"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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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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