rounds generated with the help of Ken Smith's Blackjack Strategy Trainer.
It's going to take me a while to get all of this done, but I will get there.
I can tell you right now that with all of the frills, feints and dodges stripped away, the LTD+ rule alone turns a 0.81% house edge into a 1.4% player edge, flipping an indicated LOSS of at least $263,000 into a WIN of $454,000.
That alone is impossible, according to those well-trained, tidy-minded, methodical mathematicians I mentioned earlier.
Adding my WP rule, which keeps re-doubling the bet after an opening win in a new series to a maximum of $200, adding $100 each round until the streak inevitably ends, pushes the overall win to $841,000 (+2.46%).
(An indicated loss, remember, is the product of the actual value of the house edge in a given sample, multiplied by the total action from the same sample).
Adding the MSL rule (repeating an EOS bet of LTD+ if the first attempt failed and the value of the lost bet was $500 or less) kicks the overall result up another notch to $1.05 million (+2.69%).
On its own, MSL bumped the final win from $454,000 (+1.4%) to $702,000 (+1.92%).
Adding OL=NBx2 to the bare-bones version of target betting reduced the final win by almost half to $222,000 (+0.79%), but when it was combined with WPx2, the outcome was a win of $886,000 (+3.12%).
And so it goes...
Of course, no betting rule is worth even a nickel if all it does is increase the final win by what could be a onetime fluke.
It has to be effective most of the time and that is something that can easily be tracked with a spreadsheet platform.
Runaway sims, the weapon of choice for self-styled systems debunkers, usually supply as little information as possible - the final result, total action, overall AV/HA and the invariably identical product of loss/action.
One of the purposes of target betting's "extra" rules is to provide a strategy player with a means to vary his tactics from time to time to camouflage what he is up to.
But many of them also serve to boost the overall profit from the betting method.
The numbers I get from existing data sets will not be precisely reflected in future play (assuming that games other than baccarat gave us the means to track every hand and conduct a post-win breakdown).
However, different samples from different games report strikingly similar results, enabling us to evaluate all those non-basic rules individually and collectively.
I can confidently predict that one of the good things that will come out of this spring-clean inquiry is confirmation that while individual "switches" can be turned on and off, together they make the strategy more profitable than it would be without them.
The rules are like a tasty stew, with each ingredient working together more effectively than if it were the only "flavor" in the mix.
And really, what is so complicated about the target betting rules? They become second nature very quickly, and eliminate the stress of trying to decide what to bet on the next round - a goal worth fighting for.
Perhaps their greatest gift (apart from steady profits) is that they tell you when you have won enough, and that it is time to quit the big-money arena and get back to square one.
Winners usually never know when to quit, a dilemma that more often than not makes them losers in the end.
Gamblers want a quick rush - money in a hurry.
Players with a plan know that a slow build with minimal risk is the only way to go.
One thing I should mention about the "new" tests (actually a repeat of work I have done before, with the results presented in a much more orderly manner!) is that I have streamlined bet values to fall in line with the demands of real-time play.
Given an LTD of -$875, for example, you would not fumble a pile of chips together to match that amount...you would push out $1,000 and be done with it, happy at the prospect of a $125 series profit if all goes well.
In all the past models, bets of clumsy amounts have been permitted, because this has always been as much a matter of proving the conventional wisdom wrong as of taking a bite out of the gambling industry's over-padded bottom line.
After all, how much can I do on my own?
That is why target betting is in front of you right now: I want as many people as possible to learn it, gain full confidence in it, and then use it to chip away at a business that has somehow managed to find respectability by exploiting the greed and ignorance of others.
Wall Street's bubble kept ballooning for years with excessive doses of disinformation and deception pumped into it day after day, and we all know what happened.
Target betting will not destroy (or even much discomfort) the gambling industry, because most punters are happier flying by the seat of their pants and losing than learning how to win consistently.
But as the old joke says about 10,000 lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean..."It's a pretty good start."
An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
_
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.
_
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Gaming regulations in many states favor casinos over players in a big way. So we know whose side the politicians are on!
_
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.
_
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.
_
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
If you don't believe that how a player bets can determine if he wins or loses, you probably should not be gambling.
_
Gambling is not a word I am fond of, because it suggests a foolhardy disregard of the odds and a reckless trust in luck.
I have not thought of myself as a gambler in more than three decades. A player, sure. But let's face it, gambling is for suckers!
I have spent the last day or so making my spreadsheet models more accessible to other people, so that I have less explaining to do when I agree to polite requests for copies of the files than enable me to make the claims I do for target betting.
It is just a matter of tidying up the boilerplates so that the function of the conditional formulas is less of a mystery.
I know what they are for (I created them, after all!) but some of the functions have been in place for so long that even I have forgotten how some overall results are arrived at. I just know that they are accurate.
I need answers to a lot of questions whenever I plug in a new data set and every so often I clean house this way to make sure that errors have not crept in and then gone unnoticed.
Spreadsheets are wonderful things, but it is far too easy for an occasional small glitch to grow into a major problem if every cell is not carefully reviewed once in a while.
Along the way I have been looking at whether or not the "Push-plus" rule I apply to blackjack (PBx2, PB+$100 max) would not be a good policy for baccarat.
I have come to the conclusion that backing Banker all the way is, contrary to the advice of most of the experts I have read, a very dangerous idea, with or without what would technically become "Tie-plus."
I have tried to make sense of the "no commission" variations that have been spreading through casinos since around 2003, working on the assumption that "new rules" are never introduced to benefit the player.
After an excess of open-minded analysis, I am back to my long-held belief that betting on Player only is the surest way to stay ahead of the game.
The "Tie-plus" experiment highlighted what is really the only major difference between me and the self-styled experts in gambling mathematics.
They cannot fault my methodology or the accuracy of my results, so they switch gears and complain that the target betting strategy is "not practical."
I say the player has control over his eventual fate.
They say that whatever he does to try to dodge the bullet, eventually the invincible house edge will find its mark and do him in.
They say that runaway sims provide an honest and accurate gauge of any betting method's chances of upsetting the odds.
I say that as long as we are willing to accept what I now think of as the "presumption of inertia" (not to mention idiocy, insanity, and ineptitude and eventual insolvency), then simulations that eliminate the human element, along with cards, dice, wheels, tables and dealers, may have something to tell us.
But given that actual casino table games are played by human beings, not mindless robots, their only useful lesson is that if you play like a total idiot, you will lose all your money!
Since I believe that experienced players can sense when it is time to back of from a bad situation, helped by betting rules that tell them when a change of location is due, I reject runaway sims completely.
Ah, say the experts, that's because computer simulations prove that your target betting strategy is bogus.
Au contraire, say I - very large samples of actual outcomes from reliable sources, along with on-going play against games that I have singled out as suitable for target betting, prove that my method is the only way to win consistently.
To get back to the topic of ties in baccarat, my policy has always been to ignore them, except when a dealer gets really pushy about trying to sell them as a sensible option.
When that happens (usually at a mini-baccarat layout), I smile my very best smile and say, OK, from now on, your tokes go on the Tie. The subject very rarely comes up again.
I found from reprocessing the Jones baccarat sample (more than 225,000 rounds with ties reinstated) that applying blackjack's push-plus to baccarat ties can add from 5% to 50% to the final win.
Here's a breakdown:-
Probably the first thing that jumps out at you here is that betting "Tie+plus" suffered two crippling busts while ignoring the ties (as I have for years) had just one minor hiccup that was quickly reversed in the next few shoes.
But then in 23 of 30 data sets averaging more than 7,000 rounds or 100 shoes apiece, the more aggressive betting approach paid off handsomely. That's better than 76%.
So what about those deadly busts?
Let's take a closer look at them, forgetting the illogical and unscientific caveat than in gambling, what's past can never be a predictor of what the future holds.
As the caption comments, not a pretty sight.
Now please consider the important fact that in real play, it would be impossible for prolonged downturns like these to do anything close to the damage indicated in the results summary you see here.
There is not a casino on earth that would permit you to open with a $5 minimum bet and progress all the way to a $25,000 wager, spreading 1-5,000.
Table limits exist solely to encourage gamblers to "spread tight," greatly limiting their chances of recovering from egregious downturns like those you see here.
In fact, spreads are getting tighter all the time, requiring a target bettor fighting a temporary slump to move several times from layout to layout before recovering prior losses (the all-important LTD) and starting over with a minimum bet.
Generally, I will suspend a new series when I lose a $100 bet at a $5 table, or lose $200 after a $10 opener, but there is wiggle room on the lower rungs of the ladder that enables playing conditions to dictate the first bail-out.
I do not always walk away from a $100 loss.
In fact, most of the time, I just fall back to a minimum bet, and make a mental note of the LTD/NB numbers from the unrecovered loss. Then I keep playing, perhaps suspending a few more series, until my brain cries out for a break so I can write those targets down before they evaporate!
The critical question that is begged here is How likely is it that when you bail out of a downturn, you will encounter another (and maybe another after that) when you resume play elsewhere?
