These pictures tell 201,000 stories: baccarat bets that target betting beat, creating the new gambling term un-negative expectation

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First of all, how about suspending disbelief for once and accepting my word that I had nothing whatever to do with the compilation or order of the outcomes summarized below (more than two years of play for a full time gambler!).

I have said in some of the related material that Lee Jones sent me the data as a set from two "systems tester" books put out by Zumma Publishing. Today I turned up some more archival material that tells me my memory played me false: the Jones data were packaged as "real-play shoes from casinos around the world."

What matters is that I did not originate the data set, and it can be verified by contacting Mr. Jones directly - he has his own proprietary method for winning at baccarat which I know nothing about other than that, unlike silly me, he's selling it rather than giving it away!

Another friendly statistician, Lorenzo Rodriguez, sent me the Zumma Publishing data, and I will post the results from his material next time. Years ago, I keyed in all the Zumma outcomes myself, then lost them in one of too many computer crashes (thanks a lot, Gateway).

I will let the screen shot panels speak for themselves...

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There is an awful lot of material here, too much for most people to want to study, and a powerful turn-off for those looking for an easy way to get rich in a casino without risking real money.

That's a good thing. In the 30-plus years I have spent on this challenge, I have learned that consistent winning does not come easy, and that whoever first said that it takes money to make money (it wasn't King Midas, that I know - he had it way too soft) was, er, right on the money.

I also learned that anyone who says "progressive betting can't work" is either a liar or an idiot. Think about it! Losing is by its nature (because there are always more losses than wins for even the smartest player in the long run) a progressive process.

When you are, say, five bets behind the house, you will not recover prior losses by betting the same amount or less unless your luck flips and at some point the ratio of losses to wins reverses.

Catching up on a losses-to-wins basis is, at best, unlikely and the probability is that you will continue to lose more often than you win as you struggle to recover.

So, betting less or betting the same won't save you. Betting more might do the trick, but not if you do it randomly, because you're up against the rule that says any amount bet against a negative expectation must eventually have a negative result.

All that's left, then, is money management and its objective to minimize losses and maximize wins so that the deficit between the number of wins and the number of losses overall does not translate to money down the drain.

I have in previous posts spent some time on the Martingale or double-up method, and dismissed it solely on the grounds that casinos will not permit its use for long.

It serves primarily as an example of what can be achieved by the disciplined application of a rule or set of rules. Mythematicians deride it because of the certainty that however long the odds, at some point it will encounter a losing streak long enough to push the next bet above the table limit.

In fact, that's not a problem for a player with balls and a bankroll to match: table limits are progressive, too, and you just have to keep moving within escalating limits until you hit that critical single win!

Most of the time, a Martingale will keep raking in profits with a bet ceiling of $5,000 and a variation on the standard double-up: 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000, 2500, 5000 and favorable odds of better than 1,000-to-1.

House-trained academics tell us that 10 losses in a row does not mean 10 wins in a row is "more likely" or that the number of wins will ever catch up with the number of losses. But because of the gentle influence of the house edge, which is always a very small fraction of 100%, the longer you play, the more likely it is that your negative and positive numbers will come substantially closer to balancing out.

When a positive trend arrives, you will be betting your maximum, which you did not reach until you were nine bets behind. You always want your average win value to exceed your average loss value by a percentage that is greater than the house edge for the series and this is one way to do it.

I say again, you will have to keep moving because no casino will let you bet a Martingale in one location for long. And if pit staff pick you out as a double-up punter even after you have tried to cover your tracks, they will steer you towards the nearest exit as quickly as possible.

Target betting is a better way to win.

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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You may be playing blackjack, baccarat, craps or roulette. But for the house, disinformation is the name of the game.

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The way the "gambling experience" is packaged in America's casinos today, the image is that betting (and losing) is a fun form of recreation made even more pleasurable by luxury suites, five-star restaurants, and non-gambling activities suitable for all the family.

It's not to be taken seriously, for sure. Lose only what you can afford, play and bet the way the casino expects you to, and you will be treated as a responsible adult who is in control of all that happens on an exciting, rejuvenating getaway to (wherever).

Of course, you are not really in control at all. Step out of line by just an inch or two, and you are on your way to becoming an entry in the industry's famous Black Book as a player who has the gall, the unbridled temerity, to try to win.

I am not talking about the Nevada Black Book, which like the black box always sought after a plane crash, is not black at all (see the link above) but the database each casino maintains and fills with personal information and facial recognition parameters about people who are bad for business.

Most of them are cheats and swindlers, but many are card counters and other players who are honest sticklers for good conduct and fair play but have learned enough about table games to be able to beat the odds time and time again.

The disinformation campaign sponsored by the casino business maintains that the house advantage is as powerful as the law of gravity, exerting a gentle but firm pull on all the chips in play until eventually they come home to the dealer's tray.

The message is that you can't beat house games in the end, but trying is so much fun and perhaps once in a great while you will get lucky, take home more money than you started with, then bring it back to lose it the way the natural order of things has ordained.

Mythematicians will tell you that of all the silly methods devised to upset gambling's laws, progressive betting is the silliest.

What is truly silly is that most people believe it to be true.

In fact, progressive betting is the only way to win consistently, and the casinos have known that since the dawn of betting.

"Consistently" is the key word here. It is possible to win, and it happens to thousands of people every day. But you have to get lucky to do it, assuming you don't have a plan. And as everyone knows, luck never lasts.

Mythemaniacs reserve their most acid scorn for a method known as double-up or the Small Martingale: double your bet after every loss until a win recovers all prior losses plus one unit, then start over.

The method works most of the time, thriving on the simple fact that losing is a progressive process, and so doubling after a loss keeps precise pace with it until a single win interrupts the losing streak.

This blog contains charts and screen shots relating to hundreds of thousands of real-play outcomes along with confirmation that target betting beats them all.

Ironically, so does double-up!

But the big problem with the Martingale is not that it does not work, or that it demands bets that are too high. The problem is that casinos won't let anyone play it.

If you doubt it, try it.

You will win a few series, and then the house's Martingale Machine will move into action.

While drunks and other fools lose money all around you without a comforting word from anyone on the casino's pit roster, you will be singled out for especially solicitous attention.

You will be politely advised that doubling up is a really bad idea, sure to eventually rob you of your bankroll.

Do you seriously imagine that the casino staff is concerned for the safety of your bankroll? It's the house's they are worried about!

Other players are quite likely to reinforce the message. After all, how smart can it be to bet hundreds or thousands of dollars just to win $5, or the value of your opening bet?

