It would be great to win all the time, but the gambling industry would hate us for it. So how about a 99.989% win rate?

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Last time, I put up data that showed target betting flipping a $3 million LOSS betting Banker only into a $3 million WIN simply by compensating for the damage done by the 5% commission on Banker wins.

We have already seen that backing Player only against the same data set, avoiding commission entirely, would have been very profitable using the target betting technique.

So how about "the Wobble," my Americanized name for a bet-selection method the French call avant dernier (thanks, Google, for helping me discover the correct word order and spelling for "before last" en Francais)...?

The idea is that you catch streaks either way in baccarat or roulette by betting on whichever even-money option came up in the hand or spin before the last won, so P,P would call for a bet on Player, and B,R would indicate a bet on black.

It's not a bad way to go, because there is nothing more frustrating than zigging when the shoe or wheel zags (or vice versa!).

Given a six-bet Player streak at baccarat that was preceded by P,B you will catch 5 of 6 wins, or 4 of 6 if the streak was preceded by B,B.

Being right two-thirds of the time is certainly better than missing every switch in the kind of ping-pong pattern that is common in both baccarat and roulette.

Wobble comes from win before last (WBL), and it is a useful escape from brain strain for those players who need a break from blackjack or (horrors!) refuse to play it at all.

My reluctance to allow the house to withhold 5% of the win that just turned around a losing sequence and put me back in the black has kept me away from Banker bets for years.

I now accept that that was probably a mistake.

It is certainly true that when Player is getting hammered for hand after hand, the voice in my ear that whispers "just bet Banker" gets louder and louder until the only alternative is to stand up and walk away from the game.

I would like to be able to report that adding the 5% skim to target betting gave WBL a solid win against the baccarat data set, but it did not happen, and here are four good reasons why:

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
When I first posted my ideas on an Internet gambling forum a dozen years ago, target betting was quite a bit more complicated than it is today and I was repeatedly "flamed" (such a '90s term!) to a crisp when I suggested that players with more than half a brain do not stick around when the dice, deck, shoe, wheel or whatever turns against them.

Damage control is a non-viable concept, said the experts, because no one can ever know if backing away from a downturn will be jumping from the frying pan into the fire, or if the negative trend would have reversed itself if the evasion tactic had been ignored.

Overall, they say, it's a wash: a little less than half the time, damage control will help, and a little more than half the time, it won't.

The "experts," I want you to know, are full of it.

For a fixed-bet or random player, they may actually be right. But for a target bettor (a progression player is another way to describe him) they have it all wrong.

Take another look at the fatal four-pack above.

The experts tell us that when a prolonged spike in the house's favor occurs, pushing the HA far beyond standard negative expectation for the game, there is no reason to hope that it will be substantively offset in time to enable recovery of prior losses.

Again, that may (or may not) be true for a random punter. But for a player who can get out of the hole with two consecutive wins, and more than half the time can make a profit with just ONE win, ducking a potentially deadly downturn will prove right far more often than not.

Each of the killer streaks above was followed by offsets that would have handed target betting a turnaround in a heartbeat. They just didn't come soon enough for the robot player who opted to keep taking punches on the nose instead of picking up his chips and walking away.

Runaway sims "beat" any betting method ever devised by requiring the preposterous assumption that a player would not respond to a downturn like the ones you see above.

He would just keep on betting until his bankroll ran out.

Common sense does not support that conceit any more than science does.

Because of spread limits and the constant need to maintain a low profile to avoid casino interference with a winning method, a target player does not have to trust his own judgment to figure out the right time to bail out of a downturn. The strategy rules do the job for him.

I recommend a 1-5 spread limit in any one location, except at an opening layout (one where you started with a minimum bet), where 1-20 is probably OK.

In the "killer" series above, target betting would have been out of the first one 11 gets in with a $300 loss and a ($575) LTD.

The fatal series in #13 began with seven consecutive losses, and a move would have come before the 11th bet at -200 (-375).