For a haphazard, seat-of-the-pants gambler, the odds may be as bad as 50-50 that his lousy "luck" will continue and he will sink ever deeper into the hole, however often he bails out in search of greener pastures.
Not so the target strategist. He needs just two wins in succession to turn a losing series around. And more often than not a single win will do the trick.
The "worst case scenario" charts above confirm what you and I already know. Most of the time, the win-loss pattern in a game of chance is like ping-pong with more bounces: a win, a loss, two wins, three losses, a win, a loss, three wins and so on.
In blackjack, the average EOS comes in quite a bit less than six rounds. In baccarat, turnaround takes just a little longer.
The random bettor who is five bets behind is on a slippery slope, often needing to get the same number of bets ahead in order to escape the noose.
That is never true for a target player. Ever.
Because baccarat has only even-money payouts (less if you are crazy enough to bet on Banker!) it makes sense that it would have longer recoveries and lower EOS profits than blackjack, with all its doubles and splits and naturals to boost the player's bottom line.
For that reason, I strongly recommend adding the Tie-plus rule to your target betting strategy.
The painful busts you see above represent nothing more than a reminder that a player who will not take steps to mitigate the damage from a downturn probably deserves to lose.
My critics constantly parrot the notion that damage control is a fantasy for fools, but the math says otherwise.
Target betting enables a player to repeatedly recover his losses in fewer bets than it took to get him into trouble in the first place.
A random bettor can only achieve that end by accident.
As long as you are able to win more when you win than you lose when you lose (my turn to be a parrot!) then losing more often than you win will not hurt you.
Finally, more about the cliff-drop downturns illustrated in the charts above.
Here are details of the first few bets in each "killer" series.
The red shading shows where bail-outs would have been required by the target betting rules, or by house-mandated table limits.
Most recovery series wrap up in five bets or less, enabled by the paired player wins that are a consistent and reliable feature of every game's win-loss pattern.
Longer series occur more often in baccarat than in blackjack: about 10.5% of the time vs. 8.5%.
But even so, every time you bail out of a bad run, you have much better than an 80% probability that the WLP will level out enough to enable turnaround.
You also had an 80% chance of seeing an improvement if you had stayed where you were. But as the Chinaman once said, a killer losing streak must always begin with a handful of losses, so DBO (translation: don't bend over).
You cannot know ahead of time if the negative trend that just showed up will continue long enough to wipe you out. All you can know is that the threat you are facing is an aberration, one that probably will not continue if you suspend play for a while, and resume the LTD/NB elsewhere.
One of the many failings of the runaway sim is that by totally excluding the human element, it must ignore the simple question of morale and the extent to which intuition and good sense can enhance a player's winning prospects.
They dismiss gut feelings or intuition as pathetic irrelevancies.
They don't know what they are talking about.
A winning system that never fails is a mathematical impossibility. Even the house does not have one of those.
Does that mean that we should all play like fools and accept that losing is inevitable?
I don't think so.
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.
Gambling is not a word I am fond of, because it suggests a foolhardy disregard of the odds and a reckless trust in luck.
I have not thought of myself as a gambler in more than three decades. A player, sure. But let's face it, gambling is for suckers!
I have spent the last day or so making my spreadsheet models more accessible to other people, so that I have less explaining to do when I agree to polite requests for copies of the files than enable me to make the claims I do for target betting.
It is just a matter of tidying up the boilerplates so that the function of the conditional formulas is less of a mystery.
I know what they are for (I created them, after all!) but some of the functions have been in place for so long that even I have forgotten how some overall results are arrived at. I just know that they are accurate.
I need answers to a lot of questions whenever I plug in a new data set and every so often I clean house this way to make sure that errors have not crept in and then gone unnoticed.
Spreadsheets are wonderful things, but it is far too easy for an occasional small glitch to grow into a major problem if every cell is not carefully reviewed once in a while.
Along the way I have been looking at whether or not the "Push-plus" rule I apply to blackjack (PBx2, PB+$100 max) would not be a good policy for baccarat.
I have come to the conclusion that backing Banker all the way is, contrary to the advice of most of the experts I have read, a very dangerous idea, with or without what would technically become "Tie-plus."
I have tried to make sense of the "no commission" variations that have been spreading through casinos since around 2003, working on the assumption that "new rules" are never introduced to benefit the player.
After an excess of open-minded analysis, I am back to my long-held belief that betting on Player only is the surest way to stay ahead of the game.
The "Tie-plus" experiment highlighted what is really the only major difference between me and the self-styled experts in gambling mathematics.
They cannot fault my methodology or the accuracy of my results, so they switch gears and complain that the target betting strategy is "not practical."
I say the player has control over his eventual fate.
They say that whatever he does to try to dodge the bullet, eventually the invincible house edge will find its mark and do him in.
They say that runaway sims provide an honest and accurate gauge of any betting method's chances of upsetting the odds.
I say that as long as we are willing to accept what I now think of as the "presumption of inertia" (not to mention idiocy, insanity, and ineptitude and eventual insolvency), then simulations that eliminate the human element, along with cards, dice, wheels, tables and dealers, may have something to tell us.
But given that actual casino table games are played by human beings, not mindless robots, their only useful lesson is that if you play like a total idiot, you will lose all your money!
Since I believe that experienced players can sense when it is time to back of from a bad situation, helped by betting rules that tell them when a change of location is due, I reject runaway sims completely.
Ah, say the experts, that's because computer simulations prove that your target betting strategy is bogus.
Au contraire, say I - very large samples of actual outcomes from reliable sources, along with on-going play against games that I have singled out as suitable for target betting, prove that my method is the only way to win consistently.
To get back to the topic of ties in baccarat, my policy has always been to ignore them, except when a dealer gets really pushy about trying to sell them as a sensible option.
When that happens (usually at a mini-baccarat layout), I smile my very best smile and say, OK, from now on, your tokes go on the Tie. The subject very rarely comes up again.
I found from reprocessing the Jones baccarat sample (more than 225,000 rounds with ties reinstated) that applying blackjack's push-plus to baccarat ties can add from 5% to 50% to the final win.
Here's a breakdown:-
Probably the first thing that jumps out at you here is that betting "Tie+plus" suffered two crippling busts while ignoring the ties (as I have for years) had just one minor hiccup that was quickly reversed in the next few shoes.
But then in 23 of 30 data sets averaging more than 7,000 rounds or 100 shoes apiece, the more aggressive betting approach paid off handsomely. That's better than 76%.
So what about those deadly busts?
Let's take a closer look at them, forgetting the illogical and unscientific caveat than in gambling, what's past can never be a predictor of what the future holds.
As the caption comments, not a pretty sight.
Now please consider the important fact that in real play, it would be impossible for prolonged downturns like these to do anything close to the damage indicated in the results summary you see here.
There is not a casino on earth that would permit you to open with a $5 minimum bet and progress all the way to a $25,000 wager, spreading 1-5,000.
Table limits exist solely to encourage gamblers to "spread tight," greatly limiting their chances of recovering from egregious downturns like those you see here.
In fact, spreads are getting tighter all the time, requiring a target bettor fighting a temporary slump to move several times from layout to layout before recovering prior losses (the all-important LTD) and starting over with a minimum bet.
Generally, I will suspend a new series when I lose a $100 bet at a $5 table, or lose $200 after a $10 opener, but there is wiggle room on the lower rungs of the ladder that enables playing conditions to dictate the first bail-out.
I do not always walk away from a $100 loss.
In fact, most of the time, I just fall back to a minimum bet, and make a mental note of the LTD/NB numbers from the unrecovered loss. Then I keep playing, perhaps suspending a few more series, until my brain cries out for a break so I can write those targets down before they evaporate!
The critical question that is begged here is How likely is it that when you bail out of a downturn, you will encounter another (and maybe another after that) when you resume play elsewhere?
For a haphazard, seat-of-the-pants gambler, the odds may be as bad as 50-50 that his lousy "luck" will continue and he will sink ever deeper into the hole, however often he bails out in search of greener pastures.
Not so the target strategist. He needs just two wins in succession to turn a losing series around. And more often than not a single win will do the trick.
The "worst case scenario" charts above confirm what you and I already know. Most of the time, the win-loss pattern in a game of chance is like ping-pong with more bounces: a win, a loss, two wins, three losses, a win, a loss, three wins and so on.
In blackjack, the average EOS comes in quite a bit less than six rounds. In baccarat, turnaround takes just a little longer.
The random bettor who is five bets behind is on a slippery slope, often needing to get the same number of bets ahead in order to escape the noose.
That is never true for a target player. Ever.
Because baccarat has only even-money payouts (less if you are crazy enough to bet on Banker!) it makes sense that it would have longer recoveries and lower EOS profits than blackjack, with all its doubles and splits and naturals to boost the player's bottom line.
For that reason, I strongly recommend adding the Tie-plus rule to your target betting strategy.
The painful busts you see above represent nothing more than a reminder that a player who will not take steps to mitigate the damage from a downturn probably deserves to lose.
