Occasional losses are inevitable as long as there is a house advantage (and there always is). Target betting makes those losses very rare indeed.

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Sims tell lies. We all know that. But when they say things you want to hear, they're so cool.

Opponents of any and all betting methods that challenge the supremacy of the house advantage in casino games of chance are crystal clear in their interpretation of the "laws" of mathematics.

If the actual value (AV) or house advantage (HA) applicable to a representative sample of outcomes is a negative percentage, then a player's losses against those outcomes will closely approximate his total action multiplied by the HA.

So 1,000 bets against a negative HA of 2.0% with an average bet value (ABV) of $10 will result in a loss of $200, give or take a chip or two.

There is no room for equivocation here: "Any amount bet against a negative expectation must have a negative result."

Luck can upset the house's applecart for a while, but it is a temporary phenomenon according to the law(s) of large numbers, and the axiom can be boiled down to three little words...you can't win.

That means that the following sim-generated results could not have happened:




They did happen, against outcomes supplied by a random number generator (RNG), with all five indicated progressive betting methods showing a profit after 1,000 rounds in spite of a very substantial house edge.

Last time, I posted a summary from 150,000 RNG outcomes that showed target betting well ahead of the game in defiance of the "laws" of arithmetic as interpreted by the gambling industry and its very smart experts.

And to be fair, their pessimistic view of a gambler's long-term prospects is logical as long as the punter bets fixed amounts or bets randomly.

If he bets progressively with a very specific target in sight, negative expectation will be thwarted at least 99.99% of the time, making results like those above and elsewhere on this blog commonplace.

The methods summarized here include the standard Small Martingale, which doubles the bet after any loss until a win is achieved, delivering a profit equal to the value of the opening bet, and a souped-up Martingale (-5, -10, -25, -50, -100, -250, +500) that gooses win values in proportion to an increase in overall risk.

Target betting heads the list, of course, with OG referring to a version of Oscar's Grind that departs from the rules laid out by Tom Ainslie in his book.

Mr. Ainslie claims that "Oscar" has been a steady winner for him year after year and is endorsed by one of gambling's premier mathematicians. But I have been far less lucky whenever I have applied it against one of those sims that systems debunkers love so much.

The OG shown above doubles the bet after a win, to a maximum value of the loss to date (LTD) plus one unit.

The Ainslie version adds one unit after a win, ensuring that recovery after a prolonged downturn will be long and arduous indeed.

Mr. Ainslie recommends abandoning a recovery attempt and starting over if the LTD hits 20 units (-$100 at a layout with a $5 minimum). That rule makes getting ahead a very iffy proposition.

OGT spices things up a little by making the win target not one measly unit, but 10% of the maximum loss in the current series. So if the method is $500 "in the hole" at one point, the win target is $50, and so on.

In each of the above summaries, EXP shows the amount each method "should have" lost in compliance with the HA x Action formula promoted by the gambling biz.

As you can see, it didn't happen, which is not to say that it never will.

The estimable Wizard of Odds, by far the most eloquent of all the casino shills plying their trade on the Internet, describes his decisive debunking of a betting strategy devised by a challenger with the lyrical name of Daniel Rainsong.

I have no knowledge of Mr. Rainsong's method and have been unable to track him down, but my guess is he wuz robbed.

The sim that beat him imposed a spread limit of 1,024 to 1, which might not have stymied Mr. Rainsong's strategy but would be a big problem for mine.

Mike "Wiz" Shackleford, self-billed as an international casino consultant, was able to offer Mr. Rainsong a seemingly generous house edge in his "billion bet sim" because he well knows that it is a deficiency in the critical combination of spread and bankroll, not the value of the HA below double digits, that seals a player's negative fate.

Hell's bells, he could have set the runaway sim's HA at zero and still have "beaten" the Rainsong method. But that, of course, would have given his game away.

Like many gambling industry insiders, the Wiz is well aware that inadequate bankrolls and tight spreads are the stuff that fat house wins are made of.

An even-money game (the sort that does not exist in any casino) would draw out the house's winning process a little longer, it's true. But it is short-term negative spikes against the player that put the wind up inexperienced players and wipe out piddling bankrolls, not gouge-level HAs.

The great joke in gambling is that most punters would be defeated by a game that actually gives them the edge!

That is why casinos routinely report game win percentages that far exceed the known HA for blackjack, baccarat, craps, roulette and the rest.

Think of the billboard slogan that suckers could be reading as they pedal-to-the-metal towards their certain doom in Las vegas: "We'll give you a player edge, but we'll STILL kick your ass."

Spread is the whole ball of wax for progressive betting or for ANY winning method, and a 1,024-1 limit is a deliberately deceptive gift to anyone claiming that the house edge is unbeatable.

It is a non-issue for most gamblers, for whom a 1-10 spread is too much excitement, as well as a guarantee that they will lose unless they get very, very lucky.

Casino operators have known since the beginning of time that capping the bet spread is the most effective way to protect the house edge.

That is why table limits ($5 to $500 at a blackjack layout, for example) exist, and why pit personnel are on the lookout for players who gradually escalate their bets until they achieve a turnaround win and then start over.

"The math" demands that the sooner you hit your upper limit, whether it is house-imposed or your choice, the more likely you are to fall victim to negative expectation.

Conversely, the more wiggle room you are permitted, the greater is the probability that you will be able to win more when you win than you lose when you lose, thereby overcoming the otherwise inexorable ill effect of losing more often than you win.

It is a challenge to work a casino with target betting, and it can only be done by keeping as low a profile as possible.

My policy has always been to spread no wider than 1 to 50 at a bottom tier casino (say, $5 to $250), and no wider than 1-5 at any one layout once the bet has reached $100.

Above the bottom level, the rule of thumb remains 1-5 at the current layout, and drops to 1-10 in any one casino.

The theoretical effect of this sliding scale is a whole lot of to and fro between layouts and casinos, but theory has a habit of evaporating when real life takes over.

Because the odds against you do not change much from deck to deck or game to game, a recovery series made problematic by "local" limits can be suspended until better conditions are available. But that will not happen often.

As your bankroll grows, it becomes easier to stay calm and confident when the pressure is on, and respond appropriately.

In spite of all of the Wiz's claims to the contrary, computer simulations are not a substitute for real play because they exclude the most critical component of gambling, the human element.

They also eliminate cards, dice, wheels, dealers and real time.

I have on occasion been accused of being an agent of the casinos because I offer players an alternative to losing that cannot possibly help them in the long run.

All I can say to that is that anyone claiming that games of chance cannot be beaten is a far more effective shill for the casinos than I could ever be.

Bet flat or bet randomly and you will lose.

Bet progressively according to the rules that I have been providing free of charge for more than a decade, and the odds will be dramatically in your favor rather than fractionally against you.

Either way, the arithmetic is very simple.

Against a game with a 2.0% house edge, you have a 49% chance of winning any bet and a 51% chance of losing it, whether you use target betting or not.

That means that each and every time you place an LTD+ bet in the hope of turning a losing series around, you will probably lose it.

But because your bet values keep changing to match the LTD (and because you either win or lose 100% of your bet, not some cockamamie amount in between) you can be confident that eventually, you will beat those negative odds.

On average, target betting with optimum parameters applied will turn a recovery series around in just over five rounds.

Both versions of the Martingale will do the job a little faster, but their greatest drawback is that they are unplayable in most casinos (pit staff will interfere with their use because they know they represent a real threat).

Tom Ainslie's inch-by-inch version of Oscar's Grind needs an average of 30 rounds to get out of the hole with the 20-unit bust limit omitted. It cuts that number by more than half with the limit in place, but struggles to make a profit, obliterating its gains with a succession of $100 bailouts.

Oscar's Grind could easily be a creation of the casino industry because the limits Mr. Ainslie advocates guarantee that it will fail while deluding the player into thinking that he is in control.

It is a progression, to be sure, but a halfhearted and nervous one that is no threat to the house advantage.

Capping the bet at $100 (assuming a $5 opener) will accelerate the bankroll's downfall and might even be more dangerous than betting random amounts within the same range and hoping for a little luck.

A veteran dealer at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas once told me that Frank Sinatra, a blackjack enthusiast who liked to take over an entire table, would stuff his pockets full of chips and walk away when he won but was not required to pay off his marker when he lost.