Actually, when you place a big fat bet several rounds into a losing streak, you are not aiming to win $5. Your objective is to recover all the bets you lost, plus a profit.

The size of the surplus doesn't matter. What counts is that in a single bet, you are "out of the hole" and ready for another contest against the seemingly all-powerful but actually very vulnerable house edge.

Ah, say the experts, you will be in big trouble soon enough because eventually you will lose so many bets in a row that you will bump up against the table limit. After that, a win will not cover all your past losses and you, silly fool, will be stuck in the hole forever...and it serves you right.

As it happens, x2 bettors are at work in busy casinos all the time. They avoid attention by betting, at most, three losing wagers at any one layout before moving on in search of that inevitable single win.

And if they do fall foul of any one table's bet limit, no problem - they take their money to a layout where their next wager is allowed, knowing that moving can have no negative impact on their chances of eventual success.

They especially like blackjack and field bets at craps, because there's an outside chance that the win they need will turn out to be a natural, or a multiple pay-off for dice roll of 2 or 12. That's when the gravy really flows!

More and more, casinos are combating Martingalers by barring entry to blackjack tables between shuffles: a nuisance, but not a fatal blow.

The campaign to keep as many punters as possible in ignorance of the true math of gambling is critical to the casino industry's bottom line.

The house makes a lot less money (usually none at all) from players who know the numbers and play them with precision. Those people are a threat to the whole house of cards, and should be thought of as cheats.

In Nevada, a casino can "86" a player for any reason it sees fit. In New Jersey, winning is not an allowable reason for revoking betting privileges. In the hundreds of casinos in between, there is little or no regulation, but you can be sure that if you make a habit of winning "too often" you will feel some serious heat wherever you are.

That's why it is important for a strategy player to maintain a low profile, be at all times courteous and friendly to pit personnel and other punters, and learn how to camouflage what he is doing.

Here's a summary of target betting's performance against 201,000 baccarat outcomes.

It mirrors its wins against tens of thousands of rounds played against Ken Smith's BST blackjack application.

More detail will follow, but you should know that I did not generate these outcomes or have any control over them. The data set was provided by Lee Jones, a baccarat systems promoter who assured me they were extracted from two bet-by-bet books of "real shoes" compiled by Zumma Publishing.

All that matters is that I did not alter or massage the data in any way.

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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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When the dealer keeps beating your 19+ hands, should you sit still and suck it up, or get the hell out of there?

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Your average academic mythemaniac has a simple answer: Save on shoe leather and stay where you are, because running away can't affect the long-term outcome.

There may be a grain of sad truth in that if you are a blackjack player who bets flat or within a very tight spread (1-5 is as tight as the proverbial duck's bum and many punters think they are being conservative and sensible if they narrow their spread still further).

The reality is that while paired wins are a constant, predictable feature of any house game's win/loss pattern (WLP), trends do occur that lock them out for a while.

Bailing out of the current game and taking your NB and LTD numbers elsewhere can never guarantee an improved WLP and the only way to find out if you made the right decision is to slide a substitute player into the seat you vacated and have him track the hands that came out of the shoe after you left.

All you can ever know for certain is that every deadly negative trend begins with a threatening pattern that gets steadily worse, and to avoid a potential (but not certain) disaster, you must take evasive action before you go broke.

Strategy debunkers love to use runaway sims to "prove" that there's no way to overcome the house advantage at casino table games, and the same tool demonstrates conclusively that paired wins occur about as often as paired losses.

When they stop happening, it is smart to back off and go hunting for a more comfortable WLP, even if the only certain benefit is to your peace of mind...your morale, if you like.

No one should ever gamble if they feel threatened or uncomfortable for any reason, so never hesitate to interrupt play whenever the mood strikes you, and resume it elsewhere when you're ready.

Here's the log from the last BST session in Batch #14.

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If what you see here had occurred in the course of output from a runaway sim, the essential assumption would be that the "player" (meaning, in that context, the method) would keep on betting wildly without a care in the world, until the negative pattern ended or his money ran out.

In real life, human beans don't like being kicked in the head or stomped on with heavy boots or being robbed at (metaphorical) gunpoint, let alone all at the same time.

They take defensive action.

The most effective response to a house spike is to simply walk away, knowing that interrupting play for a while can never hurt the long-term outcome, which for the target bettor is yet another session win.

I have heard from some players who prefer to pull back to fixed minimum bets for a while, especially when they are in a busy casino on a wild weekend night and hate to give up their seat. I guess it can't hurt to take a breather by treading water when the pressure's on, and the effects of such a move (or non-move!) are hard to model accurately.

What matters is that no one with blood in his veins plays the way runaway sims require them to. It would, at best, be contrary to human nature.

Just remember the DBO rule: Don't. Bend. Over.

Above all, stay cool and calm and don't take a losing streak personally. It will end. And then, as always, you will come out ahead.

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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Sometimes, winning isn't easy, but even the house with its "invincible" advantage has to take some heavy hits before it gets ahead.

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I just wrapped up the latest batch of blackjack bets against BST and as expected, the money machine cranked up my virtual bankroll a few more notches.

I keep on doing this because the assault from mythemaniacs defending the house's ordained right to win usually comes down to the warning that while any betting method can win for a while, the other shoe must drop eventually.

The final session before a new batch of around 8,000 hands gets under way was about as mean and nasty as they get, and in real play I would have bailed out several times and gone in search of relief elsewhere. The gross AV was -34, and because for once double-downs and splits did not soften the blow, the net AV was even worse (-36).

What matters is that when the $1,000 table limit was swept away, target betting flipped a 14.8% overall house edge into a comfortable +3.42% "player advantage."

My critics (specifically those frustrated by the steady wins even they record when they give target betting a try) sometimes resort to petulant complaints about the size of the bets that the method occasionally requires.

So let's remember that even casinos will now and then find themselves a very long way behind, victims of a high-roller's temporary winning streak, before The Math exerts its pull, the player's luck flees, and all the chips in play go home to the dealer's tray.

And please, don't imagine there is a contradiction here. Any player who bets flat amounts or at random will lose in the end, because the longer he plays, the more likely it becomes that lost bets will outnumber winning ones.

That is not a problem for target betting, which neuters negative expectation by winning more when it wins than it loses when it loses.

Relevant screen shots are below, but I will sum up their story before we get to them.

In spite of some seriously challenging BST sessions, the overall NET house edge for batch #14 (8,020 rounds) in the current trial was a relatively soft 0.17%. The GROSS actual value (AV) was -365/8020 or a much nastier NE of 4.55%. Ouch!