My critics constantly parrot the notion that damage control is a fantasy for fools, but the math says otherwise.
Target betting enables a player to repeatedly recover his losses in fewer bets than it took to get him into trouble in the first place.
A random bettor can only achieve that end by accident.
As long as you are able to win more when you win than you lose when you lose (my turn to be a parrot!) then losing more often than you win will not hurt you.
Finally, more about the cliff-drop downturns illustrated in the charts above.
Here are details of the first few bets in each "killer" series.
The red shading shows where bail-outs would have been required by the target betting rules, or by house-mandated table limits.
Most recovery series wrap up in five bets or less, enabled by the paired player wins that are a consistent and reliable feature of every game's win-loss pattern.
Longer series occur more often in baccarat than in blackjack: about 10.5% of the time vs. 8.5%.
But even so, every time you bail out of a bad run, you have much better than an 80% probability that the WLP will level out enough to enable turnaround.
You also had an 80% chance of seeing an improvement if you had stayed where you were. But as the Chinaman once said, a killer losing streak must always begin with a handful of losses, so DBO (translation: don't bend over).
You cannot know ahead of time if the negative trend that just showed up will continue long enough to wipe you out. All you can know is that the threat you are facing is an aberration, one that probably will not continue if you suspend play for a while, and resume the LTD/NB elsewhere.
One of the many failings of the runaway sim is that by totally excluding the human element, it must ignore the simple question of morale and the extent to which intuition and good sense can enhance a player's winning prospects.
They dismiss gut feelings or intuition as pathetic irrelevancies.
They don't know what they are talking about.
A winning system that never fails is a mathematical impossibility. Even the house does not have one of those.
Does that mean that we should all play like fools and accept that losing is inevitable?
I don't think so.
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.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Baccarat "tight spread" results are in, and it's not a tale of triumph, just another lesson in the wisdom of wideness!
_
Running target betting under tight restrictions is not something I relish because I know ahead of time that a hobbled horse can't win a race.
Still and all, limiting the spread to 1-200 ($5 to $1,000) resulted in 40,706 bets of $1,000 or more. Target betting spreading wide needed only 4,859...but with most of the recommended rules set aside, it lost anyway.
Baccarat is a frustrating game because somehow it is far "streakier" than blackjack. And since backing Banker is a bad idea because of the 95-100 payout on wins, I find it about as much fun as watching a deep puddle evaporate on a cloudy day!
With the rules fully intact, target betting handily beat a 1.6% house edge, but that was not the object of this particular exercise.
As we know, the target strategy bets more but less often. And the wiggle room it gets from its wide spread wraps up series faster.
Crippling the method with a $1,000 limit brought the final outcome in line with negative expectation (-1.6%) with an actual AV of -1.77%.
Turning off most of target betting's switches but leaving the $25,000 maximum in place gave us far fewer busts (4 vs. 26) but the hobbled version's failures were huge, and its overall AV was more than double expectation at -3.61%.
There was just one "bust" with all the rules in place, and next time I will post charts that again raise the critical question, Would a sentient being stand (or sit still) for a beating this bad...?
Here are the relevant summaries, "tight" first, then "wide." The third shot covers target betting with the recommended rules modified to compensate for baccarat's slower pace and its lack of doubles and splits or bonus payouts.
(Click on an image to enlarge it)
The experts who deny that the house advantage is vulnerable in the long term reject any data that indicate to the contrary, and these will be no exception.
Analysis of past outcomes (the only analysis that is possible!) is not ideal, but as with studying the weather, history is all we have.
That is why I recommend to anyone who wants to learn how to win that they apply target betting's rules to real-time play as soon as possible, preferably without risking any money until they know what they are doing.
Reality contradicts theory and analysis all the time, but that is in target betting's favor (actual conditions are almost invariably easier to handle than situations in which intuition and experience cannot be applied).
For example, table limits and the need to disguise the betting method from prying eyes make prolonged negative trends far less likely. And EOS bets have to be rounded up in real play, sometimes increasing exposure for a while, but always resulting in greater overall profits.
The summaries above all reflect the application of a rule requiring that an EOS bet cannot be less than the value of the successful bet that preceded it. In real play, that would be optional.
One thing you can take to the bank is that if the house edge was truly invulnerable, all of the results posted in this blog would be flat-out impossible.
They are real and accurate because winning more when you win than you lose when you lose is the only antidote to the house advantage.
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.
_
Running target betting under tight restrictions is not something I relish because I know ahead of time that a hobbled horse can't win a race.
Still and all, limiting the spread to 1-200 ($5 to $1,000) resulted in 40,706 bets of $1,000 or more. Target betting spreading wide needed only 4,859...but with most of the recommended rules set aside, it lost anyway.
Baccarat is a frustrating game because somehow it is far "streakier" than blackjack. And since backing Banker is a bad idea because of the 95-100 payout on wins, I find it about as much fun as watching a deep puddle evaporate on a cloudy day!
With the rules fully intact, target betting handily beat a 1.6% house edge, but that was not the object of this particular exercise.
As we know, the target strategy bets more but less often. And the wiggle room it gets from its wide spread wraps up series faster.
Crippling the method with a $1,000 limit brought the final outcome in line with negative expectation (-1.6%) with an actual AV of -1.77%.
Turning off most of target betting's switches but leaving the $25,000 maximum in place gave us far fewer busts (4 vs. 26) but the hobbled version's failures were huge, and its overall AV was more than double expectation at -3.61%.
There was just one "bust" with all the rules in place, and next time I will post charts that again raise the critical question, Would a sentient being stand (or sit still) for a beating this bad...?
Here are the relevant summaries, "tight" first, then "wide." The third shot covers target betting with the recommended rules modified to compensate for baccarat's slower pace and its lack of doubles and splits or bonus payouts.
The experts who deny that the house advantage is vulnerable in the long term reject any data that indicate to the contrary, and these will be no exception.
Analysis of past outcomes (the only analysis that is possible!) is not ideal, but as with studying the weather, history is all we have.
That is why I recommend to anyone who wants to learn how to win that they apply target betting's rules to real-time play as soon as possible, preferably without risking any money until they know what they are doing.
Reality contradicts theory and analysis all the time, but that is in target betting's favor (actual conditions are almost invariably easier to handle than situations in which intuition and experience cannot be applied).
For example, table limits and the need to disguise the betting method from prying eyes make prolonged negative trends far less likely. And EOS bets have to be rounded up in real play, sometimes increasing exposure for a while, but always resulting in greater overall profits.
The summaries above all reflect the application of a rule requiring that an EOS bet cannot be less than the value of the successful bet that preceded it. In real play, that would be optional.
One thing you can take to the bank is that if the house edge was truly invulnerable, all of the results posted in this blog would be flat-out impossible.
They are real and accurate because winning more when you win than you lose when you lose is the only antidote to the house advantage.
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.
_
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Back to blackjack, and more of the same old same old. It's a good thing that winning consistently never gets old (even if it's not real money!)
_
I doubt that the results that a disciplined and adequately funded player can get with target betting would come as a huge surprise to any of the long-dead mathematicians who have expounded on gambling theory.
They determined that however much a player may bet, over time he is sure to fall prey to the house advantage in games of chance, and they never felt the need to add as long as he bets randomly, or bets the same amount each time because that's the way at least 99.999% of all gamblers play.
Formulas that support the axiom that any amount bet against a negative expectation must ultimately have a negative result can run to several pages, and are impressive to behold.
But they don't mean a thing when it comes to target betting.
The formula that supports the concept that if you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win won't hurt you fills barely half a line.
And it is as true as some ancient axiom that seems to hand the gambling industry guaranteed profits from any player who does not break the mold and quit permanently as soon as he gets ahead.
Bet smart, and you will beat the house. Bet like almost everybody else, and you won't. And that's the name of that tune, as my (former) friend Robert Blake used to say.
Here's the latest BST blackjack sample (hardly new, since I haven't played a round in almost two weeks, but hey, I've been busy!).
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.
_
I doubt that the results that a disciplined and adequately funded player can get with target betting would come as a huge surprise to any of the long-dead mathematicians who have expounded on gambling theory.
They determined that however much a player may bet, over time he is sure to fall prey to the house advantage in games of chance, and they never felt the need to add as long as he bets randomly, or bets the same amount each time because that's the way at least 99.999% of all gamblers play.
Formulas that support the axiom that any amount bet against a negative expectation must ultimately have a negative result can run to several pages, and are impressive to behold.
But they don't mean a thing when it comes to target betting.
The formula that supports the concept that if you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win won't hurt you fills barely half a line.
And it is as true as some ancient axiom that seems to hand the gambling industry guaranteed profits from any player who does not break the mold and quit permanently as soon as he gets ahead.
Bet smart, and you will beat the house. Bet like almost everybody else, and you won't. And that's the name of that tune, as my (former) friend Robert Blake used to say.
Here's the latest BST blackjack sample (hardly new, since I haven't played a round in almost two weeks, but hey, I've been busy!).