That, I admit, may be the best betting strategy I ever heard of. Target betting is the next best thing, far superior to any version of Oscar's Grind!

It all comes down to the comparative frequency of wins and losses, or the win-loss pattern (WLP), and the demonstrable mathematical truth that for both sides in the game, isolated wins are more common than streaks.

For a random player, the WLP whisks his fortunes back and forth like a falling leaf in a gentle breeze, a win here, two losses there, a win, a loss, two wins, three losses.

In essence, the target player bets against the house being able to sustain a winning streak, which is subtly different from putting his money on his own luck.

Most gamblers backing what they hope is a player winning streak do so diffidently, often failing to recover the chips they lost when the WLP went against them.

Target betting's primary objective is to recover past losses in fewer bets than it took to lose the money in the first place.

It is "axiomatic" that if the house cannot take a bite out of your bankroll by winning more often than you do, than the house has a problem.

When all of target betting's rules are in play, the strategy will recover prior losses with a single win more than 70 percent of the time (not as impressive as a Martingale's 100 percent, but usually not as dangerous or as obvious, either!).

Until the strategy's top limit bet value is reached, two consecutive wins will do the job.

Once the "max" is on the table, target betting is as much at the mercy of the house advantage as any other method.

But in order to get into a hole that deep, the method must have been battered by a spike in the house edge that will at some point have to be at least partially offset in order for the known laws of math to hold true.

Let's say that the house edge went haywire for a while, putting you 12 bets "behind" in in 30 rounds, for a series HA of -12/30 = -40.0%. Ouch! All of a sudden, you are at your limit, and the only thing that can save you from certain death is the size of your bankroll (and your intestinal fortitude).

How likely is it that the house spike will continue, or that the next few dozen hands will not contain enough player wins to get you out of the hole? Not very.

Negative expectation for the game is, say, 2.0% (higher than blackjack, but easier to work with when it comes to arithmetic). We know that at some point in the future, the 12 bets you are now behind will be mixed in with upcoming wins and losses until the overall house edge for a sample beginning with the first bet in the current series drops from 40.0% to a number much closer to 2.0%.

In theory, the WLP could bounce gently to and fro without any significant streaks either way for the next 570 bets until the overall house edge settles at the level where it is "supposed" to be.

But that is very rarely the way things go in games of chance. Much more likely is a pattern resembling one of the three red-line charts shown above: more downs than ups, but enough ups to save the day for you and your bankroll.

For most players, falling just a handful of bets behind sets them on a slippery slope that cannot be escaped without a calculated exploitation of every potential winning streak.

Bumping the bet in response to every win will at times increase the speed of the downward slide. But it will also make a very rapid recovery possible.

I spend a lot of my casino time watching other players from a respectful distance, because seeing them succumb to a WLP that I know I could easily have beaten is almost as satisfying as winning myself.

Don't get me wrong, I get no pleasure at all from seeing strangers lose their money. But there is nothing I can do to help them, and monitoring their avoidable missteps at least provides one of us with a positive outcome!

If you want to win consistently, you first have to accept that over time, you are going to make more wrong bets than right ones, and decide what you are going to do about that.

If you are $50 behind and plan to stick with a bet value averaging $10, then you know you will need five more winning bets than losing ones in the near future just to break even again. How likely is that? Again...not very.

By freezing your bet after a loss, you are, in a sense, betting that the house will continue its winning streak for a while.

When you bump your bet value in response to a mid-recovery win, you are up against the same negative odds that apply to every bet but recognize that a ping-pong volley of bets of equal value is not going to get you out of the hole.

The great irony is that much of the time, betting as wide a spread as you can afford will put you at less risk than betting smaller amounts over and over again as you slowly slide deeper into the mire.

Along the way you have to set aside the standard gambler's dream of rich rewards for little risk, and think instead the way the house does.

Be happy to pocket a win that is just a few percentage points of your total action, remembering that that is how the bills get paid in the casino that surrounds you.

Don't be greedy, don't be noisy, don't get cocky and above all, keep your head down.

You will win far more money far more often than the average gambler. But that does not mean you are unbeatable.

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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An international math superstar's assessment of sims as models of human behavior: "Absolute rubbish!"

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Last week's edition of Newsweek includes an article which I interpret as vindication for my longstanding skepticism about the validity of computer simulations as predictors of human behavior.

Paul Wilmott is described as a leading quant, meaning that he specializes in developing new principles of quantitative finance that can be safely applied to the complex world of economics.

It seems he agrees with me that because mathematics cannot predict human behavior, mathematicians recklessly created models that ignored it entirely, with the disastrous results that we are all now living through.

Economics and gambling are alike only when it comes to the speculative nature of stock trading, but human nature has a powerful influence in both fields, and ignoring it is both deceptive and dangerous.

To celebrate Mr. Wilmott's dismissal of most financial models as "absolute rubbish" I decided to boost my database of blackjack and baccarat outcomes past the half-million mark by writing a new "sim" of my own to give me 150,000 new rounds.

That might seem foolish or hypocritical, but I had every reason to be confident that target betting would come out ahead this time, just as it always has.

I would love to be able to claim that there was not a loser among the 20 models of 7,500 rounds or 100 shoes apiece, but it didn't work out that way.

Here's the bottom line:


Given my dismissal of sims as proof of anything other than the disingenuous agenda of house-trained mythematicians, I can hardly trumpet the above summary as a victory for the principles of target betting.

But like my critics, I have to be grateful for the speed and convenience of computer game simulations while doubting their relevance to real play in real time by real people risking real money.

It would take me at least a month to record and collate 150,000 outcomes of baccarat, which has to be the most laborious table game ever devised, and even my soon-to-be-replaced laptop was able to come up with this data set in barely 15 minutes.

The first thing to notice is how similar most of these sets are to the baccarat data independently supplied by Messrs. Jones and Rodriguez.

As regular readers will know, my quarrel with sims is based on their requirement that the "player" they pretend to emulate must bet exactly the same way whatever the current conditions. Like a suicidal lunatic, in a word.

No defensive tactics or damage control can be applied in the otherworld of runaway sims. And perhaps the silliest conceit of all is that, in a sim, it must be possible to bet from the house minimum to the house limit in one place.

The defenders of the status quo insist that damage control is in the long run irrelevant, because the inexorable nature of the house advantage makes the probability of a beneficial effect slightly less than a 50-50 proposition in the same way that each bet is slightly more likely to lose than to win.

What this assumption willfully ignores is that progressive betting changes the odds from less than 50% to better than 90%, as shown throughout the earlier blackjack/baccarat data set and in the new outcomes summarized above.

That's an improvement from less than 1 chance in 2 to a much friendlier 10 chances in 11!

Target betting will always show a profit if a recovery series lasts for 10 rounds or fewer, even if more bets were lost than won in that series.

In the latest set, 91.4% of all series fell into that "easy win" category.

That's not to say that series lasting longer will lose - there was just ONE "bust" in 28,798 series in the new sample, indicating a win rate of 99.9965%.

My experience is that real play almost always offers better conditions than any simulation, even if that substitute for reality is based upon actual outcomes recorded in a casino.

The problem is, of course, that even "real" results become sim-like when they are plugged en masse into a model, with a betting strategy then strictly applied with no reliance on a human response to potential threats to the bankroll.

It is a classic rock-and-hard-place dilemma, confirming that the only truly relevant test of a betting strategy is real play by...etc.

The gambling industry knows that essential truth better than any mathematician!

Paul Wilmott happens to be the loudest and most visible among countless 20/20 visionaries who were either silent or unheard in the run-up to the economic tsunami that, according to an estimate I read on the Net today, has wiped out more than $1.3 trillion in Americans' personal wealth in less than a year.

The only good news is that a big chunk of that washed-away wealth was in the hands of casino moguls like Steve Wynn, Sheldon Adelson and Kirk Kerkorian after they had leeched it from the misguided fools who actually earned it before flushing it away in Las Vegas.

To the thousands of Wall Street wonks whose jobs were sucked away by the ebb tide, I can only suggest that target betting in a casino offers them a better shot at rebuilding their bankrolls than their former workplace ever will again!