Target betting delivered a final win of +5.6% and was able to do that because the average win value exceeded the average loss value by 23% (485/395).

If BST's $1,000 table limit had applied, the final outcome would have been a LOSS of $111,000 on action of $6.1m (-1.82%).

Instead, target betting delivered a win of $168,000 on action of $3m (+5.6%).

Note the effect of table limits here. They would have served their purpose well, that purpose being to limit a player's ability to recover prior losses in fewer bets than it took him to get into trouble.

So although target betting seems to demand greater risk then so-called conservative betting, it routinely (as in this case) results in reduced exposure because recoveries are faster and action can be cut in half (as here).

The effect is also scary when a typical player-imposed limit is applied.

Most punters panic at the prospect of spreading wider than 1-5, but if a more aggressive 1-10 is put into effect against "BST Batch #14" the end result is a predictable loss (-$1,048 after action of $387,000 is -0.36%, which is less than negative expectation but far from a happy ending).

A critical consequence of the 1-10 spread limit is that 95% of the 8,020 bets in the session would have been at the max, to no avail.

So it follows that the narrower or tighter a player's betting spread, whether it's self-imposed because of an inadequate bankroll or enforced by a table limit that cannot be evaded, the more certain an overall loss becomes.

As the chart below confirms, dropping from 1-10 to 1-5 reduces the action and the overall loss but dies not change the fact that the player is in the hole for most of the 8,020 rounds.

And instead of an average EOS rate of six rounds or less, the number jumps to 34+.

It just doesn't make sense to play at all if you can't afford to win.

By that I mean that bellying up to the table with an inadequate bankroll that forces you to bet a tight spread is a very bad idea.

Bet wide, back your play with big bets when you have to, and you will beat the house every time.

And there's really nothing outrageous or amazing about this idea - it's what casinos have to do whenever a high roller gets lucky for a while and takes a million or two home with him. The house knows that eventually, he will bring it all back, lose it, and pay a hefty penalty for being a bad boy.

With turnaround betting, losses are just short-term loans to the house. Without it, the reverse is true: winnings are money you get to carry around for a while until that magnetic force known as the house edge sucks it back into the casino's coffers.

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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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Gross HA and net HA. Say what? It's what makes blackjack the best table game in the house.

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The above summary chart has an important story to tell, and I think you are going to like it.

Blackjack is unique among casino table games in that decisions the player makes after the hand has been dealt can make the difference between winning and losing.

Devotees of pai-gow poker (which has a 5.0% house edge and should be seriously considered only if you have money to burn) like to pretend that there is a smart way and a dumb way to play the game, but in fact, very little brain is required in the process.

What you see above confirms the wisdom of learning "The Book" of blackjack inside out and upside down to ensure optimal use of double/split opportunities.

I said in an earlier post that recovered or completed series in target betting split pretty much evenly between those that had more wins than losses, those that had an equal number of wins and losses, and those that had more losses than wins.

Statistically, that idea isn't rocket science, and when hands are treated as either wins or losses regardless of whether the final outcome is a multiple of the original bet because of doubles/splits or added revenue from a natural, you end up with marginally more loss-heavy series as in the column on the far right above.

Treating hands just as losses or wins makes a big difference: the GROSS AV from -1,-1,-1,-1,+2,+3 indicating a successful double-down, then a winning split+double is -2; the NET AV is +1.

I use the term "loss-heavy" because thanks to target betting, they are not losing series, in spite of the fact that more bets were lost than won.

As you can see, educated and experienced application of doubles and splits switches the bias from the house's favor to the players, and it does it consistently throughout more than 60,000 rounds of blackjack in the current trial.

Given a house edge at blackjack of about 1.0%, the odds of winning any given round are 49.5-50.5 AGAINST, but the number is complicated by the fact that roughly 20% more doubles/splits will win than will lose, hence the clear player advantage inherent in those opportunities.

My mythemaniac critics will counter that the quoted or known negative expectation (NE) for the game includes not just doubles/splits but extra money from naturals too. True or not, that's an irrelevance at the moment when you pull 6,6 against a 6, split them, catch a 5 on each, and double down twice in the hope of drawing two 10s.

At that point, you have 4x your original bet on the table. Are the odds still against you? You tell me! You will be too wound up sweating an extra fat bet to think about anything until the dealer busts.

(My best double/split experience was at Caesars Tahoe when I had 5x out against the dealer's 5 at a $100 table and he turned out to have another 5 under; I had four 20s and a 19; the dealer drew an 8. I don't remember my worst-case scenario, but isn't that always how it goes?).

There will always be people who will never believe anything I say and dismiss whatever supporting data I produce, but I suspect a good proportion of the critics who "flamed" me over the years did so from office desks inside casinos.

Here's another summary they won't believe (or will say they don't):-

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My preferred spreadsheet program (vastly superior to Excel in almost every way) makes me split BST blackjack outcomes into chunks of around 8,000 per "session" and in the current trial, I'm now on #14.

As you can see, the GROSS AV is theoretically deadly at 5.4% and even the NET AV, at 0.7%, calls for an overall loss to date of $228,000 (action x -0.73%). Instead, target betting delivered a win of $1.58 million. There were some big bets along the way, including a 4x d/s on an original bet of $25,000, but target betting was never intended as a get-rich-quick guarantee for penny-pinched punters!

What matters is that the strategy ended up with a notional win worth more than 5.0% of its total action.

And a lot of it was thanks to well-timed and by the book application of splits and doubledowns.

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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Would a car crash at full throttle with the brakes disabled and no one behind the wheel? Will you lose at house games if you play like an idiot?

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The central plank in the mythematics of gambling is that a high-speed computer simulation of output from a random game of chance is exactly the same as the real thing, and so a betting method that can't beat a "sim" will fail in real play.

It is a great argument, swallowed whole by millions and bolstered by the implication that anyone who challenges simulated outcomes must be trying to hide fraudulence or foolishness, or both.

Sims are, of course, wonderful things, enabling mythematicians to bury any threat to the house advantage under a billion bets in the blink of an eye. That makes them far more convenient than the time-consuming task of testing a betting method in real time (a billion bets at, say, 100,000 rounds a year would take 10,000 years to play out!).

Trouble is, sims eliminate all the primary elements of games of chance: cards, dice, tables, wheels, real time, and, most important of all, people.

Imagine an automobile safety test that required a new car to survive being pushed at full throttle down a winding mountain road with the brakes and gas pedal disabled and no one behind the wheel. It would crash and burn, for sure. And the "safety test" would be unfair and utterly meaningless.