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.
_
Monday, April 13, 2009
Surprise, surprise! Gambling's biggest big lie, the "5%" commission, will make losers out of winners in the long run.
_
I said last time that I would at some point process a notional 5% commission on Banker wins throughout the 300,000-plus baccarat outcomes provides by Messrs. Rodriguez and Jones, and as I typed those words, I knew curiosity would make me run the query sooner rather than later.
Curiosity is really what got me into this in the first place: I couldn't believe that something protected by mathematics (the house advantage at games of chance) could not be as easily defeated by mathematics once the key was found.
Spreadsheet archives of large data sets make it relatively easy to revisit the past and apply a "what if?" scenario to potentially point the way to a better future.
My critics say that constantly reworking old data is a sure sign that I am massaging and distorting the numbers to prop up my deranged dream of beating something that is unbeatable.
The truth is that the spreadsheet platform makes it virtually impossible to cheat, especially given that all along I have offered to make my work available for microscopic analysis by the experts who keep telling me that they are far smarter than I am.
The "five percent" question has over the years made me wary of baccarat, because when I looked into the game, I quickly determined that the French derniere avant method of bet selection (backing Player or Banker according to which option won the round before last) had real merit but was sunk by the commission on Banker wins.
I call the method the Wobble, for WBL or win before last, and I am happy to report that a faster computer and enhanced methodology have made it much easier for me to get the information I needed than it was the last time I tried it.
There was just one piece of good news to emerge when all was done and dusted: target betting won handily against what was essentially a whole new set of 315,000 rounds of baccarat, giving it added vindication.
Backing Player throughout resulted in a +1.53% overall win against a house edge that, for the entire 315,000 outcomes, came out at -1.35% (pretty much on the money for baccarat, expectation-wise).
WBL won a lot more bets than Player did, and that, of course, is why those French joueurs love it so. The method catches streaks either way, which would be a handy dodge but for that so-called 5 percent gouge, which of course is why the vignes exists at all. The overall AV for the data set was trimmed from -1.35% to -0.31%.
Backing Player all the way resulted in just one failed recovery in more than 55,000 successes. WBL turned up a second "bust" along the way, but that would not have been fatal without the commission factor, which turned an overall win of $1.17 million into a LOSS of $269,000.
Here's the summary chart...
(Click on the image to enlarge it)
I am tempted now to restart the what-if process to discover how target betting would have fared backing Banker only instead of Player only, although obviously the final win that I am sure would result would be turned blood red by commission deductions.
The big news is that target betting has now been shown to be successful against 630,000 rounds of baccarat and will almost certainly prove effective against an additional 315,000 bets.
The explanation for all this is unchanged from the earliest days of target betting's evolution: Outcomes in games of chance are individually unpredictable, but when grouped together develop patterns that are reliably repeated and can be consistently and very effectively exploited.
The "grouping together" does not imply selection but describes the natural chronological process that occurs as one bet follows another. It is meaningless to players who bet randomly, and is everything to the disciplined strategist who knows that if he follows his plan, time will hand him a win even after he has lost more often than he won.
The original Jones+Rodriguez data set is a representative sample in any terms, since it is equivalent to at least three years of play by a full-time gambler.
The guardians of the status quo are inclined to argue that any sample of outcomes that depicts an overall player win in spite of a clear house advantage must be dismissed as anecdotal and irrelevant. But they have an agenda that does not stand up to serious scrutiny.
I still play baccarat from time to time, and can never shake off the recollection that it was a game invented by a doting Queen to amuse her inbred, bovine son, who was befuddled by the rules of every other card game that then existed.
I like blackjack best of all, partly because of the double-downs, splits and naturals that can boost a turnaround bet into a special payday, but also because each hand has to be played as well as bet upon.
However moronic and monotonous baccarat might sometimes seem to me, I need to get over it and accept that it has grown into the biggest of the big-money games, attracting more high roller dough than even poker (which, in any case, is not a house game).
Naturally (no pun intended) I stand by my recommendation that ideally, bets on Banker should never be placed, or should be limited to, say, $1,000. The real damage is done when critical EOS bets win just 95% of their face value.
It would not be hard to switch gears in mid-series and back Player only until EOS is achieved.
I once spent an enjoyable few weeks playing baccarat with a target betting convert who suggested that the "five percent solution" was to follow up a successful EOS wager with a bet calibrated to recover the combined cost of commission throughout the series that just ended.
So instead of following a $10,000 win on Banker with a reversion to the minimum and the start of a whole new series, there would be a supplementary bet of, say, $3,000 to offset the gouge.
I did not much cotton to the idea because it required a longer EOS winning sequence every time, and I mention it here only because it might appeal to some baccarat aficionados who can't live without bets on Banker.
I want to say again that results like those you see here could only be achieved two ways: By cheating, or because the invincible house advantage in all games of chance is not invincible at all.
It is safe to say that when you cheat, you don't win. And when you fail to follow a disciplined betting strategy that consistently delivers a profit from more lost bets than winning ones, you are in the same losers' boat. Sinking fast.
It is every weekend punter's dream to find a way to win time and again with little or no risk. It is also a hopeless fantasy.
Past posts to this blog offer a wealth of data supporting the plain truth that spreading wide is the key to vanquishing the house advantage, so long as it is paired with a viable betting strategy with a rule for every eventuality.
We have learned that a 1-1,000 spread is about as "tight" as we can go without feeling constant pressure from the house edge. Wider is better, and that takes money, sometimes a lot of it.
The good news is confirmed once again in the baccarat summary above. Target betting loses very rarely indeed, and as time goes by, the bankroll that backs it grows ever stronger.
You can see from the summary that backing Player only, target betting never had more than a fraction of its original bankroll on the line. There was just ONE "bust" spread across two data sets, and while that wiped out most of the method's prior winnings, the boat was not seriously rocked again, and the final win exceeded $2 million.
WBL and target betting together were 65% exposed at one point, but by the time the second "bust" came along, there was enough money in the bank to withstand it. Or would have been, but for the "5%" commission.
That tells us that target betting is viable. It may not be perfect and could be improved. But it WORKS.
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.
_
I said last time that I would at some point process a notional 5% commission on Banker wins throughout the 300,000-plus baccarat outcomes provides by Messrs. Rodriguez and Jones, and as I typed those words, I knew curiosity would make me run the query sooner rather than later.
Curiosity is really what got me into this in the first place: I couldn't believe that something protected by mathematics (the house advantage at games of chance) could not be as easily defeated by mathematics once the key was found.
Spreadsheet archives of large data sets make it relatively easy to revisit the past and apply a "what if?" scenario to potentially point the way to a better future.
My critics say that constantly reworking old data is a sure sign that I am massaging and distorting the numbers to prop up my deranged dream of beating something that is unbeatable.
The truth is that the spreadsheet platform makes it virtually impossible to cheat, especially given that all along I have offered to make my work available for microscopic analysis by the experts who keep telling me that they are far smarter than I am.
The "five percent" question has over the years made me wary of baccarat, because when I looked into the game, I quickly determined that the French derniere avant method of bet selection (backing Player or Banker according to which option won the round before last) had real merit but was sunk by the commission on Banker wins.
I call the method the Wobble, for WBL or win before last, and I am happy to report that a faster computer and enhanced methodology have made it much easier for me to get the information I needed than it was the last time I tried it.
There was just one piece of good news to emerge when all was done and dusted: target betting won handily against what was essentially a whole new set of 315,000 rounds of baccarat, giving it added vindication.
Backing Player throughout resulted in a +1.53% overall win against a house edge that, for the entire 315,000 outcomes, came out at -1.35% (pretty much on the money for baccarat, expectation-wise).
WBL won a lot more bets than Player did, and that, of course, is why those French joueurs love it so. The method catches streaks either way, which would be a handy dodge but for that so-called 5 percent gouge, which of course is why the vignes exists at all. The overall AV for the data set was trimmed from -1.35% to -0.31%.
Backing Player all the way resulted in just one failed recovery in more than 55,000 successes. WBL turned up a second "bust" along the way, but that would not have been fatal without the commission factor, which turned an overall win of $1.17 million into a LOSS of $269,000.
Here's the summary chart...
I am tempted now to restart the what-if process to discover how target betting would have fared backing Banker only instead of Player only, although obviously the final win that I am sure would result would be turned blood red by commission deductions.
The big news is that target betting has now been shown to be successful against 630,000 rounds of baccarat and will almost certainly prove effective against an additional 315,000 bets.
The explanation for all this is unchanged from the earliest days of target betting's evolution: Outcomes in games of chance are individually unpredictable, but when grouped together develop patterns that are reliably repeated and can be consistently and very effectively exploited.
The "grouping together" does not imply selection but describes the natural chronological process that occurs as one bet follows another. It is meaningless to players who bet randomly, and is everything to the disciplined strategist who knows that if he follows his plan, time will hand him a win even after he has lost more often than he won.
The original Jones+Rodriguez data set is a representative sample in any terms, since it is equivalent to at least three years of play by a full-time gambler.