And target betting is also a whole lot less complicated and dangerous than any of the fancy fiscal formulas that flew ever higher before succumbing to the force of gravity and falling to earth.

What sims ignore is that once a player recognizes that progressive betting is the only way to win consistently, a wide array of tactics become available to him or her.

And while a million-dollar bankroll may be ideal, it is not essential: the principles of target betting can be adapted to more modest resources, and will always offer the player better long-term odds of success than flying by the seat of his pants.

Luck might serve him better in the short term. But luck never lasts, for either side of the gambling equation.

The new RNG summary offers a wealth of useful insights that are not rendered totally meaningless by the unreliability of sims.

For instance, a standard Martingale and my souped-up versions of double-up and Oscar's Grind all did well against the new sample, each reversing the effect of the negative expectation that would have doomed a flat or random bettor challenging the same outcomes.

There may be skeptics out there who will say that 150,000 rounds is "not a representative sample" but they will be tooting a hollow tune: very few "recreational" gamblers will place that many bets in an entire lifetime.

The bottom line is that all of the results I have reported in this blog are impossible according to the conventional wisdom, meaning that either the conventional wisdom is wrong or I am a fraud.

In the new non-fraudulent sample summarized here, 14 of 20 sets of 7,500 outcomes ended with more bets lost than won, and more than 64% of all series "should have" ended with a negative or neutral result.

Instead, more than 73% of all series scored a profit after just one win, a minor miracle made possible by a combination of the OL, 2L, 3L and MSL rules of target betting (click on the rules link at the top of the blog for a refresher course).

The average end of series (EOS) win came in less than six bets.

As expected (and required by the overall house edge), more EOS attempts failed than succeeded. But because the win target is constantly updated to match the loss to date, that was not, in the end, a problem.

Target betting with the above parameters applied is an aggressive approach suited only to a large bankroll, but the actual exposure was barely 50% of the recommended $1 million.

The average win per 7,500 rounds was more than $110,000 or about $1,000 per shoe of baccarat.

Target betting turned a negative expectation of 0.97% (low for baccarat, but that can happen) into a positive result equal to +1.54% of total action.

SM, SM+ and OG (see below) all did better than target betting, in percentage terms, but delivered smaller funny-money profits.

Target betting is intended to win more when it wins than it loses when it loses in order to overcome the inescapable house advantage in casino games of chance, and against the new sample, the overall average win value exceeded the average loss value by 5%. That was more than enough to trump the house edge.

The AWV/ALV percentage for the 19 winning sets was 115%.

The average bet for target betting was $529, although only 5% of all bets (7,440 out of 150,000) exceeded $1,000.

The averages for SM, SM+ and OG were $51, $217 and $74 respectively.

The final target betting win against this irrelevant and unreliable sample of outcomes (it came from a sim, so how else can I describe it?) was equal to a little more than $800 per hour of play.

Exposure of the bankroll exceeded 10% in 9 of the 20 sets of baccarat outcomes. I will apply "bare bones" parameters against the same data sample sometime soon and post the results.

The "expected" result from this set, given a -0.97% actual value (AV) and target betting action of $79.35 million, was a LOSS of $773,000 in contrast to a WIN of $1.22m.

The overall win rate for target betting was 99.9965% or 1 loss in 29,798 series.

My critics will continue to insist that none of this could have happened without sleight of hand. That is because in many cases their livelihood depends on denial.

More about the alternatives to target betting featured in the above summary...

SM is the much-maligned standard Martingale (-1, -2, -4, -8, +16), which is very effective but almost always unplayable because of the vigilant paranoia of pit personnel.

SM+ is my adaptation of SM to deliver a little more than $5 in profit from a $5 opening bet: -$5, -$10, -$25, -$50, +$100). It is also virtually unplayable, although scrutiny can sometimes be dodged in a busy casino by betting no more than 3 wrong bets at any one location.

OG is for Oscar's Grind, which as far as I know is the only betting strategy ever endorsed in a mass-market "how to" book about gambling.

That alone makes the method suspect, since gambling books as a genre are intended to encourage people to play more while reinforcing the message that losing is ultimately inevitable.

I applaud OG for freezing the bet after a loss, thus helping to confound the enemy. But author Tom Ainslie's rules (NB=PB+1u after a win, bail out after a 20u loss, and do not apply a win progression) are in my view a prescription for certain failure.

Mr. Ainslie claims he has paid for countless Caribbean gambling trips with Oscar, which makes him a very lucky fellow. Whenever I model his rules, I drown in red ink!

My "OG" applies a win progression of PB+1u after an opening win, and as with target betting makes the streak-ending loss the LTD. After that, the mid-series win response is PBx2 to a max of LTD+1u rather than Mr. Ainslie's wimpy PB+1u.

As I said earlier, a player who embraces the unique efficacy of progressive betting as an antidote to the progressive (or regressive) process called losing has multiple options that range from mildly confident to supremely cocky.

Any one of them is better than playing and losing the way the gambling industry expects you to.

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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Casino table games offer you just three choices. You can lose, get lucky, or make sure that you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

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For once, a short post, reminding readers that you should test the rules of target betting for yourselves rather than taking my word for anything.

I am telling you the truth, but I do not expect you to believe me without proof of your own making.

Without progressive betting, you will lose. That's a fact. With it, but without target betting, you may also end up in the red.

The data and screenshots posted here are not submitted as proof. They simply illustrate what you can achieve in your own way and in your own time against games of your choice if you follow the rules of target betting.




I have laid out what I consider from experience and lengthy research to be the optimal rules for the strategy.

But until you build your confidence, and along with it, your bankroll, you are of course free to make whatever "customized" modifications you see fit.

I do not recommend cutting too far back on the LTD+ rule, the core of target betting, because instead of recovering prior losses in one or two bets, you will need three or more, and your chances of success diminish proportionately.

The math works like this: isolated player wins occur roughly twice as often as paired wins, triples happen half as often as pairs, and so on.

Safer modifications affect the opening loss (OL) response, which I generally set at PBx5 but which can be cut all the way back to no increase at all. My 2L setting is PBx3, followed by 3L at PBx1.33, assuming an opening sequence of -$5, -$25, -$75.

I play a win progression (WP) of PBx2 in response to an opening win, and keep it up until $200, after which NB=PB+$100 and a loss of $500 or more is written off with a disappointed sigh and a fallback to a minimum bet.

The data disc that comes with the book that will grow from this blog offers readers an opportunity to test my ideas and their own against samples of outcomes that can be changed with the tap of the recalc key.

Included is a warning that no simulation can be claimed to accurately and honestly replicate actual play (the only advantage of sims is that they save time and money).

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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"Proof of wins is meaningless. Anyone can win once in a while. All that matters is that when your system loses, it loses BIG!"

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I cannot over emphasize how important it is that anyone interested in learning the principles of target betting should not take my word for anything.

Gamblers are too ready to believe whatever they are told, but this blog is not aimed at them.

My audience (I hope!) consists of smart people who enjoy playing casino table games but do not consider that losing at them is inevitable.

They are not gamblers. They are players. And believe me, there is a big difference.

I was asked some time ago about the viability of a $100,000 target betting bankroll against baccarat, and my response was that while it stands a pretty good chance of making a steady profit, I would not recommend it.

I said that because target betting is not about taking chances. Its objective is to win, and the likelihood of success depends not on luck but on optimal use of available resources.

The switches or settings - the rules - of target betting each play a vital role in helping us towards our long-term goal, but only one of them is absolutely indispensable, and that is the LTD+ response to a mid-recovery win.

Even that can be modified to lessen potential strain on a limited bankroll, but once we start doing that, we need to be aware that recovery may take longer and deliver a smaller profit.

Last time, I introduced the acronym WYNN for "watch your negative numbers," and while I intended to poke a little fun at the best-known casino operator on the planet, the message was absolutely serious.

Most of the models displayed in past posts show a bankroll of $1 million and a win capability of at least $1,000 an hour at blackjack (less at baccarat because James Bond's favorite game pays even money at best).

Trimming money-making tactics necessarily cuts into anticipated revenue while reducing risk somewhat, and that requires a significant reduction in the "bust" limit, from a cool million to $250,000 or less.

After all, a 75% drop in the rate of return is only acceptable if it also permits a proportionate cut in the risk, or "level of investment."