In #20, we would probably have been out at -100 (-100) after four consecutive opening wins, and certainly after the next loss (-200).

Finally, #23's black hole would have ended after at most seven bets at -200 (-375).

Applying those strict rules would of course have affected countless other series and required a whole lot of healthy exercise and worn out shoe leather.

But one thing we know for sure is that on average, recoveries come in less than SIX bets, and series dragging on for TEN bets or more are substantially less than a 10% probability.

And let's face it, probability is what gambling in a casino is all about.

You have to know the numbers, and how to exploit them for consistent profit.

Usually, I figure at least a 99.992% win rate for target betting.

This time, the strategy delivered 99.989%, darn it.

Against a 1.35% HA game, a random punter's win rate will be 49.335%, giving him an expected 5,068 losses in 10,000 bets.

Target betting's performance betting the Wobble against the baccarat data set was ONE loss in 10,000 series (about 55,000 bets!).

You choose: 1 loss in 55,000 or 27,870 in 55,000!

OK, it's a trick question, because of course target betting will lose as many individual bets as any other method. The house advantage will see to that.

The 1 loss in 55,000 rounds is not just a loss, it is ruin, crash and burn, wipe-out or whatever else you might choose to call it.

What matters is that with target betting, more lost bets than won bets will not result in an overall loss of money 99.989% of the time.

The reverse, in fact.

Except once in 55,000 rounds IF you are dumb enough to sit still and suck it up when the house edge goes haywire.

Here are the data for the WBL "skim" run-through:


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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Math orders the universe, so you can be sure it won't wait outside while you are betting the farm in a casino.

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On the face of it, it's tough to argue with the mathematical rationale that "proves" that the house advantage at casino games of chance cannot be beaten in the long run.

So most people don't bother to try.

The logic goes pretty much like this: Even if you bet Banker all the way at baccarat, winning more often than you lose, the 5% commission on all wins will see to it that your are in the hole at the end of the day.

That's because each time you win, you are paid a little less than even money, but every losing bet is 100% in the toilet.

Here is an example of what you can expect in, say, three years of playing baccarat for five hours a day, five days a week:

Total rounds excl. ties 315,049
Average bet value ABV $527
Banker edge 1.36%

Total action $166,047,465
Total wins $83,588,338
Total losses ($82,459,127)
Gross win $1,129,211
Commission on all wins $4,179,417
Net outcome, a LOSS of ($3,050,206)

This is not good news!

What happened in the scenario above was that bet values were in effect randomly selected, and the "Banker edge" was simply not enough to offset the 5.0% gouge.

Winning more often than you lose is a rare privilege in a casino, especially after sitting through more than 315,000 wagers!

But if the so-called "5%" commission at baccarat is going to leave you with a whopping liability that's almost 4x your total win, what's the point?

Now let's try the same scenario with target betting applied at every step to ensure that (sing along with me) you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

Total rounds excl. ties 315,049
Average bet value ABV $527
Banker edge 1.36% (4.46%)

Total action $166,047,465
Total wins $86,837,610
Total losses ($79,426,415)
Gross win $7,411,195
Commission on all wins $4,341,881
Net outcome, a WIN of $3,069,315

AWB/ALB 109.33% vs. W/L +1.36%

There is nothing magical or mysterious about the results achieved in the second scenario. It's just math.

Note the two numbers after Banker edge, above. The first is the actual value (AV) derived from dividing the difference between the greater number of wins and the lesser number of losses by the total number of outcomes. The second is (money won minus money lost) divided by (overall action).

Now check out the AWB/ALB percentage (for average winning bet divided by average losing bet). That is target betting's sole objective.

The bottom line was a healthy positive number in the second scenario because although the total bets won (as opposed to the total money won) was the same in both examples, target betting won far more chips than haphazard wagering did, and lost fewer.

What we see here is discipline (a PLAN!) at work. And I think we can agree that winning is better than losing.

I revisited the baccarat data and plugged in the missing requirement that all potential EOS bets be boosted by 5% to cover commission due on a turnaround win.

