There's no escaping the fact that math rules in the casino. And it's also easy to see that mathematics does not rule out progressive betting.

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The consistent success of target betting or any method that breaks the fixed or random mold is assured by the fact that outcomes in games of chance are collectively predictable.

In blackjack, for example, a reasonably representative sample (say, more than 1,000) will confirm that pushes occur about 9% of the time, player naturals bring in a little extra from about 4% of all hands, and doubles and splits governed by strict basic strategy play will win about 20% more often than they lose.

You can also be sure that paired wins or losses will occur about half as often as isolated wins or losses, triples will be encountered roughly half as often again, and so on.

"Roughly" and "about" are words that academic mathematicians hate to hear, but the smaller the sample of outcomes, the harder it is to predict what will happen with absolute certainty.

Luckily for the target player, absolute certainty is absolutely unnecessary.

Regular readers will know that I say with monotonous regularity that If you can win more when you win than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win won't hurt you.

A picture is worth a thousand numbers, so here's a summary for the 100,000-plus baccarat rounds supplied by Lorenzo Rodriguez and Zumma Publishing:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
The first thing to notice is that after a single crash-n-burn and 13,640 successful recoveries, the AWB/ALB number is a relatively unimpressive 104%, but still enough to deliver an overall profit.
The overall HA/AV for this set was 1.6%, which is high for baccarat but not desperately so.
Two out of three recoveries were achieved with a single win, although as negative expectation required, more recovery/turnaround attempts were lost than won (the house had a 1.16% edge in that area).
Series requiring 10 or more rounds to recover were less than 9.0% or 1 in 11 and 62% of all series were wrapped up in five bets or fewer.
The average bet value was high according to some at $592 but bets of $1,000 were required only 4.4% of the time (less than 1 in 20).

Many a mythematician might be inclined to dismiss 114,000 rounds as anecdotal or non-representative, so keep in mind that the sample is equal to well over a year of play for a fulltime baccarat fanatic.

Also keep in mind that according to the same self-styled (and often house-trained) "experts" the results you see above are impossible.

Now please consider a much larger sample of baccarat outcomes, more than 200,000 supplied by Lee Jones, a systems promoter who can verify their accuracy and with whom I have no connection (he might even consider me a most unwelcome competitor since I don't charge for my ideas and his are for sale).

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The AWB/ALB product is higher at 109% vs. a more standard house edge of 1.18% and the average bet value is way down at $352 ($592) but the rest of the numbers in the summary closely resemble those for the smaller and quite separate sample from the Zumma books via Lorenzo Rodriguez:

EOS 1-5 62.5% (62%)
EOS 6-10 29% (29.3%)
EOS 10+ 8.5% (8.7%)
Positive series 35% (35%)
Neutral series (29%) (28%)
Negative series (36%) (36%)
1-win EOS 66% (66%)
EOS wins/tries 49.1% (49%)
Bets of $1,000+ 3.6% (4.4%)

The biggest difference between the two baccarat samples lies in the final target betting win (2.86% for the larger data set vs. 0.16%). The reason, of course, is that the first sample included a bust, one that was triggered by such a precipitous plunge that only the "robot" at the heart of every runaway sim would have sat through it!

Baccarat holds far fewer surprises (good or bad) than blackjack, but the stats for the first 75,000-plus outcomes in the BST blackjack trial are remarkably similar to the baccarat numbers, except for a much higher win percentage for target betting and a dramatic jump in the AWB/ALB product:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

And here are data for double-up (a Small Martingale) against the baccarat outcomes. The "win one unit" original version has the double disadvantage of being easily spotted and blocked, and a slow win rate that means that a single "bust" would wipe out years of profits.

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We are now looking at close to 400,000 "real play" outcomes, which is a representative sample according to any objective, sensible standards.