I am generally inclined to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" point of view, but I do recognize that it is easier to say (or type) the words one million dollars than it is to put the indicated sum into play in a casino.

All of the models in my database are available to anyone who asks nicely to see them, and very few indicate a level of exposure greater than 50% of the notional bankroll.

With all target betting's bells and whistles clanging and shrieking, an exposure of 10% or less is not uncommon, and the strategy wins at such a rapid clip that the initial investment quickly becomes a distant memory.

The whole idea of target betting is to build resources as efficiently as possible, because as the bankroll gets fatter, the chances of long-term failure diminish.

What my critics refuse to accept is that human beings do not play like the mindless robots that are at the heart of any computer game simulation.

An excess of caution can often be more dangerous than outright recklessness, but a skilled player develops intuition that becomes more reliable as time goes by.

Personally, I can never prove that the dealer who shakes his or her head as I approach a blackjack table, warning me away from a current "hot" streak, will have actually saved me any grief. But I certainly appreciate the friendly thought, and very rarely ignore it.

So it is with a negative trend that was not preceded by a red flag waving: If it feels right, I will move before I reach my predetermined spread limit, and I certainly will not stick around past that point.

The argument that in the long run, "damage control" stands less than a 50-50 chance of escaping potentially deadly playing conditions and leading to a quicker recovery is deliberately and cynically specious.

And the claim that improved conditions were just as likely to have come along if the player had stayed put and taken his punishment like a man is irrelevant: table limits are a reality, and where they are not a factor, a target bettor has his own rules to follow.

The arithmetic tells us that no one, however clever or lucky he may be, can escape the effects of the house advantage in the long run.

In terms of wins vs. losses, with the latter inevitably expressed by a larger number than the former, that is true and it is foolish to believe otherwise.

And it follows that anyone who bets fixed sums or determines the value of his wagers randomly must in the end lose more money than he wins as a consequence of losing more bets than he wins.

It must then also be true that for the fixed-sum or random punter, damage control will over time prove to be pointless, because it can have no effect on the overall percentage value of the house edge.

Target betting succeeds against the house edge and the dire expectation it entails because dramatic win-loss pattern (WLP) swings in the house's favor are not the norm.

And as long as the target player has not yet reached his maximum bet value, he will be able to recover all his prior losses in far fewer winning bets than the number of "wrong" wagers it took to gobble up the chips that were temporarily sucked into the dealer's tray.

Even when his "max" has been reached, the target player has "the math" on his side.

Usually, the house needs a sustained advantage of at least 25% in order for a target bettor's bankroll to be seriously threatened, and a negative trend that is a dozen or more times greater than expectation for the game cannot last indefinitely.

That is why a strong bankroll is an essential weapon against the house. It will not be needed often, but like the big guns on a battleship, it needs to be there just in case.

None of this means that it is possible for a wealthy player to simply "buy the pot."

Money is very useful in a casino, sometimes even essential. But money alone will not guarantee a long-term win, as many a misbegotten high roller can testify.

Money and a plan...now that's a winning combination. As long as the plan is target betting.

So, to get back to the opening point of this post (and to repeat the advice in the blog's introduction), don't take my word for the value of target betting.

Learn the rules, and test them in your own time against games of your choice.

You can be sure of losing more bets than you win.

But you will still make money, even if the chips are not real.

Let's face it, if the house cannot win in spite of raking in your cash more frequently than it has to pay you off, the house has a problem.

You don't. And that is all that matters.

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.
_

"The only thing your fancy charts and lists prove is that you have wasted your life on a mirage. And even if you don't like it, sims tell the truth."

_
As Ronald Reagan (not one of my heroes, I admit) famously said to an opponent: "There you go again!"

The two most powerful pointers to a mythematical disinformation campaign orchestrated by the gambling industry are the claims that past outcomes hold no clues to the future, and that simulations accurately reflect real-play conditions.

Come on! Let's use a little common sense here!

The French have a saying that translates to "The more things change, the more they stay the same" and any experienced gambler can confirm that it applies to what happens inside a casino as much as to life in the real world.

There is nothing mathematically unique about random results in games of chance, and learning from experience is as valuable for a gambler as it is for anyone who prefers to keep his money safe.

Simulations, on the other hand, have very little to teach us, because they assume that all players are self-destructive idiots, and you and I know we are better than that.

The long-standing campaign to discourage meaningful research in the field of casino table games smacks of age-old heresy trials at which clerics warned that those who asked too many questions were headed straight to hell.

It really is ridiculous to pretend that the future will not repeat the past. The past IS the future, and if we fail to take the time to learn from it, we deserve to lose.

I should qualify my objection to "sims": those that recreate the random numbers critical to roulette and craps can be helpful; those that eliminate every element of blackjack and baccarat other than the percentage of the house advantage are deliberately deceptive (dissimulations would be a better word for them).

Target betting is at its core the application of good sense to the gambling experience, which for most of its participants is about as removed from reason and wise judgment as an activity can be.

For many, the primary appeal of placing a bet is that it is risky and unwise, and the longer the odds, the greater the thrill of winning.

It's about being naughty and knowing that you are probably going to be punished for it while hoping that maybe this time you will get away with it, and be rewarded for your sins.

No one who feels that way will have much use for target betting, and will side instead with the chorus of "experts" whose message is always the same: You can't win.

You can win. But not without working at it.

I am often criticized for devising a betting method that can only be profitable for players who already have a lot of money.

The truth is that sensible money management is better than the senseless alternative even for weekend punters on a shoestring budget, although generally the best they can hope for is that it will simply make their money last longer.

What the casinos depend on is that gambling is all about choices, and most players will make the wrong choice almost every time.

Target betting, like basic strategy play at blackjack, exists to eliminate choices and replace them with consistent smart moves.

Because gambling is what it is, the smart move is only the right move when you win. But it stands to good sense (common sense) that consistency and discipline are sure to bring better results in the long run than flying by the seat of your pants.

It always amazes me how few gamblers take the trouble to learn the numbers that apply to the games they play, and with a nod to their worst enemy, I hereby offer the following easy acronym: WYNN, short for Watch Your Negative Numbers.

A week or so ago, I was playing blackjack in my hometown casino with a kid whose wrong moves were so frequent that finally the dealer blurted out in a stage whisper, "Are you sure you want to do that?"

He wasn't sure, and from then on the dealer and I between us coached him so successfully that his diminishing pile of chips took a turn for the better, and within 15 minutes, he was back in the black.

Target betting depends on constant awareness not just of the depth of the hole you are in, but that to win, you must always recoup your losses in fewer bets than it took you to get into trouble.

There is nothing delusional about that, and it is not heresy either. You will in the end always lose more bets than you win, so the only way to get ahead of the game is to win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

That requires discipline, confidence, consistency and (sometimes) a lot of cash, and none of those attributes conflict with the laws of arithmetic.

Google "progressive betting" and you will find hundreds of thousands of entries, most of which argue that it is a suicidal method that cannot win.

The truth is that it is the only method (other than dumb luck, which is not a method at all) that can overcome the reality that losing bets will always outnumber winning ones in the end.

House-trained mythematicians warn of the very real danger that at some point, the next bet in a progression will exceed the table limit "and then you are sure to lose" or words to that effect.

Quelle crappe, comme dites les Francaises!

No one without adequate funding should ever consider progressive betting, and for a player with a healthy bankroll, a looming table limit is simply a signal to back out of the game and go find a layout in a higher rent neighborhood.

The simplest progression is the Martingale or double-up, and players who succeed with it never incur more than three successive losses at one layout before moving on.

That way, they stand a chance of flying under PR (pit radar) while repeatedly turning their losses around and fattening their bankrolls still further.

They tend whenever they can to bet blackjack and field bets at craps, where naturals and x2 or x3 payouts will occasionally make a long-awaited win very profitable indeed.

Those Google citations I mentioned will often argue that a player has to be crazy to start out with a $10 bet and potentially risk thousands to win "just ten bucks" when a win finally breaks a losing streak.

They are written by math-challenged people who fail to grasp that a winning bet worth thousands wins thousands, not "just ten bucks" and achieves what most gamblers can only dream of: recouping all prior losses in a single wager.