So it is with sims.

If all gamblers were robots who sat still and sucked up whatever the dealer, the dice or the wheel threw at them, betting flat or random sums without a thought of self-preservation until their money ran dry, runaway sims might accurately mimic their behavior.

But not all players are fools.

Many actually recognize that tables and shoes grow hot and cold and that prolonged negative trends can kill them, and they respond to playing conditions accordingly.

The mythematicians say that damage control (most simply defined as quitting a game and resuming play elsewhere) is ultimately irrelevant because the probability of a negative trend continuing in a new location precisely matches the probability that it will end if the player stays put.

But if you just glance at any sizable sample of outcomes from actual play, including the logs published in this blog, you will quickly see that prolonged negative trends are in truth not the norm in casino table games with a house edge that does not equate to player suicide.

My pencil logs are from a blackjack "sim" that makes random use of actual cards in an order that might occur in a real 8-deck shoe. In other words, once eight Kings of Hearts have been dealt, that card cannot reappear until after the next shuffle.

In blackjack, the draw choices a player makes can affect the outcome of the hand, and the game is unique in that regard (Pai-Gow Poker doesn't come close, and in baccarat, the player has no influence on the order in which cards are arrayed after they come out of the shoe).

In all casino table games, including blackjack, the only player choice that really matters is the size of the bet he makes before the next round.

Sims may have some small relevance to the expectation of gamblers who bet narrow spreads randomly, or fixed amounts without regard to what is left of their bankroll. But for alert, smart players who are not brain dead, they are completely meaningless.

Would you sit down at a table in a casino and place bets on fantasy cards dealt, dice thrown or wheels spun by a computer simulation?

If you are a slot player, you just might. And like a slot player, you would expect to lose and perhaps even consider it your duty.

Otherwise, I doubt it. I know I wouldn't. If the hands coming at me don't collectively meet certain criteria, I'll back away from a table and take my NB and LTD values somewhere else, and to hell with the cost of shoe leather.

Here's the latest BST session, another big win for target betting against (for a while) a truly nasty run of cards. If you want to at least partially imitate conditions in a multi-table casino, you can load Ken Smith's handy little app in as many browser tabs as your system will permit, and hop between them whenever the mood strikes you.

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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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Waiting for the other shoe to drop could take a lifetime (and it may never happen at all!)

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The assumption that mythematicians like to cling on to and batter us about the head with is that if you are certain to lose more bets than you win in the long run then you must also be doomed to lose more money than you win.

They don't care that models and data summaries covering millions of outcomes with a clear overall house edge include countless thousands of profitable series that consisted of more losses than wins.

They just keep chanting that the sample, however large, was "not representative" and warn that at some point, the sum total of all losses must exceed the sum total of all wins. So, beware, insolent peasants, and be ready to pay your dues.

Here's the latest BST log:

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It's true that from time to time, a win-loss pattern will set in that has a succession of isolated wins (wins immediately followed by one or more losses). And if the PB value is outside of your MSL ("do over") range, two wins separated by one loss will not save the day before the cavalry rides over the hill in the form of "twins" (two wins in succession!).

The horrors of long stretches in which the NB keeps jumping skyward with each failed EOS bet diminish dramatically as your confidence grows. But it never hurts to keep in mind that you are playing a game in which the odds are almost always against you.

As I explained in the summary, table limits usually extend the battle to climb out of the hole because without wiggle room in your bet values, the green ceiling forces you to keep betting the max until the WLP switches to a more positive trend.

But that assumes you do not have the option to back away from the layout that has put you in the hole, and resume play at a location where you can continue to strictly follow the target betting rules.

Here are the target betting bets applied by the spreadsheet model to the outcomes in the pencil log shown above. The final totals differ from the numbers at the bottom of the log because the recommended responses to dealer naturals and dealer 21s are not applied. I'll fix that at some point, but my purpose here is to keep on demonstrating that more lost bets does not translate to more lost dough!


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The blocks of numbers in the spreadsheet line up with the checks and crosses etc. in the log, so if you print out the three images, it should be fairly easy to match them up.

As always, there were numerous turnarounds that delivered a profit from a negative situation, and overall, the house edge was almost 2.0% gross, confirming that more hands went south than north, so to speak.

The NET AV was +2.79%, demonstrating once again that properly-applied doubles/splits really do deliver a player advantage. We already knew that a 3-2 pay-off is better for the bottom line than a 1-1 pay-off!

Real math (as opposed to mythematics) is reassuringly predictable when it comes to data from games of chance. An analysis of recovered series will invariably show that one third contained fewer wins than losses, one third had an equal number of wins and losses, and one third had fewer losses than wins. Surprise!

The bigger the sample, the more precise the distribution becomes. This set (the outcomes from 090309) made a liar out of me, temporarily, with 45 positive series, 18 negatives, and 21 break-evens, but that's not the norm. The current trial sample (all bets against Ken Smith's BST app) are also out of whack (547/369/315) but the distribution will settle down eventually!

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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Mixed messages: The mythematicians say there's no way to win, while casino ads say, "Come! Play! Win! And isn't it great that losing is such fun!?"

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I aim to try to keep future posts shorter and let new charts and screen shots speak for themselves.

My target betting material repeats a win rate estimate of 99.992% for the TA/T rules, suggesting favorable odds of better than 10,000 to 1.

This is confirmed by the current on-going blackjack trial, which shows TA/T without a "crash and burn" loss in 12,318 series or about 69,000 bets.

My friends the mythematicians like to say that any sample of outcomes that shows the house edge being soundly thrashed is by definition non-representative, and that either fraud was involved or the method that prevailed will be ruined by the next batch of outcomes of similar size.

This back-and-forth has been going on for years, and will probably never end.

Just hold on to the thought that the casinos need players to believe that only luck can make them winners, and so the fate of their bankroll is out of their control.

Poppycock! Know your game, learn the rules of target betting and (in blackjack) play strictly by the book, and the house advantage will become an irrelevance.

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An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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The "no frills" approach to target betting is a consistent winner. But all those bells and whistles help boost the bottom line.

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The idea that it should be possible to win more from fewer winning bets than you lose in a greater number of losing bets first occurred to me in 1978, and the following year I bought my first computer.

The new system was a Xerox 820 CP/M contraption with a trailblazing 64kb of RAM, no hard drive, and twin floppies with a combined storage capacity of less than 100kb.

The whole kit and caboodle, including a daisy-wheel printer only a little smaller and lighter than the family car, set me back $13,000 and was intended primarily as a word processor because words were the source of my living back then.