We can see that ruin (the loss of our $1,000,000 bankroll) is a rare occurrence indeed, and that in spite of a single crash-n-burn, target's notional profit at this point is closing in on $4 million

Spread is the critical factor, we have learned. A spread of less than 1-1,000 is doomed, in the long run.

We do not have a monopoly on that knowledge: the casinos are well aware of the danger to their bottom line posed by progressive bettors with a disciplined plan and a fat bankroll behind them. They and will do whatever it takes to thwart them.

Obviously, a player confined to a single casino or, worse, to a handful of table options, can never hope to spread from 1-5,000 (the recommended optimum) or even 1-1,000, in the same place.

The solution to that is an over-abundance of patience, and strong legs. Spreading from $5-$100 (1-20) from the opening of a new series is plausible, but after that, 1-5 is the limit to aim for ($100-$500, $500-$2,500, $2,500-$10,000 and $10,000-$25,000, for example).

One player flying solo might find the range hard to achieve under ever-increasing casino staff scrutiny, and tough as it sometimes is to run smoothly, team-work is probably the answer.

For now, all we are concerned with is "The Math." And it is on our side.

If you doubt it, here are new numbers from the BST trial (I just began batch #16):


An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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The million-dollar question: Is damage control just another gambler's fallacy, or can ruin be avoided intuitively?

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Human intuition or decision making is the critical element that the You Can't Win brigade omits from the runaway simulations they use to "prove" that the house advantage at games of chance is ultimately unbeatable.

They also eliminate cards, dice, wheels, tables, money, dealers and real time, and then pretend that a high-speed computer simulation based on a random number generator (RNG) is "exactly the same as a real game."

Once upon a time, I was able to ask who would be gullible enough to bet actual cash against a game that used RNG output to simulate blackjack, baccarat or roulette, and I was confident that the answer was clear.

Then the casinos came out with giant flat-screen TVs featuring curvaceously UN-flat, life-sized "dealers" and slots for suckers to push their money into. And by golly, some people do play these so-called games, lured perhaps by cleavage that they can drool over without getting their faces slapped.

The mythematical defense of sims is that at some point, a fatal negative pattern of losses and wins will occur in real play that is exactly like output from a RNG, and vice versa, and ruin will be unavoidable.

It is, as I have said before, like arguing that a car that crashes with no driver at the wheel and with the gas pedal and brakes disabled is inherently unsafe.

Sorry, guys, but gambling is a human activity and the human element really does matter.

Simulations are useful only because they run at very high speeds, saving a huge amount of real-time research, and can give some indication of how a new game (or a method of betting) will perform.

But when the Wizard of Odds and other experts sponsored by the gambling industry claim that casinos rely on simulations to evaluate new games or rule changes to old ones, they are being deliberately disingenuous.

Sims have a role to play, but is always a preliminary one.

Casinos know very well that the only tests that really matter have to be conducted out on the floor, and nothing new ever gets the green light until it has been exhaustively evaluated under real-play conditions.

I have gone to great trouble over the years to amass as many blocks of outcomes from actual play as I can, and target betting has so far recorded only one million-dollar crash-and-burn in more than 500,000 rounds of baccarat and blackjack (more than five years of play for a full time gambler, if such an animal still exists).

The pattern that caused target betting to crash and burn looked like this...


If you were to see a "deadman's drop" like this in real play, one that went on to give the house a 33.33% edge in 114 bets in which 34 more wagers went south than didn't, you would not wait for rock bottom.

You know for sure that if you were sitting at a baccarat or blackjack table and the shoe turned that vicious that fast, you would decide it was time to take a break long before your bankroll was in serious jeopardy.

As it happens, this spectacular nosedive followed eight consecutive wins that raked in $1,090 in profits before the ninth bet, for $500, lost.

For years, my rule for blackjack has been to keep redoubling during an opening win progression until the bet hits $200, add $100 each time if the winning streak continues, and accept a loss of $500 or more as EOS, happy to end the series with $590+ in extra chips, and fall back to a minimum opening bet at a different layout.