Here's how it looks:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
I am still inclined to recommend that betting Player only and avoiding commission is the best way to apply target betting to baccarat if you really must stray from the blackjack tables.

But the effectiveness of the 5% "skim" makes a compelling case for flexibility, and it is certainly true that the more options you permit yourself in a casino, the more likely you are to win while maintaining a low profile.

Field bets at craps can be lucrative, even-money bets at roulette too. Even 3-card poker can boost your bankroll, if you ignore Pair-plus and halve your LTD before making a potential EOS bet (ante the first half and bet the rest if you have a hand worth backing).

But whenever a series starts to get serious you should back away from a high-HA game and take your chips and your LTD/NB numbers to a friendlier game: blackjack or baccarat.

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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Gambling is not sensible, logical or rational. Mathematics is nothing but. So what am I trying to do here? Win sensibly, that's what!

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I have spent most of this week testing my idea that the crippling effect of the baccarat gouge (the so-called 5% commission on Banker wins) can be overcome by arithmetic.

I plowed into the problem well aware that every baccarat book ever written says the game cannot be beaten, and that no less a gambling luminary than Prof. Edward O. Thorp gave up trying way back in the 1980s.

I actually met the man at a backgammon bash in Pebble Beach, Calif., more than 30 years ago, and the author of the best-selling blackjack bible of all time told me then that he had baccarat in his sights as his next gambling target.

Pity it didn't work out for him...

First, a summary of the results achieved when what I now think of as "skim theory" is applied to the 315,000 baccarat outcomes mentioned in earlier posts.

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

The highlighted columns contain results from individual data sets for Player only bets, Banker bets without the "skim" modification, and Banker bets with the anti-gouge LTD adjustment applied.

The surprise to me is that the new method turns out to be an even better bet than staying away from commission wagers entirely (+2.22% of overall action vs. +1.53%).

But I should be used to surprises by now: the good ones help me to do a better job, and the bad ones teach valuable lessons before I bury them forever.

Academic mathematicians and others who oppose the idea that the house advantage in casino games of chance is vulnerable will reject these results. That's their loss, because there is a lot they could learn here if they would only open their minds!

They will doubtless argue that 315,000 outcomes is not a representative sample, or that I somehow managed to massage that huge data set until I came up with a rules combination that beat over 4,000 shoes of baccarat. Sorry, guys.

As always, my methodology has been scrupulously careful, fair and accurate. Any other approach to the challenge would be a waste of time and toil.

The bottom line here is that backing Banker all the way does not have to be a losing proposition in spite of the fact that every win pays less than even money.

Beating one of the most artfully camouflaged rip-offs on the casino floor does not require any change to the rules of target betting other than the deduction of 5% from the value of each win before it is applied to the loss to date (LTD).

My erstwhile baccarat buddy would probably tell me that this new approach is a no-brainer and that he does it already. But unless he has changed his ways in recent years, he doesn't and he won't. His "method" is to apply target betting rules to a point, then abandon them at the time he needs them the most. And as a result, he is a certain long-term loser, with no hope of recovery.

The effect of the "skim" is that a recovery series continues until enough has been won to offset prior losses PLUS all commission due on winning bets throughout that series.

And the rules modification is greatly helped by the fact that over time, there will always be more wins for Banker than for Player (betting under those conditions is a unique experience for me!).

It sounds simple, if not simple-minded, but consistency is the key to beating the house advantage, and that is a very uncomplicated concept.

Hard as I try to get everything right, the one thing I did not build into this week's test is a 105% boost to each potential EOS bet to offset commission due after recovery. I'll get to that later...

Note that the total action required for the modified method to win $6.3 million before commission is fractionally less than the action necessary to make Player a $2 million winner.

And I don't doubt for a moment that even better results could be achieved by letting "The Math" identify a more efficient antidote to the gouge.

I don't want to get into that here because of the academic prohibition against "twiddling and tweaking."