The guardians of the status quo are inclined to argue that any sample of outcomes that depicts an overall player win in spite of a clear house advantage must be dismissed as anecdotal and irrelevant. But they have an agenda that does not stand up to serious scrutiny.
I still play baccarat from time to time, and can never shake off the recollection that it was a game invented by a doting Queen to amuse her inbred, bovine son, who was befuddled by the rules of every other card game that then existed.
I like blackjack best of all, partly because of the double-downs, splits and naturals that can boost a turnaround bet into a special payday, but also because each hand has to be played as well as bet upon.
However moronic and monotonous baccarat might sometimes seem to me, I need to get over it and accept that it has grown into the biggest of the big-money games, attracting more high roller dough than even poker (which, in any case, is not a house game).
Naturally (no pun intended) I stand by my recommendation that ideally, bets on Banker should never be placed, or should be limited to, say, $1,000. The real damage is done when critical EOS bets win just 95% of their face value.
It would not be hard to switch gears in mid-series and back Player only until EOS is achieved.
I once spent an enjoyable few weeks playing baccarat with a target betting convert who suggested that the "five percent solution" was to follow up a successful EOS wager with a bet calibrated to recover the combined cost of commission throughout the series that just ended.
So instead of following a $10,000 win on Banker with a reversion to the minimum and the start of a whole new series, there would be a supplementary bet of, say, $3,000 to offset the gouge.
I did not much cotton to the idea because it required a longer EOS winning sequence every time, and I mention it here only because it might appeal to some baccarat aficionados who can't live without bets on Banker.
I want to say again that results like those you see here could only be achieved two ways: By cheating, or because the invincible house advantage in all games of chance is not invincible at all.
It is safe to say that when you cheat, you don't win. And when you fail to follow a disciplined betting strategy that consistently delivers a profit from more lost bets than winning ones, you are in the same losers' boat. Sinking fast.
It is every weekend punter's dream to find a way to win time and again with little or no risk. It is also a hopeless fantasy.
Past posts to this blog offer a wealth of data supporting the plain truth that spreading wide is the key to vanquishing the house advantage, so long as it is paired with a viable betting strategy with a rule for every eventuality.
We have learned that a 1-1,000 spread is about as "tight" as we can go without feeling constant pressure from the house edge. Wider is better, and that takes money, sometimes a lot of it.
The good news is confirmed once again in the baccarat summary above. Target betting loses very rarely indeed, and as time goes by, the bankroll that backs it grows ever stronger.
You can see from the summary that backing Player only, target betting never had more than a fraction of its original bankroll on the line. There was just ONE "bust" spread across two data sets, and while that wiped out most of the method's prior winnings, the boat was not seriously rocked again, and the final win exceeded $2 million.
WBL and target betting together were 65% exposed at one point, but by the time the second "bust" came along, there was enough money in the bank to withstand it. Or would have been, but for the "5%" commission.
That tells us that target betting is viable. It may not be perfect and could be improved. But it WORKS.
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.
_
Sunday, March 29, 2009
The latest BST session should have turned out very badly. It didn't. Maybe next time?
_
The conventional wisdom holds that because the house advantage at casino table games is immutable and invincible, any attempt to beat it must ultimately prove fruitless.
The message from the experts is that you can't win, so trying is a waste of time.
They tell me to "just do the math," and my problem is that the more math I do (applying far more strict standards of fairness and accuracy than most mathematicians I have encountered) the shakier and more vulnerable the house advantage proves to be.
In this post, fewer words, more pictures. Here they are (and as always, clicking on any image will make it larger and fully legible)...
I'm not a big fan of double-up or Martingale betting, not because it doesn't work (in spite of what house-trained mythematicians will tell you, it really does) but because it is quickly spotted by pit personnel who will then do whatever it takes to stop it. The chart above shows that against the current BST outcomes, the traditional Martingale and my more aggressive version of it both overcame the house edge without exceeding the house limit I imposed (a house limit being the highest permitted table limit). The summary above also reminds us that target betting is a far better way to go.
The data below cover the current batch of BST trials (#15) and have a lot to tell us about the inherent weakness of the house advantage, as long as it is not bolstered by tight spread limits. Casinos do all they can to prevent players from "betting wide" but gamblers are themselves the strictest enforcers of this damaging rule. Very few weekend punters spread wider than 1-5, and those that do (mostly high rollers) do it randomly. Bad idea!
Of all the claims I have made for my methods, the one that attracts the most flack is the target betting axiom that "if you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win won't hurt you." Yeah, I get it, they tell me, "You bet more when you know you are going to win and less when you know you are going to lose." Funny stuff! And very un-smart. You don't need a crystal ball to achieve this important objective, but you do need a strict set of rules and the discipline to apply them consistently.
In the latest BST contest, as in most of them, target betting could not succeed against a $5-$1,000 spread limit. And as always, I am not in the least surprised. Don't tell me that the bets that target betting requires are too high or that the risks my methods impose are beyond the reach of the average part-time punter. Tight spreads are far more dangerous than a controlled progression, as you can see (AGAIN) from the latest BST numbers. And this whole thing is not about making "recreational gamblers" rich on a shoestring budget: it's about proving that as well as not deserving to win as much as they do, casinos do not have to win as much as they do. The Math repeatedly proves that point.
_
An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
_
The conventional wisdom holds that because the house advantage at casino table games is immutable and invincible, any attempt to beat it must ultimately prove fruitless.
The message from the experts is that you can't win, so trying is a waste of time.
They tell me to "just do the math," and my problem is that the more math I do (applying far more strict standards of fairness and accuracy than most mathematicians I have encountered) the shakier and more vulnerable the house advantage proves to be.
In this post, fewer words, more pictures. Here they are (and as always, clicking on any image will make it larger and fully legible)...
I'm not a big fan of double-up or Martingale betting, not because it doesn't work (in spite of what house-trained mythematicians will tell you, it really does) but because it is quickly spotted by pit personnel who will then do whatever it takes to stop it. The chart above shows that against the current BST outcomes, the traditional Martingale and my more aggressive version of it both overcame the house edge without exceeding the house limit I imposed (a house limit being the highest permitted table limit). The summary above also reminds us that target betting is a far better way to go.
The data below cover the current batch of BST trials (#15) and have a lot to tell us about the inherent weakness of the house advantage, as long as it is not bolstered by tight spread limits. Casinos do all they can to prevent players from "betting wide" but gamblers are themselves the strictest enforcers of this damaging rule. Very few weekend punters spread wider than 1-5, and those that do (mostly high rollers) do it randomly. Bad idea!
Of all the claims I have made for my methods, the one that attracts the most flack is the target betting axiom that "if you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win won't hurt you." Yeah, I get it, they tell me, "You bet more when you know you are going to win and less when you know you are going to lose." Funny stuff! And very un-smart. You don't need a crystal ball to achieve this important objective, but you do need a strict set of rules and the discipline to apply them consistently.
In the latest BST contest, as in most of them, target betting could not succeed against a $5-$1,000 spread limit. And as always, I am not in the least surprised. Don't tell me that the bets that target betting requires are too high or that the risks my methods impose are beyond the reach of the average part-time punter. Tight spreads are far more dangerous than a controlled progression, as you can see (AGAIN) from the latest BST numbers. And this whole thing is not about making "recreational gamblers" rich on a shoestring budget: it's about proving that as well as not deserving to win as much as they do, casinos do not have to win as much as they do. The Math repeatedly proves that point.
_
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.
_
Friday, March 20, 2009
Mythematics: Any sample of outcomes, however large, is totally unique. Reality: If that were so, there would be no house advantage.
_
The gambling industry's mighty disinformation machine holds that the house edge cannot be beaten in the long run because every sample of random outcomes differs from every other except in one component: negative expectation.
We are all supposed to believe that a sample of more than 70,000 blackjack outcomes like those in the current BST trial can never be duplicated, so a betting method that beats that data set will fail against another of similar size.
Quelle crappe! comme ils disent en France.
It is, like so much of the conventional wisdom applied to gambling, a partial truth. And we all know that a half truth is not a whole lot truer than a lie.
Within a representative sample of more than 50,000 outcomes, pair patterns will be constantly repeated, three-round patterns less so, identical four-bet sequences less often, and so on. By the time you widen the sample within a sample to look for identical patterns of 10 bets or more, you are going to be out of luck.
So it is true to say that one large sample of random outcomes can never be precisely repeated.
And that begs the terse two-word question: So what?
The house relies for its profits on broad or big picture predictability in two critical areas, player behavior and/or resources, and random win-loss patterns.
The house edge is more reliably predictable the larger the sample of outcomes, and much the same applies to gamblers (the bigger the crowd, the deeper the hole!).
There may be a few dozen outcomes in which the house advantage can barely be discerned, just as a handful of players in thousands might have the knowledge and bankroll to be a serious threat to the casino's bottom line.
But the further we "zoom out" in terms of sample size, the more likely it is that the house advantage will prevail and that the majority of gamblers, even those who won more bets than they lost, will surrender their bankrolls in dutiful compliance with with negative expectation.