Blackjack is the perfect game for target betting because "natural" pay-offs that exceed the value of the original bet (adding 50% or I'm not playing!) and well-timed splits and double-downs make it much more profitable than baccarat.

To make up the difference, I set the win progression cut-off much higher at $1,000 vs. baccarat, and that made the rules set vulnerable in just this one instance out of more than 60,000 successful recoveries.

The first baccarat trial, bust-free after 37,062 recoveries, delivered a virtual profit of $1.97 million and retired the original $1 million buy-in. The second baccarat series had one bust in 18,446 series and earned a little more than $110,000 (better than a break-even but not by much!). The current blackjack trials stand at a funny-money win to date of $1.75 million and counting. That's a total win of almost $4 million for five years' work, chickenfeed for a CEO but a big improvement on negative expectation.

It would be easy for me to change the baccarat results to eliminate the "bust" then claim that target betting was unbeaten against hundreds of thousands of real-play rounds.

But that would be cheating, and I don't believe in that (not because I am a saint, but because it is simply not necessary!).

For the record, changing the win progression rule to match my blackjack strategy would have turned a baccarat crash-n-burn into a win equal to 5.0% of the action for that same data set.

House-trained academics have a notion that systems promoters always have an excuse when their method crashes in ruins, and eliminate the problem simply by changing the rules.

So target betting's single loss of its bankroll stands in my book, reducing my method's win rate from 100% to -1/69,272 recovered series = 99.9985564%.

I generally claim a 99.992% win rate for my betting method, equal to favorable odds of 12,500 to 1. If I am in a cautious mood, I fall all the way down to 5,000 to 1 in a player's favor, figuring that even that has to be preferable to negative odds of 495 to 505 if you're a little lucky and play blackjack well.

And then there's the obvious wisdom of not claiming a 100% win rate, but instead encouraging the casinos and their tame experts to go public over and over again with "proof" that target betting cannot beat a runaway sim and is therefore worthless.

Let's face it, if gambling industry brainiacs can show for certain that the strategy is worthless, then they have no legal argument for banning its use in their casinos.

As for the ability of a thinking human being to recognize potential danger before it becomes deadly and take steps to avoid it, "simsters" know well that evasive, self-protecting tactics are difficult (meaning inconvenient) to model.

I have done it with what I call an interactive sim, which relies on the famously unreliable Windows RNG to spew out losses and wins with a randomness that may be questionable, but is at least out of my control beyond my insertion of a clear house edge of 1.4%.

In real play, several factors are likely to prompt a player to quit a series before recovery, then resume betting at the appropriate level elsewhere. A sim can't imitate boredom, hunger, fatigue or a need to pee, among other human responses, but table limits play a key role and they can be factored in.

The way it works is that the sim starts and ends series after series as a "live" player would, but the spreadsheet platform enables a human to scroll down, identify a spread limit trigger, and respond to it.

The job is done by "freezing" all of the outcomes or rounds up to that point, then refreshing the RNG to simulate play continuing at a different layout.

This is done whenever a spread limit trigger arises, and my assumption is first that at a $5 table, a $100 bet is as high as a real player would be able to go without attracting unwanted attention. After that, the rule is a spread of 1-5: lose a $500 bet after starting out with a minimum wager at a $100 table, and move on, then a $2,500 bet, and so on.

Series very rarely drag on for long (the average EOS comes in less than six bets) so this is not nearly as complicated or tedious a procedure as it sounds.

The point is that flesh-and-blood players do not suffer the kind of downturns that the robot at the heart of a runaway sim is required to ignore in order for the routine to "prove" that no betting method can ever beat the house advantage. It is simply not human nature to take a relentless beating when real money is at stake without taking appropriate evasive action.

Runaway sims are dishonest. But in some ways, that's not a bad thing for a cool, calm and disciplined player who knows how to beat the odds and win consistently.

Here's the latest BST blackjack data (playing the $500 win progression rule!).

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