I was intrigued, though, by the prospect that the Supercalc spreadsheet program that was bundled with the system might help me speed up the process of testing my ideas for betting at blackjack.

As it turned out, it took around another ten years for computers and spreadsheets to grow powerful enough to be of much use to me as a betting aid, and quite a bit longer for me to become proficient enough to properly employ all that theoretical muscle.

By then, I had a vast backlog of questions that needed answering, and boxes of notebooks packed with real-time play logs that looked about the same as the ones you will find in this blog.

All the logs had to be keyed into my third or fourth new system (an early Gateway, as I recall) and that alone was a monumental task.

I had learned early on not to trust random output from a computer and to stick faithfully to actual game records.

The problem with "sims" is not just that they tend to recycle huge chunks of output, delivering blocks of outcomes in the same order over and over again, but that use of them requires an assumption that simply cannot apply to "real play."

Mythematicians love sims to bits because in just a few minutes, they will "prove" that no betting strategy can ever hope to beat the house advantage in the long run, and it is very important to the economic health of the gambling industry that players everywhere believe that to be true.

But sims depend on the daft presumption that a player who is losing his shirt in a prolonged downturn will sit still and suck it up until his money runs out, at which point he will slink away from the game and start saving his pennies so he can lose another shirt another day.

If the same logic were to be applied to automobile safety tests, the rules would requite that a car survive being sent at full throttle down a winding mountain road with no one behind the wheel and the brake and gas pedals disabled. Come on!

Anyone who has ever gambled in a casino for more than an hour or two knows the value of taking a break when a prolonged losing streak sets in, and listening to a combination of experience and gut feelings that signal when a change of scene is needed.

This isn't hocus-pocus or silly superstition, it's just common sense (something gamblers are meant to be lacking, it's true).

I am asked from time to time why I use QuattroPro for most of my spreadsheet work, instead of following the herd and relying on Excel. Simple answer: It's a better program, just as WordPerfect is still a better word processing program by far than Microsoft Word.

For one thing, Excel limits users to nine conditionals in any one formula. QPro allows as many as can be squeezed into 1024 characters, and that's a lot.

The spreadsheet platform is perfect for betting analysis. It enables different rules or conditionals to be applied to the same set of outcomes so that the long term effects of a specific method can be measured at least to a degree.

Of course, no one set of outcomes from a truly random source such as real play can ever be exactly like any other (a reality that does not apply to RNG-based sims that constantly recycle old data). But large data sets do not differ that much in terms of win-loss patterns, and certain assumptions can be made.

For example, isolated wins and losses are about twice as frequent as paired wins and losses, which are in turn about twice as frequent as triples, and so on. If the house edge for a given game is known ahead of time (and you should not be playing it if it isn't!) it is safe to predict that the larger the sample of outcomes, the closer the actual value (AV) of the sample will match negative expectation (the house advantage).

The "gamblers fallacy" that a very large number of losses increase the probability that a given bet will be a winner deserves its name, because it is nonsense. But study of any representative sample of outcomes (more than 100) will confirm that very large swings in one direction will be to some degree offset by swings in the opposite direction.

To me, the ideal losing streak is one where the NB value is low (surprise!) because I am happy to watch 15 $10 bets in a row go south knowing that sometime soon, there will be a positive swing that will recover all my losses and give my bankroll a handy boost.

Anyone who doubts the certainty of swings and offsets is welcome to e-mail me and request an Excel file that will prove the truth with every tap of the recalc button! Wins of course cannot be predicted on a bet by bet basis (it wouldn't be gambling if they could) but we can be confident that over the long haul, there will be about as many wins as losses, less the prevailing house edge.

The chart at the top of this post serves to illustrate the effects of specific "tweaks" in the betting strategy rules.

Look to the right of the bold labels and then at the green numbers along the center of the chart. You will see that against the current set of outcomes (my blackjack trials never end!) a bare-bones version of TA/T with only the after-a-win LTD+ bet applied managed to overcome a gross house edge of 4.6% and an expected LOSS of $195,000 to deliver an overall profit of $72,000 (+1.7% of action).

The numbers head north as more and more target betting "switches" are flipped on, and they are as follows:-

OLx is the response to an opening loss in a new series (1 means follow it with a bet of equal value, 2 means x2 and so on.
2Lx is the response if the second bet loses and
3Lx shows the 3rd loss response, if any.
WPx is the PB multiple after an opening win in a new series, and any subsequent wins until the streak ends with a loss. The value is usually 2, but 1.5 also works well and I will add it to future summaries.
WP max is the maximum amount NB can be in relationship to PB (keep redoubling until PB is $200, then add $100 after each additional win.
Tgt is the profit you aim for each time an EOS opportunity comes along. I recommend a minimum of $25 or 5u.
Min is the value of the opening bet, $5 in most trials but $5 tables are becoming increasingly hard to find, at least in Nevada.
Max is the self-imposed maximum bet for these trials. A target bettor won't reach this stratosphere for quite a while, but this method is not about making easy money with minimal risk (let's face it, that simply is not possible in the long run). $5,000 to $15,000 table limits are commonplace in Nevada these days, even in rinky-dink Stateline, and high-roller rooms or salles privees offer much bigger limits.
Bust Crash-and-burn limit. No one should imagine that a million bucks in the bankroll is a guarantee against losing. It's spread that makes the difference, not how much you can afford to lose.
MSL to MSL means mid-series loss, and it's a little wrinkle that ought to make for riskier betting, you might think, but doesn't. It's basically a "do over" bet when a hoped-for EOS wager fails. Here, a second EOS bet follows a loss if PB is $1,000 or less. Above that amount, you have to wait longer for another shot at the brass ring!
WP to is the PB value at which loss recovery attempts are abandoned when an opening winning streak ends. By the time you lose a $500 bet, you will be at least $1,090 ahead on the series and "eating" the loss will drop you back to a profit of $590 from a string of nine bets (8 wins and 1 loss). Not bad. When the WP max is reached, a loss is followed by a minimum bet and the start of a new series.
Push+ is the maximum amount by which NB can exceed PB after a push. Note that in the chart, introducing the after-push rule boosts the win by about 10% but also inevitably cracks up the overall action.
Pushx is usually 2, meaning that after a push NB=PBx2 to a maximum of PB+$100.

You will see two different AV (actual value) or HA (house advantage) numbers in all blackjack trials, so I will explain why again. The GROSS value summarizes the number of overall wins less the overall loss total, counting naturals and multiples of the original bet as single wins and losses.

The NET value tallies the absolute value of each outcome (-2, +1.5 and so on).