Today's post revisits the topic of the certain danger inherent in tight betting spreads by examining expanded data from the BST blackjack trials.
Here's a summary:-
(Click on the image to enlarge it)
What this tells us is that narrow spreads (defined as 1-500 or less!) are virtually certain to fail, even with target betting rules applied. And the negative odds, bad as they already are, worsen still further if disciplined money management is not in play.
I have used a $5-$25,000 spread (1-5,000) throughout the blackjack trials, and I am well used to skeptics squawking in unison that a bet range that wide is ludicrously unrealistic and far out of the reach of the regular weekend punter.
To take the last point first, the regular weekend punter has neither the resources nor the desire to do what it takes to win consistently.
And in this context the only function of the "recreational gambler" is to provide the gambling industry with the profits it needs to pay off a few winners here and there without going broke.
Very large bets are indeed a reality, especially in casinos that try to cater simultaneously to shoestring players arriving by coach to fritter their tiny wads on the slots, and high rollers winging in from afar in private jets.
A $25,000 bet is 10% of what some "whales" will risk on the turn of a card, and no one knows better than the gambling industry that big bucks do not a winner make any more than does a penny-ante purse-full! In other words, the pot cannot be bought...it has to be earned.
I remember years ago playing at a blackjack table with an immaculately-dressed and courteous gent from Mexico City whose response when the dealer warned us of her current hot streak was, "You can't beat me; I have too much money."
He said it with tongue in cheek, but I got the feeling he believed it, and ever since I have wondered how he fared during his wild weekend in Nevada. Badly, I fear.
Money is essential to long-term success at gambling, there is no doubt about that. But money alone will not beat the house advantage in the long run.
As for the claimed "uniqueness" of large blocks of random outcomes, casinos know that even a runaway sim cannot produce representative data sets in which prolonged negative trends are not at least partially offset by opposite patterns.
It simply can't be done.
A gambler who, like most players, relies on winning more bets than he loses will eventually surrender his bankroll. That's a fact. Even an equal number of wins and losses is a long-term impossibility in a game with a house bias (and of course, there is no other kind).
The only way to win, therefore, is to recoup losses from a succession of "wrong" bets with a smaller number of winners.
To repeat a simple example: 49 wins and 51 losses against a game with a 2.0% house edge adds up to red ink if the overall average bet value is $10; but if the average win value is $10.50 and the average loss value is $9.50, $514.50 in wins trump $484.50 in losses in spite of that same 2.0% house edge, delivering a profit equal to a 3.0% "hold" of action.
The house always has complete confidence that over time, wild fluctuations against it will be evened out by the anti-player bias, and that a slightly greater number of player losses than wins will, given random bet values, make the game profitable for the casino.
Without that "big picture" predictability, any game would be too risky for the house to venture. And that's the name of that tune...
An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
_
The gambling industry's mighty disinformation machine holds that the house edge cannot be beaten in the long run because every sample of random outcomes differs from every other except in one component: negative expectation.
We are all supposed to believe that a sample of more than 70,000 blackjack outcomes like those in the current BST trial can never be duplicated, so a betting method that beats that data set will fail against another of similar size.
Quelle crappe! comme ils disent en France.
It is, like so much of the conventional wisdom applied to gambling, a partial truth. And we all know that a half truth is not a whole lot truer than a lie.
Within a representative sample of more than 50,000 outcomes, pair patterns will be constantly repeated, three-round patterns less so, identical four-bet sequences less often, and so on. By the time you widen the sample within a sample to look for identical patterns of 10 bets or more, you are going to be out of luck.
So it is true to say that one large sample of random outcomes can never be precisely repeated.
And that begs the terse two-word question: So what?
The house relies for its profits on broad or big picture predictability in two critical areas, player behavior and/or resources, and random win-loss patterns.
The house edge is more reliably predictable the larger the sample of outcomes, and much the same applies to gamblers (the bigger the crowd, the deeper the hole!).
There may be a few dozen outcomes in which the house advantage can barely be discerned, just as a handful of players in thousands might have the knowledge and bankroll to be a serious threat to the casino's bottom line.
But the further we "zoom out" in terms of sample size, the more likely it is that the house advantage will prevail and that the majority of gamblers, even those who won more bets than they lost, will surrender their bankrolls in dutiful compliance with with negative expectation.
Today's post revisits the topic of the certain danger inherent in tight betting spreads by examining expanded data from the BST blackjack trials.
Here's a summary:-
What this tells us is that narrow spreads (defined as 1-500 or less!) are virtually certain to fail, even with target betting rules applied. And the negative odds, bad as they already are, worsen still further if disciplined money management is not in play.
I have used a $5-$25,000 spread (1-5,000) throughout the blackjack trials, and I am well used to skeptics squawking in unison that a bet range that wide is ludicrously unrealistic and far out of the reach of the regular weekend punter.
To take the last point first, the regular weekend punter has neither the resources nor the desire to do what it takes to win consistently.
And in this context the only function of the "recreational gambler" is to provide the gambling industry with the profits it needs to pay off a few winners here and there without going broke.
Very large bets are indeed a reality, especially in casinos that try to cater simultaneously to shoestring players arriving by coach to fritter their tiny wads on the slots, and high rollers winging in from afar in private jets.
A $25,000 bet is 10% of what some "whales" will risk on the turn of a card, and no one knows better than the gambling industry that big bucks do not a winner make any more than does a penny-ante purse-full! In other words, the pot cannot be bought...it has to be earned.
I remember years ago playing at a blackjack table with an immaculately-dressed and courteous gent from Mexico City whose response when the dealer warned us of her current hot streak was, "You can't beat me; I have too much money."
He said it with tongue in cheek, but I got the feeling he believed it, and ever since I have wondered how he fared during his wild weekend in Nevada. Badly, I fear.
Money is essential to long-term success at gambling, there is no doubt about that. But money alone will not beat the house advantage in the long run.
As for the claimed "uniqueness" of large blocks of random outcomes, casinos know that even a runaway sim cannot produce representative data sets in which prolonged negative trends are not at least partially offset by opposite patterns.
It simply can't be done.
A gambler who, like most players, relies on winning more bets than he loses will eventually surrender his bankroll. That's a fact. Even an equal number of wins and losses is a long-term impossibility in a game with a house bias (and of course, there is no other kind).
The only way to win, therefore, is to recoup losses from a succession of "wrong" bets with a smaller number of winners.
To repeat a simple example: 49 wins and 51 losses against a game with a 2.0% house edge adds up to red ink if the overall average bet value is $10; but if the average win value is $10.50 and the average loss value is $9.50, $514.50 in wins trump $484.50 in losses in spite of that same 2.0% house edge, delivering a profit equal to a 3.0% "hold" of action.
The house always has complete confidence that over time, wild fluctuations against it will be evened out by the anti-player bias, and that a slightly greater number of player losses than wins will, given random bet values, make the game profitable for the casino.
Without that "big picture" predictability, any game would be too risky for the house to venture. And that's the name of that tune...
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.
_
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Give target betting a try where your learner's mistakes won't cost you cash. Then please share your experience with me!
_
I could keep on posting new examples of target betting demolishing a house edge far greater than negative expectation, but there are people out there who will not believe it until they do it themselves.
And that is how it should be.
What I have been working hard to demonstrate here is that my method's consistent success is not a fluke, it is just common sense and arithmetic at work.
The basics of target betting have been around for more than three decades and available on the Internet since 1997, but still I get warnings that my ideas won't work "next time."
How many next times do there have to be, I wonder?
I once had an interesting conversation with the publisher of a now-defunct gambling magazine who summarily dismissed all my claims for target betting, but added: "Even very smart people who ought to know better wish in their hearts that the house advantage could be beaten. And if you show them something new in a casino and start winning real money as they watch, they are very easily impressed."
His point was that personal experience is a more powerful influence than prejudice or theory, adding that the keenest academic minds can be dulled by the thrill of an easy win.
So anyone contributing to this unending series of trials should fight any temptation to rush to judgment, even if their judgment is that target betting is the only way to win.
My publisher friend said that for his part, he would remain officially unconvinced if I showed him solid wins against millions of verifiable outcomes, and he hinted that I had come to the wrong place for support.
And of course he was right.
Most of his advertising came from casinos, and his sponsors would be seriously unamused if he started teaching his readers how to threaten the gambling industry's billions in profits.
I had naively assumed that his magazine put its readers first and would be glad to make gambling more pleasurable for them. But without casino ads, there would be no publication, and sometimes self-interest trumps the greater good (ask any politician!).
Here's the latest BST session, the last for a while (winning is fun, but less fun when there's no real money to take to the cashier's cage!). Hopefully one of these days, I will be posting results that other people have obtained.
Click on the image to enlarge it
A few more words about spread limits...
Given BST's $1,000 table limit against the current batch of blackjack outcomes to date (2,418 bets), with no target betting rules applied, a by-the-book player would have squeaked out a win of $5,388/$642,815 (+0.84%) with an average bet value (ABV) of $266 and 604 bets of $1,000+.
