"Just who are you preaching to? Even if your ideas about beating the house edge made sense (and they don't), no one could afford to use them!"

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This is a criticism I hear from time to time, and my only answer to it is that making money is never cheap, except in everyone's dreams.

Setting up a business on fabled Main Street, for example, requires a huge outlay on premises, remodeling and inventory, just for starters, and often profits are not seen for years.

Building a casino costs billions these days, and since some players manage to win now and then (sometimes in the millions) the house has to keep huge sums handy to cover downturns and stay ahead.

There is no mathematically supportable way to beat the odds at games of chance without occasional risk, and betting a wide spread is inevitably expensive before it can be profitable.

Your own data show occasional enormous losses that wipe out hundreds of hours worth of winnings. That kind of disaster could happen any time, possibly in successive sessions. That means that your strategy could be suicidal. Admit it: you are working for the gambling industry.

Casino table games are all about probability. It is possible for target betting to lose because its win rate is less than 100%. But it is not probable.

In simple terms, you are looking at favorable odds of far more than 5,000 to 1 if you bet progressively using the target betting rules, and the odds against two successive losses are therefore at least 25 million to 1.

It has always seemed strange to me that the so-called systems debunkers whom I often refer to as mythematicians insist that if a betting strategy can lose just once, it must be worthless.

The house has the best system of them all, a passive strategy that encourages players to bet and behave in a certain way, but does not force them to put money on the table or tell them how much to wager. But even the house loses occasionally.

What happens with target betting is that even in the face of occasional "high exposure," profits come in rapidly and consistently, just as they do for the house.

Sometimes, winning is harder than usual, just as it is for the house.

And once in a very great while, the team has to take a hit, just like the house.

All of the figures posted here and elsewhere in support of target betting are honest and accurate, and all of them demonstrate that very infrequent setbacks are quickly recovered.

Your chances of being killed in a car crash in the U.S.A. are estimated at around 20,000 to 1 against. Does that guarantee that you will be road kill before the end of your 20,000th trip? Of course not!

What you get from auto safety data is much the same as the message derived from target betting trials, and that is that your risk of crashing and burning is too insignificant to preclude either driving a car or betting in a casino!

That assumes, of course, that you drive safely and sensibly on the road, and that you defy the odds in a casino by using target betting to win consistently.

Sounds like you never heard that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Your "proof" is not proof at all because your data are subjective and suspect at worst, and anecdotal and irrelevant at best. You can't use prior outcomes to develop a betting strategy that will work against future outcomes.

I am comforted that insanity is never defined as doing the same thing again and again and expecting the same result, which is what I do with each new target betting trial.

It is also why I recommend to those who are rightly at first skeptical about my ideas that they don't take my word for anything, but instead apply my method to "future outcomes."

They will quickly learn that they have nothing to fear, and much to gain.

It makes no sense to dismiss past outcomes as non-representative.

Even casinos do not do that!

A new game or a rule change to an old game might initially be tested against what I always refer to as runaway sims because they totally eliminate human control and restraint.

But that is never more than a first step.

A casino will insist that a new game must be tested against real players in actual "gaming" conditions before it has a chance of being introduced to the floor.

The gambling industry knows very well that people do not play like computerized robots, and that sims therefore cannot accurately reflect reality.

Face it, no one with the kind of money you say is needed to make target betting work would put it at risk the way you want them to. Gamblers may not be the smartest people on the planet, but they are not the stupidest either. They know that if you want to win, you have to protect your bankroll. You say the opposite.

"Conservative" betting is almost as dangerous to a player (please, let's not call him a gambler) as greed, which is Punter's Enemy #1 in a casino.

The house always wants people to bet conservatively because the math says that they are more likely to lose that way.

The ideal player, from a casino's point of view, is someone who bets a narrow spread (never more than 1 to 10), pulls back when he is losing, and responds timidly to a potential winning streak.

Table limits (spread limits) exist entirely to encourage players to be cautious in their betting habits, so that when they start losing, it is far more difficult for them to bet their way out of the hole.

It is a very simple matter for arithmetic to demonstrate the folly of narrow spreads, and you can be sure that the gambling industry knows that.

Nothing that I have published here or elsewhere in the dozen years since I first posted the principles of target betting for free on the Internet is new to the casino business.

Casino operators know very well that progressive betting is the only way to consistently and reliably overcome the house advantage, and they go to extraordinary lengths to discourage it.

I tell the "experts" that they should try progressive betting for themselves before helping the gambling industry disseminate more deliberate disinformation about how it can't possibly work.

It does work, and casinos hate it.

As for high rollers, most of them have survived expensive lessons on the hazards of trying to "buy the pot."

Big bets alone can never guarantee success at games of chance, and "whales" earned that nickname from the gambling business not because of the size of their bankrolls, but because they keep on taking a dive, then resurfacing for another go-around.

Las Vegas casinos love to put out press releases about the huge sums won by a high roller in from Hong Kong or the land down under. But you will never see publicity about a "whale" who dumped $10,000,000 at baccarat (or whatever) before limping home.

That's because winners bring in losers; losers are bad news, except for the bottom line.

Money alone will not beat the house advantage.

Money and a plan - a plan I call target betting - will always get the job done.

Losses will occur. But winnings will always exceed losses.

As I keep saying, the only way to stay ahead in a casino is to win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

There is nothing revolutionary (or insane!) about that idea: It is wholly logical, sensible and scientific.

If you keep on winning back your losses in fewer bets than it took you to fall behind in the first place, the house edge becomes meaningless.

So...here are the latest BST blackjack results. More of the same old same old!


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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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:-

(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.
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