As things stand, the models apply bets that would be rounded up in real play, inflating overall action but hopefully also benefiting the final win. That is one problem with a mathematically accurate, nit-picky approach: precision must sometimes be compromised to a degree to reflect reality, but only after a theory has been proved.

Speaking of reality, here's a chart of the win-loss pattern (WLP) that was disastrous for Player-only bets against the Rodriguez/Jones baccarat sets and led to the one "bust" in more than 50,000 successful recoveries:-


Bear with me a moment and ask yourself if you would stick around for an over-the-cliff plunge like this if you were playing baccarat for real money and a shoe went this far south this fast.

If your answer is No, as mine sure is, the next question that's begged is, Would it make any difference in the long run if you walked away from every egregious "house spike" in the hope of finding a friendlier WLP elsewhere?

The academic defenders of the status quo say no, absolutely not. But both mathematics and common sense say they are wrong when gambling is set aside and target betting replaces it in the equation.

For a fixed or random bettor there will often come a point where the hole he is in is too deep for the longest ladder (in the form of a partial reversal of a negative trend). Once he is 20 or 30 bets behind, as in the pattern depicted here, he's dead meat.

But the target strategist is only seriously threatened when he reaches his maximum bet value, which has nothing to do with table limits and all to do with how much money he has behind him.

Until then, two wins in succession will get him out of the hole...a mighty short ladder by any definition. And more often than not, a single win will save his bacon.

So while the mythematicians who manipulate arithmetic in the service of the gambling industry are not exactly telling a lie when they say you can't run away from bad luck, their "truth" does not apply to target betting.

I will be posting some more "over a cliff" sequences for your amusement from time to time. And I use the cliff analogy with good reason, recognizing that seeing into the future is a little easier on the road than it is in a casino.

Imagine that you are driving down a mountain road and you see a sharp curve coming up and what could be a 1,000ft drop straight ahead. Do you apply the brakes and turn the wheel, or do you keep going? The answer (Duh!) is so intuitive that it now has a place in the Merriam-Webster American Dictionary: used derisively to indicate that something just stated is all too obvious or self-evident.

And that takes me back to the heading at the top of this post.

Mathematics is not disconnected from logic and good sense, however frustrating and impractical its precision may sometimes be.

Gambling, the way most punters interpret and apply it, is illogical, irrational, imprecise and ultimately chaotic and hopeless (which is not to say that its practitioners do not keep doing the same things over and over again while hoping for a happier result!).

Arithmetic can beat the house, as we see here. Luck cannot.

The runaway sims that mythematicians use to "prove" that the house edge is ultimately unbeatable rely on rare patterns like the one above to undo a betting method.

A car driven at high speed with the steering and brakes disabled will almost certainly crash and burn.

A safety-conscious, sensible driver knows how to navigate the worst roads and weather conditions and get home (or to the bank) alive.

Which ride would you prefer?

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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Strange to wake up in the morning and find your brain has been working on a problem while you slept!

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Don't worry, this is not going to be a post about how dead people can help you win at baccarat (see the first blog entry, archived at left!).

But it is something of an experiment as I adjust to the process of allowing target betting to evolve day by day under public scrutiny.

As I have said many times, baccarat has always seemed to me about as exciting as watching grass grow next to blackjack, but now and then I feel obligated to revisit the game because of its huge international status.

As I drifted off to sleep last night, I was noodling the notion that since Banker always wins more hands than Player over the long run, target betting should be able to exploit that advantage by compensating for "The Gouge."

The gouge, of course, is the so-called 5% commission that, in my test, trimmed a $3.3 million funny-money win all the way down to barely $500,000.

My baccarat partner's long-ago suggestion that chips gobbled up by the gouge could be recovered with a post-EOS bet before NB reverts to the minimum did not at the time strike me as workable, and I still have my doubts.

But what if the potential EOS bet itself incorporated commission paid out during the current series, so that the NB equation would be something like NB=1.05*(LTD+Tgt+Comm)?