In fact, the house's passive "system" is more like a Martingale than anything else, permitting a few players to get thousands of dollars ahead while secure in the knowledge that soon enough, they will lose and all those borrowed chips will be back where they belong.

In theory, a house edge of 1.0% at blackjack means that the casino will see a profit of just $100 for every $10,000 "at risk" - a level of reward that a Martingale player would find less than satisfactory.

In fact, most blackjack players are as bad at the game as the young man I mentioned earlier, and the true house edge is closer to 12% or $1,200 for every $10,000 of action.

Target betting requires knowledge and intuition, hence WYNN: watch your negative numbers, and when the house gets too far ahead, get the hell outta there!

Using my method with all its switches at their maximum setting can be a risky proposition, one that should not be undertaken without a very substantial bankroll.

But forget everything but the LTD+ response to a mid-series win, and the method is routinely more effective than a Martingale without the screaming sirens and flashing red lights that double-up will set off in any pit if a player is dumb enough to get caught using it.

I will say again, I don't recommend a Martingale, not because it is too risky, but because I do not want to be chased away from the games I love to play and WIN AT.

All those target betting switches can provide a long-term boost to profits, but their primary function is as camouflage.

They can be turned on or off or dialed up or down at will, which is one of the many reasons why simulations that feature a suicidal maniac betting exactly the same way ad infinitum are just plain dishonest.

I recommend that the starting point for nervous newcomers to target betting should be LTD+1u for an EOS goal, plus a win progression of x1.5 and MSL set at a modest -100.

If you have forgotten the rules, that means that in response to a mid-recovery win, you would bet LTD+$10 at a $10 table, repeating the formula if the end of series wager goes south for a total of $100 or less. After an opening win of $10, NB would be $15, then $25, $40, $60 and so on, with the eventual streak-ending loss becoming the new LTD.

Those cliff-drop negative trends that runaway sims depend upon cannot apply to a target player because of the spread limits that the rules impose: not more than 1 to 20 after a $10 opener, then not more than 1 to 5 at any one location.

Spread is the most critical factor in any casino table game, which is why the house imposes table limits that are getting ever tighter as the years roll by.

A big bankroll alone will not guarantee an overall win when losing bets outnumber winning bets.

A wide spread (1 to 5,000 is optimum) will make you a winner every time.


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.
_

Don't blame bad luck when you lose at a casino table game...it's more likely that bad betting did you in.

_
Anyone who walks into a casino hoping to win more bets than he loses is probably going to be disappointed.

But that is exactly how most gamblers approach the challenge of beating odds that they know from the start are against them.

It doesn't make much sense, does it?

It is a demonstrable mathematical fact that if you bet the same amount each time, or choose your bet values randomly, you will eventually fall prey to the house advantage, more likely sooner than later.

And even if you apply money management to the process, responding appropriately to trends for and against you and restricting bet values to a limited proportion of your bankroll, you won't win in the end.

You will simply get to play a little longer.

Casinos are not in the business of money management...player management is their game, and they do what they do so subtly that most gamblers believe that the choices they make are entirely their own.

For example, before a casino in my Nevada neighborhood burned down a year or so ago, its blackjack tables offered a betting spread of $2 to $200.

When it reopened, its fancy new layouts all had table limits of $5 to $100.

To the vast majority of punters, table (or spread limits) are a matter of supreme indifference.

Most people do not spread their bets wider than 1-5, and the bigger their bankroll and their opening bet, the tighter their spread is likely to be.

It is possible for them to make a little money if the house advantage maintains its predicted level for a while and if they press while they are ahead and pull back during a downturn.

They will be in trouble when the house gets a few bets ahead, because they will need an equal number of wins to recover, and because of the game's bias, that may not happen in time to save their meager bankroll.

By imposing table limits, casinos exploit the fact that most players are reluctant to quit a game during a losing streak, especially if the joint is jumping on a Saturday night, and finding another seat might take a while.

So for nearly all of the players who returned to that rebuilt casino in Nevada, their only complaint is likely to be that $2 bets are no longer permitted, not that the maximum spread has dropped to 1-20 from 1-100.

I do not have access to the books at Topaz Lodge, of course, but I can promise you that the house win per player numbers at its blackjack tables are up, in spite of a slump in casino traffic.

The reason is quite simply that $25 players can now only spread 1-4 instead of 1-8, and while spreads that tight are sure to lose in the end, the prospect of a late lucky streak has been summarily halved.

Gamblers are creatures of habit and highly predictable, and casinos depend on their knowledge of human behavior to maximize their profits.

"System" is a word that in the gambling context has become a pejorative, conjuring up images of snake-oil salesmen and the gullible fools they prey upon to profit from their evil schemes.

Outside of casinos, the word is more likely to connote discipline, orderliness, good sense and professionalism, and sundry other attributes.

Inside casinos, only the management is systematic, secure in the knowledge that mathematics, perhaps the most orderly discipline in the known universe, will smooth out minor fluctuations in player behavior and the ups and downs of fate and fortune and deliver a profit at the end of the day.

It comes down to this: a player who does not bet systematically will lose.

It may not happen today or tomorrow, but it will happen in time, as surely as 2+2-5 is a negative number.

And in spite of that undeniable truth, 99.99% of all gamblers will tell you that there is no system known to man that can beat the house advantage.

Here is a different look at the latest pencil log from my BST blackjack trial:


The big numbers in the BST screenshots should come as no surprise by now, and I have stopped providing breakdowns of each step along the way to a final win because by now the point should have been made.

What may surprise some of you is that throughout the session, losing series, defined here as recoveries achieved in spite of more bets lost than won, are in the majority.

It should not come as a shock, but too many people are inclined to assume that luck is the only factor that can make you a winner in a casino, and it simply is not so.

Since none of us can ever know ahead of time if the very next bet is going to win or lose, systematic betting is our only option.

Call it money management if you like - call it grzignflumpf, even - but however you may choose to gussy up or disguise it, a "system" is what is needed here.

Casinos know this and are constantly on the alert for players who do not bet (and lose) the way they are "supposed to."

Table limits are one way to reign in players who may have the means and the inclination to "bet the farm" in the midst of a punishing losing streak and recover all their prior losses in a single bet.

Another is to come down hard on punters who are "foolish" enough to revert to the best known - and thanks to the gambling business, most reviled - system of them all, the double up, double down or the Martingale.

Unless we believe in luck, along with Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and other invisible benefactors, we all know that over time we are going to lose more bets than we win.

It that were not so, there would be no casinos.

It therefore follows that the only way we can win in the end is to rake in more money from a smaller number of winning bets than we give up from a greater number of losing bets.

A Martingale does the job very well: -1, -2, -4, -8, +16 delivers a 1-unit or +3.2% win against a house advantage of -3/5 = 60%, average win 16u, average loss 4u.

A Martingale also happens to be unplayable in a casino, except by professionals who spend their time in motion, losing no more than three bets in any one location before moving on in search of the single win that will give them a profit.

They find themselves out on the sidewalk from time to time, but they don't care: there is always another casino just a few steps away.

Nor do they care that "the math" is apparently against them: they are grateful that all but a tiny percentage of gamblers believe that to be so, leaving the field open to them.

Consider an opening bet of $5 and a relatively modest baccarat table limit of $15,000 (the current green ceiling at Harrahs Stateline), then the fact that 12 consecutive losses will be needed before the next bet in the progression ($20,480) will be unplayable.

Now think about the odds against 12 consecutive losses: roughly 0.002% or 2% of 1% or 1 in 4,016.

Next, consider that if our "Martingaler" places and wins a $15,000 bet at baccarat, he is $5,480 "in the hole."

End of story? Of course not! His chances of winning that first $15,000 bet are a little less than 50-50 (49.3 to 50.7), meaning that he will probably lose. But what he now has to ask himself is how likely it is that he can get just two bets ahead of the house ($30,000 less $10,240) after falling 12 bets behind.

Thanks to the house advantage, a force that pulls both ways, those chances are better than good.

The so-called Gambler's Fallacy is the assumption that because an inordinate number of bets have been lost, a win is somehow more probable at this moment than it would be otherwise.

When applied to individual bets, the delusion is well-named as a fallacious disregard of the negative odds that apply equally to every bet, regardless of what went before.