So for example, the GROSS value of -2,-10,-5,+4.5,+15 is -1 and the NET value is +2.5. In the summary above, the NET value matches expectation for blackjack much more closely than the GROSS number. The discrepancy exists because 3-2 payoffs for naturals exceed the original bet value (naturally!) and double/split opportunities in blackjack give about a 20% edge to the player, assuming he plays "by the book."

I'll sign off with the latest BST log:-


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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.
_

There's mathematics, and then there's mythematics (the "proven" notion that casino games of chance are ultimately unbeatable!).

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The only thing that is demonstrable about the (hopefully) random win-loss patterns derived from house-biased games is that a player who bets flat amounts or bets randomly is certain to lose in the end.

It's a simple enough truth, although some academics have felt the need to produce formulae that run to several pages to demonstrate that if you lose more bets than you win, then you must also lose more money than you win.

And if it is inevitable that losses must always exceed wins, the question that has to be answered is, What's the point of playing?

The lure of gambling of course is that it is possible to win in the short term, if you get lucky either by winning more often than you lose, or by accidentally timing your bets in such a way that the combined value of your fewer wins exceeds the combined value of your more numerous losses.

The problem for must gamblers is that the more they win, the more likely they are to keep playing. And the more they play, the more likely they are to lose. If you're a blackjack player (and a fan of satirical novels) you could call this dilemma a Catch 21!

Much has been written down the centuries about what's known as the "gambler's fallacy" or the idea that after an unusually high ratio of losses to wins (a ratio that exceeds the known negative expectation for the game at hand), a win is more likely.

It's not, of course. In a game with a 2.0% house edge, your odds of winning are 49-51, or a tad less than 50-50, every time you make a bet. So a betting strategy that depends on a win being "more likely" at any point in the game is doomed to failure.

Target betting dramatically boosts the next bet (NB) value in response to a mid-series win not because a second consecutive win is "more likely" than a loss, but because if fortune should smile in spite of negative expectation, all prior losses for the series (LTD) will be recovered, plus a small profit.

(If you are new to this method, a series begins with an opening minimum bet, and ends when turnaround or end of series aka EOS has been achieved. If a series opens with one or more successive wins, it continues until a loss, and the value of that loss becomes the LTD, with the NB value = LTD+T. If the streak-ending loss is immediately followed by a win, the series ends and the bet reverts to the opening minimum. If not, it continues per the strategy rules until EOS is achieved).

Mythematicians love to heap scorn on the Small Martingale or double-up betting method, which opens with a 1-unit bet and risks -1, -2, -4, -8, -16 and so on until a win finally comes along, recovering all prior losses with a single successful wager and delivering an overall profit of 1 unit.

The method is derided as suicidal because of the fact that repeated doubling is certain eventually to bump up against the table limit, and if the required x2 bet can't be made, an overall loss is inevitable.

That would be true if a double-up bettor was too dumb to move to a layout with a higher table limit before he got into serious trouble, and in theory, it might be possible for so many successive losses to occur that a $5 bet grows to exceed even the most generous house limit in Las Vegas ($25,000 is about average on "The Strip" these days, and high rollers can add several zeroes to that amount with special dispensation).

It's possible, but not likely. And gambling is all about what's likely, or probable, with blind luck ruled an irrelevance.

Interestingly, there is not a casino I have ever heard of that will permit x2 betting for long. Why? Because it is much more likely to succeed than to fail. And gamblers can never be permitted to win for long.

"Martingalers" can be seen in action in any busy casino if you know what to look for. The guy who muscles into a blackjack game, places two or three consecutive losing bets and then moves on is an x2 bettor in search of a single win. Blackjack is the perfect game for him, because a natural or a successful double/split will greatly boost his bottom line, giving him a final win exceeding his target 1u.

So, target betting is progressive betting, and progressive betting is certain suicide, right? Wrong.

In the current target betting trial, the TA/T strategy is ahead $184,000 or 5.6% of total action against a house edge of 4.6% indicating a mythematically expected loss of $149,000. A Martingale would be $37,000 (10.5%) ahead against the same outcomes. Average bet values and overall risk or exposure are both much lower for x2 betting, but it doesn't much matter because casinos do all they can to block the use of a Martingale.

My target betting method needs two successive wins to achieve turnaround/EOS/recovery, which is twice as tough to come by as a single win. But if you take a typical game session such as this one...


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...and then highlight the paired (or better) wins, it is easy to see why my method is very tough for the house to beat. You will win more often with a Martingale, with less risk. But since the bad guys won't let you play it, why not win with a method that they have not yet figured out?



There can be some scary gaps between paired wins from time to time, it's true, but they become less of a threat to your bankroll the longer you play, as long as you take my advice and add at least half of each session's profits to your war chest.

Fact is, it is not the house edge that blows most gamblers out of the game: it's their pathetically inadequate bankrolls, coupled with the fact that they consistently fail to fully exploit winning streaks.

You WILL lose more bets than you win, in the long run. So you have to bet opportunistically (and optimistically!) in response to a potential winning streak, knowing that every positive trend has to start with a single win, but not knowing for sure that that win will be immediately followed by another.

I once had a gambling aunt who would tell me: "Luck won't find you, you have to step out in front of it." And that is what target betting is all about. (Auntie Betty once owned a nightclub in London's Soho, and was a died-in-the-wool gambler until the day she fell off her perch; when she won, she gave most of the money away; when she lost, she kept on cranking until the next big hit came along).

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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More about Ken Smith's nifty skill-building app, the Blackjack Strategy Trainer.

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One of the pitfalls of blackjack is that a player can make decisions that are so bad that he helps the house get its hands on his bankroll a little sooner. In most table games, when to bet on what and how much are the player's only choices, and that is more than enough pressure, thank you very much.

Something else that is unique about blackjack is that almost everyone who plays it thinks he or she is an expert, and feels qualified to tell other people what to do with their money.

My preference is to play one-on-one against the dealer whenever possible, or else to ignore what other players are doing and concentrate on the job at hand, which is to win a little money while attracting as little attention as possible.

In the end, while making smart hit or stand decisions is helpful, it all comes down to how you bet, not how you play.

And it isn't the piddling house edge (barely 1.0%) that will do you in at blackjack, it's having a bankroll that is too small to take you through occasional house spikes (prolonged negative trends) that may be offset by an opposite pattern too late to save your ass.

A good rule of thumb is never to bet less than 20% of your current loss to date (LTD), but that's a move that can be discussed at another time.