With only target betting's LTD+ rule added, the win would have been $13,553/$1.04m (+1.31%), ABV $428, 943 x $1,000+.
Bump the table limit to $25,000, add the full array of target betting rules, and you get an overall win of $44,635/$786,000 (+5.68%), ABV $325, 131 x $1,000+.
The notion that tight spreads and a low green ceiling constitute a smarter way to bet is exposed for what it truly is: mythematics, devised by the gambling industry for the gambling industry, with player protection not even a passing consideration.
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.
_
I could keep on posting new examples of target betting demolishing a house edge far greater than negative expectation, but there are people out there who will not believe it until they do it themselves.
And that is how it should be.
What I have been working hard to demonstrate here is that my method's consistent success is not a fluke, it is just common sense and arithmetic at work.
The basics of target betting have been around for more than three decades and available on the Internet since 1997, but still I get warnings that my ideas won't work "next time."
How many next times do there have to be, I wonder?
I once had an interesting conversation with the publisher of a now-defunct gambling magazine who summarily dismissed all my claims for target betting, but added: "Even very smart people who ought to know better wish in their hearts that the house advantage could be beaten. And if you show them something new in a casino and start winning real money as they watch, they are very easily impressed."
His point was that personal experience is a more powerful influence than prejudice or theory, adding that the keenest academic minds can be dulled by the thrill of an easy win.
So anyone contributing to this unending series of trials should fight any temptation to rush to judgment, even if their judgment is that target betting is the only way to win.
My publisher friend said that for his part, he would remain officially unconvinced if I showed him solid wins against millions of verifiable outcomes, and he hinted that I had come to the wrong place for support.
And of course he was right.
Most of his advertising came from casinos, and his sponsors would be seriously unamused if he started teaching his readers how to threaten the gambling industry's billions in profits.
I had naively assumed that his magazine put its readers first and would be glad to make gambling more pleasurable for them. But without casino ads, there would be no publication, and sometimes self-interest trumps the greater good (ask any politician!).
Here's the latest BST session, the last for a while (winning is fun, but less fun when there's no real money to take to the cashier's cage!). Hopefully one of these days, I will be posting results that other people have obtained.
A few more words about spread limits...
Given BST's $1,000 table limit against the current batch of blackjack outcomes to date (2,418 bets), with no target betting rules applied, a by-the-book player would have squeaked out a win of $5,388/$642,815 (+0.84%) with an average bet value (ABV) of $266 and 604 bets of $1,000+.
With only target betting's LTD+ rule added, the win would have been $13,553/$1.04m (+1.31%), ABV $428, 943 x $1,000+.
Bump the table limit to $25,000, add the full array of target betting rules, and you get an overall win of $44,635/$786,000 (+5.68%), ABV $325, 131 x $1,000+.
The notion that tight spreads and a low green ceiling constitute a smarter way to bet is exposed for what it truly is: mythematics, devised by the gambling industry for the gambling industry, with player protection not even a passing consideration.
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.
_
Friday, March 13, 2009
When the dealer keeps beating your 19+ hands, should you sit still and suck it up, or get the hell out of there?
_
Your average academic mythemaniac has a simple answer: Save on shoe leather and stay where you are, because running away can't affect the long-term outcome.
There may be a grain of sad truth in that if you are a blackjack player who bets flat or within a very tight spread (1-5 is as tight as the proverbial duck's bum and many punters think they are being conservative and sensible if they narrow their spread still further).
The reality is that while paired wins are a constant, predictable feature of any house game's win/loss pattern (WLP), trends do occur that lock them out for a while.
Bailing out of the current game and taking your NB and LTD numbers elsewhere can never guarantee an improved WLP and the only way to find out if you made the right decision is to slide a substitute player into the seat you vacated and have him track the hands that came out of the shoe after you left.
All you can ever know for certain is that every deadly negative trend begins with a threatening pattern that gets steadily worse, and to avoid a potential (but not certain) disaster, you must take evasive action before you go broke.
Strategy debunkers love to use runaway sims to "prove" that there's no way to overcome the house advantage at casino table games, and the same tool demonstrates conclusively that paired wins occur about as often as paired losses.
When they stop happening, it is smart to back off and go hunting for a more comfortable WLP, even if the only certain benefit is to your peace of mind...your morale, if you like.
No one should ever gamble if they feel threatened or uncomfortable for any reason, so never hesitate to interrupt play whenever the mood strikes you, and resume it elsewhere when you're ready.
Here's the log from the last BST session in Batch #14.
(Click on the image to enlarge it)
If what you see here had occurred in the course of output from a runaway sim, the essential assumption would be that the "player" (meaning, in that context, the method) would keep on betting wildly without a care in the world, until the negative pattern ended or his money ran out.
In real life, human beans don't like being kicked in the head or stomped on with heavy boots or being robbed at (metaphorical) gunpoint, let alone all at the same time.
They take defensive action.
The most effective response to a house spike is to simply walk away, knowing that interrupting play for a while can never hurt the long-term outcome, which for the target bettor is yet another session win.
I have heard from some players who prefer to pull back to fixed minimum bets for a while, especially when they are in a busy casino on a wild weekend night and hate to give up their seat. I guess it can't hurt to take a breather by treading water when the pressure's on, and the effects of such a move (or non-move!) are hard to model accurately.
What matters is that no one with blood in his veins plays the way runaway sims require them to. It would, at best, be contrary to human nature.
Just remember the DBO rule: Don't. Bend. Over.
Above all, stay cool and calm and don't take a losing streak personally. It will end. And then, as always, you will come out ahead.
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.
_
Your average academic mythemaniac has a simple answer: Save on shoe leather and stay where you are, because running away can't affect the long-term outcome.
There may be a grain of sad truth in that if you are a blackjack player who bets flat or within a very tight spread (1-5 is as tight as the proverbial duck's bum and many punters think they are being conservative and sensible if they narrow their spread still further).
The reality is that while paired wins are a constant, predictable feature of any house game's win/loss pattern (WLP), trends do occur that lock them out for a while.
Bailing out of the current game and taking your NB and LTD numbers elsewhere can never guarantee an improved WLP and the only way to find out if you made the right decision is to slide a substitute player into the seat you vacated and have him track the hands that came out of the shoe after you left.
All you can ever know for certain is that every deadly negative trend begins with a threatening pattern that gets steadily worse, and to avoid a potential (but not certain) disaster, you must take evasive action before you go broke.
Strategy debunkers love to use runaway sims to "prove" that there's no way to overcome the house advantage at casino table games, and the same tool demonstrates conclusively that paired wins occur about as often as paired losses.
When they stop happening, it is smart to back off and go hunting for a more comfortable WLP, even if the only certain benefit is to your peace of mind...your morale, if you like.
No one should ever gamble if they feel threatened or uncomfortable for any reason, so never hesitate to interrupt play whenever the mood strikes you, and resume it elsewhere when you're ready.
Here's the log from the last BST session in Batch #14.
If what you see here had occurred in the course of output from a runaway sim, the essential assumption would be that the "player" (meaning, in that context, the method) would keep on betting wildly without a care in the world, until the negative pattern ended or his money ran out.
In real life, human beans don't like being kicked in the head or stomped on with heavy boots or being robbed at (metaphorical) gunpoint, let alone all at the same time.
They take defensive action.
The most effective response to a house spike is to simply walk away, knowing that interrupting play for a while can never hurt the long-term outcome, which for the target bettor is yet another session win.
I have heard from some players who prefer to pull back to fixed minimum bets for a while, especially when they are in a busy casino on a wild weekend night and hate to give up their seat. I guess it can't hurt to take a breather by treading water when the pressure's on, and the effects of such a move (or non-move!) are hard to model accurately.
What matters is that no one with blood in his veins plays the way runaway sims require them to. It would, at best, be contrary to human nature.
Just remember the DBO rule: Don't. Bend. Over.
Above all, stay cool and calm and don't take a losing streak personally. It will end. And then, as always, you will come out ahead.
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.
_
Sunday, March 8, 2009
There's mathematics, and then there's mythematics (the "proven" notion that casino games of chance are ultimately unbeatable!).
_
The only thing that is demonstrable about the (hopefully) random win-loss patterns derived from house-biased games is that a player who bets flat amounts or bets randomly is certain to lose in the end.
It's a simple enough truth, although some academics have felt the need to produce formulae that run to several pages to demonstrate that if you lose more bets than you win, then you must also lose more money than you win.
And if it is inevitable that losses must always exceed wins, the question that has to be answered is, What's the point of playing?
The lure of gambling of course is that it is possible to win in the short term, if you get lucky either by winning more often than you lose, or by accidentally timing your bets in such a way that the combined value of your fewer wins exceeds the combined value of your more numerous losses.
The problem for must gamblers is that the more they win, the more likely they are to keep playing. And the more they play, the more likely they are to lose. If you're a blackjack player (and a fan of satirical novels) you could call this dilemma a Catch 21!