But our Martingaler has just lost 12 bets in a row, then won a single wager, indicating a house advantage for the sequence of -11/13 = 85%.

The known house edge for baccarat is about 1.4%, so how "probable" is it that the house will stay 11 bets ahead indefinitely?

Not very.

It is at this point that a large bankroll becomes essential to the task of eliminating the negative effects of the house advantage.

I have had many a mathematician scold me with a reminder that in theory, an egregious imbalance like the example above need never be offset sufficiently to enable a progressive bettor to recover his losses.

But I have yet to be provided with a real-play example of the house edge running amok without eventually returning to compliance with negative expectation for the game.

There is a good reason for that: It can't happen.

It can take a while, but the house edge cannot stay at 85% (or even close) forever. Remember, we are not betting the farm on a complete counter-swing of the pendulum, just one or two wins.

Mythematicians love to trot out runaway sims to "prove" their specious prophecies, so it seems fair that I offer one of my own, an Excel RNG that signals HELP! when the house edge exceeds 50% and SAVED! when paired wins occur.

For a Martingaler who is betting below his green ceiling, a single win is enough to recover prior losses. For a target player, it sometimes (about a third of the time) takes TWO, otherwise one is all that is needed.

Ask me nicely, and I will send you the file. Meantime, here are a couple of out-takes, and the formulas are at the bottom of this post.



Mythematicians, the guys who will defend the power of the house advantage no matter what, concern themselves with what is possible rather than what is probable, arguing that if a given betting method can fail even once in 50,000 bets, it should not be trusted at all.

In casinos, all manner of wondrous outcomes are possible, but not probable, and the probable outweighs the possible by a percentage just great enough to hand the house a profit at game over.

For example, a royal flush is possible on a $5 video poker machine, paying out $20,000 and making the lucky winner very happy.

But on average, at least $21,500 will have to be fed into the machine for every $20,000 paid out, making the house even happier.

And more than 98% of the people who play that machine between jackpots will take out considerably less money than they "contributed."

The HELP! SAVED! file is no more representative of an actual game of baccarat than any other runaway sim, but it serves to illustrate the important difference between what's possible and what is probable.

Once in a great while, a serious threat to the bankroll will emerge. But the greater likelihood is that by then, so much money will have been won that the potential damage from the exposure has been reduced or eliminated.

The sim features a Martingale rather than target betting as I prescribe it, but it confirms that if only paranoid pit personnel would permit double-up to be played, even that simple strategy will consistently overturn the house advantage.

Any pit boss you talk to will confirm that progressive betting of any kind, and the Martingale in particular, cannot possibly win in the long run.

But if your response to that is, "OK, then you won't mind if I give it a try," you will quickly learn that what he says is not what he believes.

The standard retort to any defense of a progression is that it risks too much to win too little, a nonsense criticism that would be meaningful only if it did not apply at least as much to every other method of betting, and to the house's exposure, too.

Think about it: the house permits players to bet whatever they want within the limits discussed earlier, anticipating a "hold" that can be less than 2% of total action.

In truth, the house's share of the churn is much higher than the predicted edge for table games, ranging from 1% at blackjack to 5.26% at roulette, but that's because most players bet as if they want to lose.

A player who can walk away with his bankroll intact, plus 2% of his action, does not have a whole lot to complain about - but systems "debunkers" pretend otherwise in defense of an agenda that is never clear.

The Martingale can be said to win "just $5" when a losing streak finally ends with a turnaround win, but it doesn't: It wins all prior losses PLUS $5.

If you are tempted to venture a Martingale, I recommend varying it a little to boost the bottom line: 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 500, 1000, 2000, 5000 and so on.

But do not get too attached to this approach. You will not be allowed to play it for long!

I have been relentlessly scrutinized and harassed over the years, more often than not with a charm that is skin-deep, and that hardly makes sense from an industry that claims to welcome progressive betting.

Before Caesars Tahoe banned me from its blackjack tables (unaware that target betting works almost as well at baccarat, craps and roulette, among other games) my wife and I were invited to a dinner show.

We had been seated barely five minutes when the Maitre D' brought another couple to our booth, explaining that the show was fully-booked and since we had been comped, our help would be appreciated. It was a large booth, so why not?

Almost before he had settled in his seat, our new table-mate introduced himself as "Tony" and boasted that he and his wife were there because of the huge sums he bet at baccarat in the casino's salle privee.

He was, he said, a high roller.

"So, what system do you use?" he asked, with no further preamble. "Mine is really simple: After I win, I bet five chips, after I lose I bet one, and because I never bet less than $500, I am happy if I get only one chip ahead per shoe."

I replied that I preferred blackjack to baccarat, and that I did not have a system - I was just lucky, I guess.

The same question was asked repeatedly - gently, but firmly - through dinner and the show that followed, and my answer was always the same.

Why on earth would a player with a "winning system" be interested in how someone else stayed ahead of the game?

He wouldn't, of course.

But the house would want to know.

For the record, Tony's "system" is a total disaster. Target betting is not.

Here are the primary cell conditionals for the HELP/SAVED simulation:

(A1)=IF(RAND()<=0.49,1,-1)
(B1)=+A1
(C1)=+B1
(D1)=+B1/C1
(E1)=IF(AND(D1>=50%,C1>=10),"HELP!","")
(F2)=IF(AND(B2<0,A2>0,A1>0),"SAVED!","")
(G1)=IF(AND(G1<0,H1<0),A2*MIN(15000,ABS(G1)*2),A2*5)
(H2)=IF(H1<0,G2+H1,G2)
(I2)=IF(AND(H1<0,H2>0),1,"")

That will get you started with a DIY version of my sim.


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.
_ale

Casino table games are sucker traps. And if you don't play like a sucker, the welcome mat will be whipped out from under your feet.

_
First, the latest from the ongoing BST blackjack trial...


Skeptics who don't question my honesty or the accuracy of my published results will sometimes suggest that target betting might work in theory, but cannot be successful under real-play conditions.

It is certainly true that a prolonged negative trend (defined for target betting as clumps of losing rounds separated by isolated wins) will drive bet values very high very fast, making it impossible for a strategy player to remain in one location.

In my experience, table-hopping in one casino or moving from one casino to another as the win-loss pattern demands makes good sense for all sorts of reasons, not the least of them being that it helps a target player to avoid attracting attention.

As always, it is all about common sense. If you are in a near-empty casino at 3:00am, then jumping in and out of games with a wide range of bets is going to set off alarms left and right.

The same is not true mid-evening on a Friday, when all the games are in full swing, and finding a seat at layouts under $100 can require a whole lot of walking.

The mathematical question that comes up involves the effect constant mid-series motion is likely to have on long-term profitability, and the short answer is: None.

Anyone who has studied gambling games knows that negative expectation is a constant factor, like gravity, or the slow-moving DOWN escalator I described in an earlier post.

Supporters of card counting in blackjack insist that a rich deck value reduces or eliminates the house edge, but most players do not count cards and even those who do have often lost heavily in spite of conditions that seemed to favor them.

In a game with any house edge (and casinos do not offer games without one), the percentage of negative expectation applies equally to every bet, meaning that in a 2% game, the player's odds of winning the very next bet are 49-51 against him.

All of the target betting models track not just winning EOS bets but failed attempts too, and naturally more potential turnaround bets go south than succeed and save the day.

If that were not true, there would definitely be something wrong with my methodology.

So the only difference between theory and practice is a little thing called time.

In the models, as with all simulations, bets are placed without regard to table or house limits, and the only inhibiting factor is the standard target betting "bust" limit of $1,000,000 in funny-money.

In actual play, it is not smart to spread wider than 1-5 in any one location, although if the risk of attracting unwanted attention is low, there is some room for maneuver.

An exception is at the bottom level: $5 to $100 (1-20) is generally OK, but again, sometimes it is better to suspend a series sooner than that after assessing local conditions.

And suspending a series does not have to mean taking yet another walk, especially if you know it will be a while before you can find an empty slot.

It works just as well (and saves shoe-leather) if you cut a series off in mid-recovery, remember or jot down the LTD/NB numbers, and begin another series with a minimum bet.

When you have several targets stored in your sharply-honed, always reliable grey cells, you can move on ready to recover them one by one elsewhere.