What I want to say here is that practice makes perfect, and in my opinion there's no more perfect way to practice online than with Ken Smith's Blackjack Strategy Trainer.

Eccentric as I am, I generally choose to play against a shoe rather than the single deck that the self-styled experts prefer. I like the streaks that can set in with a shoe and last for a dozen or more rounds (less likely with a single deck and all that shuffling!).

Lately, single-deck layouts in Nevada have tended to drop the natural pay-out rate from 3-2 to 6-5, an outrageous gouge that offends me to the roots of what little hair I have left (a 60% pay cut, aggghhhhh!) so I am even more likely to pick a shoe.


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If your online connection is up to it, a useful way to imitate the multi-table environment of a casino is to load BST in several tabs and switch your LTD/NB numbers from one to the other as win-loss patterns dictate.

I turn off insurance (of course) in the BST options, and also the on-screen "coach" because there are several recommendations that I flat-out disagree with.

It is not necessary to play through each series from an opening minimum bet to EOS over and over again, as I do, because all the recorded outcomes will be plugged in to a spreadsheet eventually and the correct target bets will be processed there. All you really need is the outcomes in a chronological log.

My choice happens to be to bet as if the money was real, partly because I enjoy the practice, but also because there's a lot of satisfaction in repeatedly seeing a crappy set of outcomes being turned into a notional profit!

I would certainly welcome scanned pencil logs from anyone who cares to submit them! Mine look like this:


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I may not be neat, but I get it all written down! Pushes matter because I double the bet, adding up to $100, after a push, not because I think I have a better chance of winning (of course I don't) but for the fun of it.

Xs with a ring around them indicate a dealer natural, which also prompts a doubled bet, and I even bump the bet after a dealer 21 with 3+ cards, using the push rule (NB=PBx2 to a max of PB+$100).

A line under an outcome signifies EOS. And a quick glance at any log confirms the clumping or streaking patterns that make target betting so effective.

Remember that the LTD+ bet in response to a mid-series win is the key to target betting's consistent success, and while quirky bumps push bet values higher, they also fatten the bottom line.

You can make the bet-by-bet strategy as simple or as complicated as you want, either just for the fun of it or to confound anyone who's watching too closely, just as long as you don't mess with the LTD+ "engine" at the heart of it all.

One thing to watch out for with the BST app is an annoying little flaw that doesn't mess you up often but is infuriating when it does. If when the screen prompt offers you the option to add another $1,000 to your depleted bankroll, you click ever so slightly to the right of the $ button, you will accidentally quit the session instead, wiping out all of the stats. It's too easy to do, if you have left your cursor where it was when you last opted to stand, and you click before moving it to the "money button". The glitch needs a fix, but I am too grateful to Mr. Smith for his neat little game to bug him with a complaint!

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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This what a nightmare looks like! But with target betting applied, it turned out to be just another profitable visit to The Bank.**

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This blog will consist primarily of blackjack session screenshots taken from play against Ken Smith's estimable Blackjack Strategy Trainer, which I rank as the best online blackjack simulation I have come across so far.

I usually set the game at 8 decks because I figure if target betting can thrash the dumbest (meaning most player unfriendly) 21 game around, all other versions of blackjack will be a comparative walk in the park.

The primary objective of target betting is to win more when you win than you lose when you lose, knowing that in the long run it is inevitable that you will lose more bets than you win. It doesn't take magic or psychic powers, just discipline, confidence, commitment...and now and then, a whole lotta dough.

No one should kid themselves that money alone is all it takes to be a winner. The late Kerry Packer, an Australian billionaire with a death wish when he was playing in a casino rather than owning one (he built several Down Under), routinely bet $250,000 on each of six hands of blackjack, and was a big winner once in a great while.

Mostly, he was the most popular "whale" in Las Vegas history, because no one who flat-bets can ever hope to win in the end. Mr. Packer sure didn't.

**OK, so the Bank wasn't open and there was no green harvest at the cashier's cage. But it has always been my experience that real play in real time in a real casino is typically less hazardous than sessions against "sims" like this one. One reason might be that switching layouts/games/casinos is less of a problem in a real-live gambling town where another table is a few steps away and a whole new casino is next door on both sides. There's less of an incentive to bail out when no actual moolah is at stake!

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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The difference between winning and losing at casino table games isn't luck. It's all about discipline.

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You may not know it, but the casinos you love to frequent have a plan for you, and it goes like this:

You will...

• Go to the table with an inadequate bankroll.
• Bet within a very tight spread (probably not more than 1-5) so that even a relatively short negative trend will wipe you out.
• Respond to a downturn by dropping back to minimum bets and playing scared or pushing out ever-larger bets until your money's all gone.
• Gratefully accept "free" cocktails so that your play becomes increasingly reckless and self-destructive as your inhibitions are buzzed into oblivion.
• React to a run of luck by raising your bets, then stubbornly sticking to high wagers when luck deserts you (as it always will) until all your winnings are back in the dealer's tray.
• Go home a loser, convinced that it was not your fault that you made another "contribution" and
• Come back again for another drubbing because you never learn anything from being beaten.

Casino personnel are trained to have a very low opinion of their customers' common sense quotient and to steel their hearts when they see someone losing far more than they can afford (no one forced the fool to gamble, after all).

The house's fat bottom line depends primarily on the fact that the vast majority of gamblers have no idea of the negative odds they are challenging, and assume that whatever the numbers may be, they don't apply to them.

A consistent winner, on the other hand, will...

• Accept that luck is an irrelevance because it favors the house as much as the player and
• Recognize that the house advantage makes it inevitable that over time, the smartest punter will lose more bets than he wins.
• Be fully aware of the negative odds he faces, while knowing that the tiny edge the house enjoys is far less of a factor in player losses than poor money management.
• Know that winning requires a substantial bankroll (something the house knows, too) and that long-term profit without risk is a mathematical impossibility.
• Grasp enough math to understand that if he is going to lose more bets than he wins in the long run, then the only way he can make any money is to win more when he wins than he loses when he loses (an objective that sometimes requires balls, but never crystal ones!).
• Learn the best way to play any "house game" he chooses to venture and ignore side bets and sucker traps such as Royal Match at blackjack and Pair Plus at 3-card poker (which is itself only suited to players with too much money).
• Play consistently and cautiously, knowing that what many people assume is conservative betting actually increases the house's already favorable odds.
• Study win-loss patterns and see in them the simple truth that they key to winning is exploiting positive streaks in such a way that cumulative losses can be recovered in fewer bets than it took to get into trouble in the first place.
• Do everything possible to avoid attracting the attention of paranoid pit personnel who assume that anyone who wins "too often" must be cheating. Effective camouflage includes:
• Varying strategy rules without ever flouting the core principle that a mid-series win must always be followed by a loss to date plus target bet (LTD+).
• Never spreading bets so wide in one location that pit staff or other players notice the low-high gap.
• Bailing out of any prolonged negative trend, knowing that house "spikes" are not the norm (in blackjack and baccarat, at least!) and that betting against a losing streak can be more damaging than moving.
• Knowing that moving from one layout to another (or a different game or even a different casino) has no effect on probabilities, as long as the next bet (NB) and loss to date (LTD) values are maintained.
• Never playing when tired, bored or otherwise uncomfortable, because winning can always wait a while and the tables aren't going anywhere!
• Never taking losses personally, because they are almost always temporary.

