Mythematics: Any sample of outcomes, however large, is totally unique. Reality: If that were so, there would be no house advantage.

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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:-

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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.
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You'd think a strategy that gives players favorable odds better than 5,000 to 1 would be a serious threat to casinos. Why it isn't...

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Gamblers are their own worst enemies. Casinos know that, exploit it, and are grateful.

Blackjack is probably the most documented game in gambling, or was before the current poker craze caught on. That's because it is the only "house game" in which how a player plays his hand is almost as important as how he handles his money.

Poker, of course, is not a house game: the casino takes a percentage or "rake" from every pot or applies a fixed charge per round, but participants are betting against each other.

That's the main reason poker interests me only as a spectator sport, and even then not much.

My aim is for every punter on the planet to win a little, and the house - all casinos everywhere - to lose a lot. We know that they, at least, can afford it!

In spite of all the good advice that can be had about blackjack in particular, very few people bother to learn the fundamentals of good play, and fewer still remember the right moves when the pressure's on.

Back in the '50s and '60s, when card counting began to catch on, the casinos panicked and began to dream up all manner of dodges to thwart players who had the bad manners to try to win.

Then they realized that the measures they had brought in to defend against a tiny minority of players were irritating everyone else. They did the math, and concluded that there was more money to be made from keeping the masses happy than could be saved by defeating the disciples of card counting.

I tried card-counting way back when and became pretty good at it. But in the end it falls foul of the fact that a "rich" deck (one with more 10s than the expected ratio) is often as good for the house as it is for the player, and over time expectation remains negative.

Other problems with counting are its narrow betting spreads (the experts warn against anything wider than 1-10) and its requirement that you have to stick around and keep playing against one deck or shoe - you cannot keep moving, as I recommend whenever the bad guys are getting all the good hands!

Of course I accept that adults have the right to do whatever they want with their money, and if their choice includes defying preposterous odds in the hope of making a big killing, it is none of my business.

Or to put it more selfishly, the more losers there are, the more opportunities there will be for winners to get in the game. And judging from the folks I get to meet every time I visit a casino, for them losing really is fun.

So, back to the heart of it all: tight betting spreads, and most importantly, narrow spreads that players impose on themselves, do much, much more to boost a casino's bottom line than the piddly percentage values of the house advantage at any given game.

Most players bet against themselves and still manage to lose. All the house has to do is provide a game, along with an occasional "free" drink. Give 'em a rope, you might say.

The latest BST sessions produced some numbers that I find interesting, and I hope you will too. Most people will ignore them!

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Again, it's all about spread limits, which really are the nitty-gritty when it comes to beating the odds (forget about card counting, rabbits' feet and all that other hocus-pocus!).

As reported in the session summary, a 1-200 table limit (far wider than most players would dream of betting) results in 1,088 bets of $1,000-plus, the "plus" applying to splits and doubles, an average bet value of $792, and a hefty overall loss.

In contrast, against the same outcomes, target betting delivers a win worth almost 10% of total action, 73 bets of $1,000-plus, and an ABV of $208, or less than one third of the average bet required by so-called "conservative" play.

Over and over again, the BST table limit defeats by-the-book play, but the same outcomes are easily beaten by target betting.

The casinos are of course paranoid about anyone who beats them consistently, and so target betting does run into trouble now and then, not from what comes out of the shoe but from the people in the pit behind it.

It doesn't matter much in the long run.

Suppose that you are target betting and a canny pit boss keeps his distance until you are in a deep hole before stepping up and asking you to leave.

You are, say, $10,000 down, with a $2,000 bet due, and all of a sudden, you're out of the game. No problem. By now, you will be ahead of the overall game by tens of thousands, and a little patience is not going to leave you broke.

Just save the current NB/LTD numbers for another time, another place. In the gambling business, there is always someone, somewhere ready to take your bet.

In my book, I talk about two concepts, team play, which is self-explanatory, and tier play, which isn't.