Much has been written down the centuries about what's known as the "gambler's fallacy" or the idea that after an unusually high ratio of losses to wins (a ratio that exceeds the known negative expectation for the game at hand), a win is more likely.
It's not, of course. In a game with a 2.0% house edge, your odds of winning are 49-51, or a tad less than 50-50, every time you make a bet. So a betting strategy that depends on a win being "more likely" at any point in the game is doomed to failure.
Target betting dramatically boosts the next bet (NB) value in response to a mid-series win not because a second consecutive win is "more likely" than a loss, but because if fortune should smile in spite of negative expectation, all prior losses for the series (LTD) will be recovered, plus a small profit.
(If you are new to this method, a series begins with an opening minimum bet, and ends when turnaround or end of series aka EOS has been achieved. If a series opens with one or more successive wins, it continues until a loss, and the value of that loss becomes the LTD, with the NB value = LTD+T. If the streak-ending loss is immediately followed by a win, the series ends and the bet reverts to the opening minimum. If not, it continues per the strategy rules until EOS is achieved).
Mythematicians love to heap scorn on the Small Martingale or double-up betting method, which opens with a 1-unit bet and risks -1, -2, -4, -8, -16 and so on until a win finally comes along, recovering all prior losses with a single successful wager and delivering an overall profit of 1 unit.
The method is derided as suicidal because of the fact that repeated doubling is certain eventually to bump up against the table limit, and if the required x2 bet can't be made, an overall loss is inevitable.
That would be true if a double-up bettor was too dumb to move to a layout with a higher table limit before he got into serious trouble, and in theory, it might be possible for so many successive losses to occur that a $5 bet grows to exceed even the most generous house limit in Las Vegas ($25,000 is about average on "The Strip" these days, and high rollers can add several zeroes to that amount with special dispensation).
It's possible, but not likely. And gambling is all about what's likely, or probable, with blind luck ruled an irrelevance.
Interestingly, there is not a casino I have ever heard of that will permit x2 betting for long. Why? Because it is much more likely to succeed than to fail. And gamblers can never be permitted to win for long.
"Martingalers" can be seen in action in any busy casino if you know what to look for. The guy who muscles into a blackjack game, places two or three consecutive losing bets and then moves on is an x2 bettor in search of a single win. Blackjack is the perfect game for him, because a natural or a successful double/split will greatly boost his bottom line, giving him a final win exceeding his target 1u.
So, target betting is progressive betting, and progressive betting is certain suicide, right? Wrong.
In the current target betting trial, the TA/T strategy is ahead $184,000 or 5.6% of total action against a house edge of 4.6% indicating a mythematically expected loss of $149,000. A Martingale would be $37,000 (10.5%) ahead against the same outcomes. Average bet values and overall risk or exposure are both much lower for x2 betting, but it doesn't much matter because casinos do all they can to block the use of a Martingale.
My target betting method needs two successive wins to achieve turnaround/EOS/recovery, which is twice as tough to come by as a single win. But if you take a typical game session such as this one...
(Click on the image to enlarge it)
...and then highlight the paired (or better) wins, it is easy to see why my method is very tough for the house to beat. You will win more often with a Martingale, with less risk. But since the bad guys won't let you play it, why not win with a method that they have not yet figured out?
There can be some scary gaps between paired wins from time to time, it's true, but they become less of a threat to your bankroll the longer you play, as long as you take my advice and add at least half of each session's profits to your war chest.
Fact is, it is not the house edge that blows most gamblers out of the game: it's their pathetically inadequate bankrolls, coupled with the fact that they consistently fail to fully exploit winning streaks.
You WILL lose more bets than you win, in the long run. So you have to bet opportunistically (and optimistically!) in response to a potential winning streak, knowing that every positive trend has to start with a single win, but not knowing for sure that that win will be immediately followed by another.
I once had a gambling aunt who would tell me: "Luck won't find you, you have to step out in front of it." And that is what target betting is all about. (Auntie Betty once owned a nightclub in London's Soho, and was a died-in-the-wool gambler until the day she fell off her perch; when she won, she gave most of the money away; when she lost, she kept on cranking until the next big hit came along).
An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
_
The only thing that is demonstrable about the (hopefully) random win-loss patterns derived from house-biased games is that a player who bets flat amounts or bets randomly is certain to lose in the end.
It's a simple enough truth, although some academics have felt the need to produce formulae that run to several pages to demonstrate that if you lose more bets than you win, then you must also lose more money than you win.
And if it is inevitable that losses must always exceed wins, the question that has to be answered is, What's the point of playing?
The lure of gambling of course is that it is possible to win in the short term, if you get lucky either by winning more often than you lose, or by accidentally timing your bets in such a way that the combined value of your fewer wins exceeds the combined value of your more numerous losses.
The problem for must gamblers is that the more they win, the more likely they are to keep playing. And the more they play, the more likely they are to lose. If you're a blackjack player (and a fan of satirical novels) you could call this dilemma a Catch 21!
Much has been written down the centuries about what's known as the "gambler's fallacy" or the idea that after an unusually high ratio of losses to wins (a ratio that exceeds the known negative expectation for the game at hand), a win is more likely.
It's not, of course. In a game with a 2.0% house edge, your odds of winning are 49-51, or a tad less than 50-50, every time you make a bet. So a betting strategy that depends on a win being "more likely" at any point in the game is doomed to failure.
Target betting dramatically boosts the next bet (NB) value in response to a mid-series win not because a second consecutive win is "more likely" than a loss, but because if fortune should smile in spite of negative expectation, all prior losses for the series (LTD) will be recovered, plus a small profit.
(If you are new to this method, a series begins with an opening minimum bet, and ends when turnaround or end of series aka EOS has been achieved. If a series opens with one or more successive wins, it continues until a loss, and the value of that loss becomes the LTD, with the NB value = LTD+T. If the streak-ending loss is immediately followed by a win, the series ends and the bet reverts to the opening minimum. If not, it continues per the strategy rules until EOS is achieved).
Mythematicians love to heap scorn on the Small Martingale or double-up betting method, which opens with a 1-unit bet and risks -1, -2, -4, -8, -16 and so on until a win finally comes along, recovering all prior losses with a single successful wager and delivering an overall profit of 1 unit.
The method is derided as suicidal because of the fact that repeated doubling is certain eventually to bump up against the table limit, and if the required x2 bet can't be made, an overall loss is inevitable.
That would be true if a double-up bettor was too dumb to move to a layout with a higher table limit before he got into serious trouble, and in theory, it might be possible for so many successive losses to occur that a $5 bet grows to exceed even the most generous house limit in Las Vegas ($25,000 is about average on "The Strip" these days, and high rollers can add several zeroes to that amount with special dispensation).
It's possible, but not likely. And gambling is all about what's likely, or probable, with blind luck ruled an irrelevance.
Interestingly, there is not a casino I have ever heard of that will permit x2 betting for long. Why? Because it is much more likely to succeed than to fail. And gamblers can never be permitted to win for long.
"Martingalers" can be seen in action in any busy casino if you know what to look for. The guy who muscles into a blackjack game, places two or three consecutive losing bets and then moves on is an x2 bettor in search of a single win. Blackjack is the perfect game for him, because a natural or a successful double/split will greatly boost his bottom line, giving him a final win exceeding his target 1u.
So, target betting is progressive betting, and progressive betting is certain suicide, right? Wrong.
In the current target betting trial, the TA/T strategy is ahead $184,000 or 5.6% of total action against a house edge of 4.6% indicating a mythematically expected loss of $149,000. A Martingale would be $37,000 (10.5%) ahead against the same outcomes. Average bet values and overall risk or exposure are both much lower for x2 betting, but it doesn't much matter because casinos do all they can to block the use of a Martingale.
My target betting method needs two successive wins to achieve turnaround/EOS/recovery, which is twice as tough to come by as a single win. But if you take a typical game session such as this one...
...and then highlight the paired (or better) wins, it is easy to see why my method is very tough for the house to beat. You will win more often with a Martingale, with less risk. But since the bad guys won't let you play it, why not win with a method that they have not yet figured out?
There can be some scary gaps between paired wins from time to time, it's true, but they become less of a threat to your bankroll the longer you play, as long as you take my advice and add at least half of each session's profits to your war chest.
Fact is, it is not the house edge that blows most gamblers out of the game: it's their pathetically inadequate bankrolls, coupled with the fact that they consistently fail to fully exploit winning streaks.
You WILL lose more bets than you win, in the long run. So you have to bet opportunistically (and optimistically!) in response to a potential winning streak, knowing that every positive trend has to start with a single win, but not knowing for sure that that win will be immediately followed by another.
I once had a gambling aunt who would tell me: "Luck won't find you, you have to step out in front of it." And that is what target betting is all about. (Auntie Betty once owned a nightclub in London's Soho, and was a died-in-the-wool gambler until the day she fell off her perch; when she won, she gave most of the money away; when she lost, she kept on cranking until the next big hit came along).
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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