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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Take the time to learn the strategy rules, playing against "funny money" games until you are an expert. Then, you will be ready to be a real winner!

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Target betting simply means knowing at all times how much you are "in the hole" in a given series, a series being a string of bets that starts with a minimum wager and continues until a profit has been achieved.

Your objective is to make a steady profit, and because you know ahead of time that in the end you will lose more bets than you win, you also know that the only way you can make money is by winning more when you win than you lose when you lose.

Psychic ability is not required.

What's needed is a set of responses tailored to circumstances and requiring a different reaction to a win than to a loss. In this way, the damage done by a string of consecutive losses will be less than the benefit derived from a similar string of consecutive wins, and over time, the value of your average winning bet will be greater than that of your average losing bet.

For example, 49 wins at $11 will offset 51 losses at $10 and overcome a house advantage of 2% (negative expectation being a loss of $21, replaced by a win of $29 or 2.8% of overall action).

It is not my purpose here to explain in detail why the method works, but to challenge skeptics to try it themselves and discover its merits from their own experience rather than mine.

Step one is to learn the rules below. Step two is to put them into action without risk until confidence (and competence) has been gained. Step three is to take what you have learned into a casino and kick ass.

As long as you are behind in a series, carefully track your loss to date (LTD) until a win comes along, then respond to that win by pushing out a next bet (NB) that covers the sum total of the LTD plus a target profit ($5 or 1 unit is good, $25 or 5u is better).

If the mid-series win is followed by a loss (as it will be slightly more often than not) the loss becomes the new NB value, and the series continues until the next win, when the process is repeated. Eventually, a second consecutive mid-series win will bring an end to the series (EOS), and the bet falls back to the minimum 1u.

Target betting will prevail in the long run with just the LTD+TGT rule in place, but I recommend rules variations that will not only boost profitability but will serve to camouflage what you are doing and confuse the enemy (you know who they are).

After an opening loss, bet 5x the previous bet (PB).
After a second loss, bet PB/2 and do the same after a third loss.
If losses continue, repeat the bet (NB=PB) until a win, then apply the LTD+ rule.

After an opening win, bet 2x (NB=PBx2), and keep doing that after each successive win until the bet hits $200.
When the win progression (WP) x2 limit is reached, NB=PB+$100 until a loss ends the winning streak.
When an opening winning streak ends with a loss, NB= the lesser of PBx2 or PB+$100 and LTD=PB.
If losses continue, freeze the bet (NB=PB) and continue doing so until a win calls for the LTD+TGT rule.

Doubled wins (meaning any wins greater than the value of the original bet) do not affect the NB value, but doubled losses change the NB value to match the prior loss (-1, -1, -1, -1x2, -2, -2, -2x3, -6 and so on).

After a push (about 9.0% of all bets at blackjack), double the bet (NB=PBx2) to a maximum added value of $100, and do the same after a dealer natural except if a 2x bet would be due anyway (see above), in which case, add $100 (NB=PB+$100) on top of the doubled value. Treat any dealer 21 as a push, and respond accordingly.

With this method, bets can increase very rapidly, sometimes to amounts that are prohibited by the table limit at the layout where the series began. Whenever that happens, move to a higher-rent layout, and continue the series as before.

(If you are playing against Ken Smith's BST app, you will have to deal with a $1,000 table limit, which is also a 1-200 spread limit, assuming a $5 opening bet for each new series. Freeze the bet at NB=PB until you recover, and as you record each outcome in a log, console yourself with the knowledge that with a less house-biased table limit, each twin-win pattern would rocket you out of the hole and into profit! And please, send me scanned copies of your logs if they're legible - I will be happy to process them at the correct betting levels).

Higher bets mean greater risk, at least in your first few hours of target betting play, but they also mean recovery of past losses in fewer bets than it took you to get into trouble and in the end, bigger profits.

Always add at least half of every session's profit to your bankroll, enabling you to grow stronger and tougher to beat.

Whenever you feel uncomfortable or threatened in a given location, move and take your NB/LTD numbers to a new layout ("the math" will be unaffected). Never break the strategy rules, never touch alcohol during play, and never take losses personally, because they are always temporary.

And...keep reminding yourself that if you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win won't hurt you. It's sound logic, and irrefutable arithmetic. Now get out there and win.

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.
_

Reading that ghosts can help you win at blackjack makes me a whole lot less apologetic about my "wacky" gambling theories!

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My target betting method has been taking pretty good care of me for the best part of 30 years, and since the idea first popped into my head in Las Vegas in 1978, I must have written at least a million words about it, and illustrated it with tens of thousands of spreadsheet and photo files.

Blogging suddenly struck me as the perfect way to get other players (not gamblers!) involved because I have been working on a blog about a completely unrelated business topic for the last few weeks, and have found it an ideal forum for fresh ideas and observations.

Probably each new entry will have to be headed with a repetition of the following:

Anyone who has ever gambled for more than an hour or two knows that all casino games have a house advantage that makes it impossible for even the luckiest player to win more bets than he loses in the long term. It follows that anyone betting flat or random amounts is also sure to lose more money than he wins. Target betting is about wagering in such a disciplined and consistent way that you win more when you win than you lose when you lose. Impossible? Follow these rules, and you will learn that losing more often than you win can actually make you a winner, without the help of psychic powers or friendly ghosts.

The ghost reference comes from a post I just tripped over that makes for great reading but may not be inspirational to anyone who doubts that dead people are luckier than live ones (probably the opposite, in fact).

I don't plan to repeatedly defend the concept of target betting. I have done that in three or four versions of a book that I have been writing and rewriting for decades without changing the core concept that dates all the way back to March of '78.

One of these days, I will get the book right (write?), although by then I may have concluded that I am better off keeping my ideas to a limited audience and simply using them to make steady money in casinos.

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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