Human nature often makes team play more hazardous than it ought to be, but the general idea is that if you hit a road block like the one I just described, you just pull out your cell phone and text the critical numbers to another player, who picks up the ball and runs with it until recovery is achieved.

Tier play splits casinos into different categories: $5-$200, $200-$2,500, $2,500 to $10,000 and $10,000-plus, for example.

At the "D" or lowest level, every time you lose a bet of $200+ you abandon the series, and start over with a minimum bet, gradually accumulating a block of NB/LTD numbers to be played out at level "C" later. And so it goes on.

Skeptics have suggested that the tier concept I describe is no different than betting a tight spread with, in many cases, far higher opening bets than I usually apply to target betting trials.

But that's just not true.

What the strategy does is not just tell you how much to bet, but when to stop...and those last three words describe a winner's biggest dilemma.

Target betting does as its name indicates. It provides a player who's "in the hole" with a goal to meet, then tells him to reduce his bet once he gets there.

Every haphazard or random player that ever was has tales to tell about the time he got way ahead, then lost everything because he kept his bets too high. Do that, and you are at the mercy of the house advantage. And if the WLP has already been unusually kind to you, chances are that you are due for more losses than wins.

Don't confuse this with the famous Gambler's Fallacy which holds that after a string of losses, the very next bet is "more likely" to win. It isn't. But in a situation where eight bets out of ten have been losses, giving the house an edge of 60%, it is safe to surmise that during the next several bets, there will be more wins than losses. Maybe.

Remember, with target betting you don't need 8 wins to recover your losses from 8 wrong bets. Just a couple will do the trick, and with the MSL rule applied, one win will be enough.

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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Read between the ads, and you will find the casinos' true message: "You can't win so don't waste time trying. Just learn how to love losing."

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Here's a question for anyone out there who fits the gambling industry's profile of the perfect punter.

Which is riskier: Betting to a $1,000 table limit, and then hoping your luck will change while you are at the max, or switching locations so you can make even bigger bets - up to $25,000! - until you recover past losses and can fall back to a minimum bet?

OK, OK, the answer is obvious because of who's asking the question, but let's look at facts confirmed in the latest BST challenge.

In the first session logged below, a target betting player following the current rules variation (see the second screen shot for details) would have won $4,208 on total action of $31,778, which is +13.2%. Betting the BST table limit would have resulted in a LOSS of $2,500 on total action of $237,500 (-1.05%).

The target bettor's average bet value would have been $136. His "cautious" counterpart's ABV would have been $1,019 (higher than the table limit because of splits/doubles).

In the split session that preceded this one, the numbers were: (Part A) Target betting +$4,905/$30,615 = +16.02% ABV $114; BST Lim +$4,875/$33,815 = +14.4% ABV $126; (Part B) Target +$5,265/$123,055 = +4.28% ABV $136; BST Lim -$23,413/$187,878 = -12.5% ABV $1,019.

The lesson, once again: Tight spreads will kill you!!!

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I'm in this to shake up the conventional wisdom and encourage as many people as possible to see for themselves that they are being hung out to dry, fleeced, conned and otherwise deliberately misdirected whenever they gamble.

I am not suggesting that they shouldn't visit casinos and bet when they feel like it, just that they would be better off with a full knowledge of what is involved.

Comparative numbers like those quoted here will be reflected throughout the scores of data sets featured in this blog, covering close to 400,000 "real play" outcomes in all. That is around four years of betting for a full time gambler, and a lifetime's worth for most weekend punters!

For now, let's just look back to "Batch #15," the last full set of rounds (8,020) from BST sessions. Target betting "won" (in quotes because no one has sent me a check yet) $172,398/$3.04m = +5.67%, ABV $380; table limit per BST would have lost $44,573/$5.26m = -0.85%, ABV $655.




If you remain unconvinced and need more evidence, just drop me a line.

I know there are people out there who truly believe that all this study and analysis drains the fun out of gambling, turning it into a chore rather than rest and relaxation.

Maybe. But in my experience (and I have had a lot of it) winning is a whole lot more fun than losing.

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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