The effect might be disastrous, pushing bet values and overall action into the stratosphere and risk along with them.

But because Banker always has a solid edge over Player, it might just work.

The experimental aspect here is that I have never before speculated on the effectiveness of a modification ahead of actually applying it.

Given that I have 315,000 verifiable baccarat outcomes to work with, courtesy of Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Jones, I think it's worth the effort to give it a try.

Once again, the spreadsheet platform rules! Running the test will be straightforward enough, and of course I will post the results here as soon as I am done.

The hard part will be figuring out the conditional formula to make the test accurate and effective!

Watch this space...

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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A test of backing Banker all the way at baccarat, and how the "5%" gouge makes it a very bad idea!

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Baccarat may not be my favorite casino table game, but target betting certainly likes it!

Running queries for data on the effect of backing Player only, Banker only and WBL has in effect turned the Rodriguez and Jones combined data sets of 315,000 outcomes into a monster sample of 945,000, so it was well worth the effort.

Now the job's done, I am relieved to be able to confirm that there are no big surprises.

Many baccarat veterans recommend ignoring the Player option entirely, and my test indicates that if winning more often than you lose floats your boat, then that is the way to go.

But brace yourself for a very large "5%" commission tab that will slash your overall winnings by more than 80% (repeat, 80%, not 5%) and leave you with profits that pale against those achieved by the guy at the same table who used target betting to back just Player every time.

My baccarat buddy (the one who suggested cranking up the EOS bet to recover commission fees after a recovery) insisted from day one that the gouge or "vig" or whatever else it might be called was a non-issue.

I'd say that a penalty that slashes a $3.3 million win by more than four fifths is definitely an issue, but I don't play baccarat much so I will leave it to readers to decide.

I have known for a long time that target betting will prevail even if the outcome of individual rounds is reversed (win to loss, red to black, odd to even or whatever) but have never given it a whole lot of thought because blackjack does not offer that option.

It may be possible to apply the Wobble (WBL or win before last) method to 21, but I figure I have enough stuff to keep in my head when I am playing blackjack, and adding more might cause a gray-matter meltdown! So, I have never tried it. And I am hoping that having said that, I won't be tempted to investigate further.

In the chart and summary below, avoiding commission is confirmed as the right way to tackle baccarat, as long as target betting is the primary ingredient.

"Banker Only" sailed through the test with barely a speed bump, but that's not a surprise because (as we all knew before we got into this) Banker wins more often than Player.

I am still in touch with my former baccarat partner, who steadfastly refuses to do the smart thing and step up to blackjack, and he tells me that in Macao and other exotic gambling locations, commission has been replaced by a rule that gives the house a win on a 6-6 tie.

That change might be better for target betting, but somehow I doubt it. Let's face it, casinos very rarely make rules changes that benefit the player!

One of these days I might be able to evaluate the switch, but I have never bothered to record ties, let alone recommend putting money on them, so that is not on my to-do list for the current decade at least.

To me, baccarat is like dancing in deep treacle compared to blackjack, but I know there are millions of aficionados out there and I recommend that they give disciplined target betting a try.

Here's the promised data...

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
I get a kick out of the fact that, commission aside, target betting kicked butt three ways.

But I am not surprised.

The method did encounter a "bust" backing Player only, and it is true to say that the crash 'n burn could have come along in the very first series. However, given 55,000 successful recoveries and just one fatal downturn, we can conclude that "coulda, woulda, shoulda" the three most pointless words in the gambling glossary, do not apply here.

It makes more sense to speculate about what would have happened if the house spike that cost target betting a million bucks in funny-money had been subjected to the damage control that most players instinctively apply in various ways when the going gets extra tough.

It's moot in any case, because most players would prefer odds of 55,000 to 1 in their favor to odds of 49.33 to 50.67 (-1.35%) against them. I am excluding those gamblers who bet as if losing is fun, of course!

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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Surprise, surprise! Gambling's biggest big lie, the "5%" commission, will make losers out of winners in the long run.

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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.
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