All simulations, including mine, eliminate the human factor, which happens to be at the top of the list of factors that determine long-term success at gambling games.

When the human factor (hn in those terrific TV commercials!) is reintroduced to the formula, everything changes for the better except if the human being involved is one of those who thinks that losing is fun.

When spread limits are applied, series that begin with a $5 bet and end with a $25,000 win simply cannot happen - but that in no way alters the fact that a threat to the bankroll can be turned around 99.99% of the time (or better) with target betting.

It just takes a while longer in real play.

There is, I can reassure you, no contradiction between my assessment of your prospects when you bail out to comply with spread limits and your chances if you back out of a game to duck a particularly deadly downturn.

Whatever your reason for moving, the numbers are the same: a quick 2-win turnaround is a 10-1 probability, with the odds in your favor.

So staying put through a negative trend that threatens your bankroll makes no sense at all, and trusting your gut is the right thing to do.

Gamblers only get into trouble when their "gut" is allowed to set bet values, and target betting does not permit that. The strategy wins because there is a rule for every eventuality.

Occasional threats are inevitable, but you can take comfort in the fact that in order for a maximum bet to be required, the house edge will have had to balloon to 30% or more, a far cry from the 1-5% that usually applies.

If you had to rely on a 100% correction of an egregious swing in the house's favor, you would probably be out of luck.

But with target betting, just a short offset against the trend that got you into trouble is all it takes to rocket you out of the hole and back into profit.

A glance at any of the thousands of AV charts that track negative expectation in my models confirms that substantive offsets in the player's favor are a reliable feature of the WLP after (and often during) a downturn.

Without a bankroll big enough to keep you afloat through rough waters, you and your money will be out of the game before one of those offsets can happen.

And that is why a wide spread and fat wad, the same weapons that the house wields against you, are essential to long-term success.

You have to be able to think like a casino operator and have full confidence that "the arithmetic" will take good care of you, no matter what.

In theory, a 1.5% house edge means that the house can be sure of keeping $15,000 for every million bucks that goes back and forth in a given game.

In fact, the gambling industry does much better than that.

Casinos win more money and more often than negative expectation says they should because the only house advantage that really matters is that the house has a bigger bankroll than the players do. All of them put together, that is.

If you check the Nevada casino win numbers, dwindling as they may be in a down economy, you will not find a game where the reported win percentage matches standard expectation.

Blackjack, for example, has a house edge of 1-2%, depending on the level of a player's compliance with basic playing strategy.

The win for all of Nevada's blackjack layouts in February 2009 was 11.65% (10.4% for baccarat and 26% for 3-card poker!).

In March of '09, the matching numbers were 11.69%, 10.3% and 26%.

Who says gambling games are "unpredictable"?

And that is really what it all comes down to, isn't it?

I say, and can prove, that win-loss patterns for games of chance are broadly predictable and so can be exploited with the right math-based approach.

My critics argue that casino games are unique in all the universe, able to generate WLPs that, like quicksilver or Tinkerbell, cannot be second-guessed, and woe betide the heretic who tries.

I am going to wrap this up with a spread pattern breakdown of a random sample of series.



It is possible to produce an almost infinite number of these things, but I think just one tells the story well enough.

In actual play, the majority of recovery series turn around rapidly and without incident, paying a modest profit even though most of them have a zero or negative actual value.

When a move is called for (shaded light blue above), the chances of a turnaround remain the same: about 90%.

Once in a while, spread limits will require a series to be suspended a second or third time, or as often as it takes before two consecutive wins deliver EOS.

Overall, the average length of a recovery series is less than six bets.

You know you are going to lose more bets than you win, over time, and that reality must always translate to more money lost than won unless you can win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

Target betting delivers on that promise for tens, even hundreds of thousands of rounds in succession, although sometimes, a sizable chunk of your bankroll will have to be put into play before it can be bolstered by yet another big win.

There is no winning alternative to progressive betting, and as far as I know, target betting is the best method of money management available anywhere.

Steve Wynn, credited as the creator of the modern Las Vegas, said on "60 Minutes" the other night that the only way to beat the house is to be the house, and he needs you to believe that.

Even though he knows better...

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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In the commonsense dictionary, gambling is just another word for losing, and losing is not what target betting is all about.

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Yesterday's e-mail brought a tentative suggestion that maybe a syndicate backing target betting to 1/10th of the recommended bankroll might stand a chance of making a profit.

It might, but it is not something I would be willing to support.

I sympathize with everyone who says that I have arbitrarily chosen a BR value that no one but the highest of high rollers (high in both senses of the word!) would dare to risk.

All I can do is point yet again to mathematical models that demonstrate that the widest possible spread and a BR to match together reduce long-term risk rather than increasing it.

Better yet, an optimum spread/BR combo promises greater profits at a faster pace, paying down an initial investment far more rapidly and building the strength of the bankroll so that threats are much less devastating.

And there will always be threats.

Win-loss patterns are broadly predictable, even if we can never know which way the very next bet is going to go.

And one of the things we can be sure of is that once in a while, we will have to work extra hard for our money.

My critics and I clash all the time over the question of whether or not a player can affect his long-term fate by relying on intuition and experience to apply judicious damage control when conditions get rough.

I am not interested in lectures about independence of trials and probability because I hear what they say and I have no quarrel with them.

A random bettor is just as likely to jump from the frying pan into the fire as he is to land in a safer haven.

Not so the target player, who only needs two consecutive wins to get out of trouble and more often than not will be saved by a single win.

With each fresh loss, the haphazard gambler becomes more likely to be a loser.

Without a plan that adjusts to every possible eventuality, luck is the only winning option, and anyone dumb enough to rely on luck had better be ready to pay a high price.

Both sides of the argument can go blue in the face repeating their conflicting mantras, but target betting at least is supported not just by past outcomes but ongoing tests against rounds as yet unplayed.

Here's my response to yesterday's query, followed by the latest BST set.

Interesting!
I have been posting baccarat-related data on the blog lately.
SPREAD is the critical factor, far more important than total bankroll, although of course the two are related (you can't have one without the other!).
To be more specific, a $1,000,000 bankroll is not in itself a guarantee of success with TA, any more than a $5,000,000 bankroll is sure to win without a PROVEN progressive money management method.
A spread of 1-5,000 ($5 to $25,000) and consistent application of the TA/Target rules, however, is a guarantee, assuming adequate funding.
I don't recommend a bankroll of less than 40xMax but have test data that suggests 20x might be adequate.
I have never posited viability for a $100,000 bankroll! I'll attach some numbers from my baccarat and blackjack data sets so you can see why.
The great frustration inherent in bucking the conventional wisdom is that any test outside of an actual casino environment must assume that a player would have no reaction whatever to a prolonged negative trend.
Sims fail if they are denied that unscientific "assumption of inertia," and so sims have little or nothing to tell us: they simply cannot recreate real play conditions, because they necessarily exclude the human element.
The data set I use has some of the problems associated with RNG-based sims, since each evaluation of minor changes in the strategy's parameters has to be applied to all 400,000-plus outcomes and that would be an impossible task in real time.
What's good about my data is that every outcome is derived from actual play and most are verifiably objective, since the two baccarat sources (80% of all the outcomes) are unconnected with me (they might even be hostile to me, since I have developed a betting method that is vastly superior to either of theirs!).
Anyone considering any form of investment in my method, whether using it in actual play without my involvement or participating in a syndicate like the (one) you propose, should understand that I do not offer success against my (expanding) data set as PROOF of anything.
What we get from applying different versions of the target betting strategy to such a large sample of outcomes is a powerful INDICATION of what works and what doesn't.
My critics often claim that I developed TA by tweaking the rules against a fixed data set until I stumbled on a combination that would beat that sample, and that sample alone.
Given that the strategy has been out in the open on the Internet since 1997 and the data set I am using today post-dates that publication, along with the fact that the TA rules are essentially the same, I believe I have earned the right to ignore the skeptics!
Potential investors are strongly advised to test the strategy rules for themselves against outcomes as yet "un-played" with the help of any of the countless online simulations of casino table games.
I use Ken Smith's blackjack strategy trainer (http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bst/bst.htm) because I know it never repeats the same card between shuffles. I have yet to find a similarly trustworthy baccarat app, but I am sure they are out there.
Properly applied, TA works very well for blackjack (of course!), baccarat, field bets at craps and even money bets at roulette, and I have had some great results against 3-card poker of all things.
What I am saying here is that no one should take my word for anything.
And as for the presentation you suggested, I would hope that the blog would do a good job of convincing a potential investor/winner that target betting the TA way offers a viable, reliable and exciting alternative to losing. This response to your suggestion should also be helpful, and you have my permission to pass it on if it will benefit your new idea.
The potential for TA is huge. But the backing for the strategy has to be real, not ephemeral.
Those who study and then apply the target betting method are always rewarded with confirmation that it is indeed possible to "win more when you win than you lose when you lose." More importantly, they learn that doing so is the only way to overcome the negative bias in casino table games, and flip the house edge into a player edge.
It does not take an Einstein to figure out that if you lose, say, 2% more bets than you win, but your average winning bet is 10% greater than your average losing bet, negative expectation becomes irrelevant and a positive end-of-game result is inevitable.
Blackjack is an easier game to beat than any of the alternatives, and it is not uncommon to see an AWB/ALB value of 130% or more. Given an overall house edge of 1.0% or less, an overall player win is a mathematical certainty.
You will see from the (blog data) that a max of $25,000 and a bankroll of $100,000 can succeed repeatedly. It is entirely possible that in real play, results would be even better than the baccarat and blackjack data sets indicate.
I would, however, be unable to confidently predict long-term success for an initial BR of $100,000.
The mathematical support for a higher BR to back the recommended max can be found in every model that indicates a serious threat. In order for a max bet to be reached in any series, the house edge must have run amok, which it does rarely but reliably. It then becomes inevitable that there will be an opposite win-loss pattern (WLP), or in Wall Street parlance, a "correction." Otherwise, it would not be possible for the overall house edge to average out at known negative expectation levels, which it always does.
The offset is very rarely equal to the downturn that preceded it, but it does not have to be. That's why TA works. And works, and works...
I have to fall back on my 'old faithful' analogy describing an oilfield survey that shows 99.999% of the black gold is at 5,000ft with occasional small pockets at shallower depths. If you keep on drilling 500ft wells, hoping to save money, you might see a little oil now and then. But the drilling costs will always outstrip your profits.
Better to drill one deep well and be done with it - that way, you will be swimming in oil for life!
As you know, games of chance are all about probability. If you know the numbers and have the confidence and resources to back what you know, those games can be consistently beaten. If you keep backing off and fiddling around with the strategy rules, they can't. That's the bottom line.
The thousands of summaries and analyses I have generated over the years are the antithesis of gambling. But that does not bother me one bit, because gambling, as most people define it, is the antithesis of winning. So why gamble?
The question that is unanswered by my control data set is the effect of a player responding to table conditions by suspending play before a recovery, and resuming betting elsewhere. The losses shown in the target betting summaries occurred because the house advantage reached and then exceeded 30% vs. the negative expectation of <1.0% for blackjack and <1.4% for baccarat.
Would you stay in your seat when the house has streaked that far ahead of you in a given series? Of course not!
And it would not just be a question of intuition, because it simply is not possible in real play to bet from $5 to $25,000 in one place (assuming you were crazy enough to want to!).
A player would have to back away from a prolonged recovery according to the dictates of common sense: perhaps $5-$200 would be an acceptable spread at the bottom level, but thereafter, it would be best to stick to a 1-5 spread in any one location. That tactic alone would make losses like those we see in the models far less likely.
As always, the math supports what I am telling you. Target betting needs just two consecutive wins to turn a recovery series around, and in most (65%+) cases, a single win will do. WLPs without an early dual win are a 1 in 10 rarity, which means that every time a strategy player walks away from a potential threat, the odds are 10-1 in his favor that he will walk into a favorable pattern.
Last year, a cable channel ran a series called "Man Against Las Vegas" in which a disorganized, erratic egomaniac tried to recover claimed prior losses of $3,000,000 with a $1,000,000 bankroll and a TV camera crew at his elbow. It made me spit nails! I didn't watch the show for fear of fatal apoplexy, but I read all about it online and gnashed my teeth vicariously.
The MALV dingbat lost a big chunk of his money, as he deserved to, and the series was not renewed because his failure was an embarrassment to all concerned.
With TA/Target he would have cleaned up, dammit.



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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Gaming regulations in many states favor casinos over players in a big way. So we know whose side the politicians are on!

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It's beyond me how there can be any argument about the critical role spread limits play in casino games of chance. So I am especially baffled by new "gaming" rules in Florida and regulations already in place in other states.

Florida is working on new laws that will permit casinos operated by the Seminoles to offer a full range of table games, but there is concern that blackjack betting should be limited in the $5-$25 range to protect patrons from excessive losses.

Similar rules are already in place elsewhere: Colorado, for instance, limits blackjack bets to $5 a hand, opting for "player protection" rather than boost state gambling revenues by allowing people to bet whatever they want.

This is madness!

Tight spreads and table limits at kindergarten levels may slow down the rate at which some players lose, but the real winners are the casinos.

It is a mathematical fact that the tighter your spread (most people do not dare venture beyond 1-10 and 1-5 is about average) the more certain it is that your win-loss pattern will track the known negative expectation for the game.

I ran some tests against the 80,000 BST blackjack outcomes in my models and did the same for the 114,000 or so rounds of baccarat supplied by Lorenzo Rodriquez, and there were no surprises for me.

But the results provide a useful illustration of what players are up against when they try to beat the odds with a shoestring budget.

First, a couple of summaries:



The assumption that most people make is that the wider you spread, the more you will bet and the more likely you are to lose.

Not so.

Both the spread summaries show that my recommended spread range (1-5,000) requires less action than a 1-250 spread at baccarat and a 1-100 spread at blackjack.

The BST blackjack screen shots have been telling us that since the BST tests began more than 80,000 rounds ago, but a little extra confirmation never hurts.

Sure, if you spread 1-50 or less, you will churn less money than you would at 1-5,000. But you will also lose your bankroll, for certain.

It is an absolute fact that as soon as you hit your maximum bet limit, whether it is self-imposed or a house restriction, you lose your "wiggle room" and are instead totally at the mercy of the house edge from that point on.

So it follows that the higher your max, the better off you are. Only a protracted negative pattern will push you to your limit, if it is high enough. And the longer it takes you to get there, the more likely it is that the "down trend" that got you into trouble will be at least partially offset.

Skeptics love to talk about independence of trials and that old cliche, the Gambler's Fallacy and use them to "prove" that a wild swing in the house's favor may never be counter-balanced.

This is prime mythematics!

Given a 1-5,000 spread, the house edge in a series will have to climb well into double figures percentage wise before the dreaded "green ceiling" will cap bets at the top limit. That's nice for the house, for sure, but it can't go on.

The primary engine of a successful betting strategy, assuming discipline and consistence, is having sufficient chips to ride out an egregious house spike.

Most losers take too little cash to the table, and a prolonged swing against them will wipe them out.

Money cannot buy the pot, but an adequate bankroll combined with an effective progressive betting method will make the house advantage irrelevant time and again.

Here's a dramatic illustration of how tight spreads guarantee long-term losses while wide spreads do exactly the opposite.

The chart combo below applies to a baccarat sample selected at random from the 16 blocks in the "Rodriguez Collection" of verifiable rounds and shoes collected by Zumma Publishing.

Baccarat, for those who don't know it already, is a tougher game to beat than blackjack because it lacks double-downs and splits and 50% "bonuses" for naturals. It's also a yawwwwwwnnn, in my opinion, but I know there are people out there who play nothing else.


I can hear my critics screaming that no one could possibly afford the level of spread that I recommend.

The summaries to the left of each green chart show the action for each spread, along with the average bet value and the hourly win, based upon one shoe per hour (about 75 rounds).

You will see that action (or risk) increases with each step, levels off, and then drops even as the size of the maximum bet heads ever skyward.

The earlier summary above contains another critical column of information - the number of bets of $1,000 or more required at each spread level.

In both data sets, the $5-$25,000 spread range required by far the smallest number of bets of $1,000 or more of any of the ranges in which a $1,000 bet was actually permitted.

That's important.

Get smart. Spread tight and you will lose. Spread wide and you won't.

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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