Stop me if you've heard this before: If you can't afford to win, you shouldn't play (probably the best gambling advice you'll ever get!)

I'm not posting here very often these days, simply because I have said all I have to say about progressive betting over and over again, and even someone afflicted with acute blogghorhea has to get tired eventually!

Still and all, just lately I have had several e-mails from readers initially praising Target betting principles to the skies, then suddenly going quiet.

I can't help but assume that in spite of my repeated warnings that winning consistently takes a great deal of money on top of discipline, confidence and courage, they tried to beat the house with an inadequate bankroll.

The great trap for most gamblers, I have learned over many, many years at this, is that they want to make too much money too fast, propelled by the notion that somehow all the arithmetic that governs games of chance will not apply to them.

The truth is that sometimes, with a positive expectation ranging from less than 1.0% at blackjack to more than 5.0% at double-zero roulette and other carnival games, even the house suffers an occasional shellacking, and it's player greed, not percentage points, that eventually sucks their money back into the cashier's cage.

I'm often asked how much it takes to beat house games, and the best answer I can ever give is that it depends, much as I'd like to come up with a definitive number.

All any of us can do is to stay away from games of chance if we can't pull together a bankroll of at least 5,000 times our minimum bet, and even then, we have to stick strictly with the betting rules and hope that we can keep building our arsenal so that failure becomes a diminishing threat.

Yes, it's a lot of money, and quite possibly people with that much in their pockets are too smart to risk losing it.

But there is not a business proposition anywhere, opening a casino included, that does not require an initial investment far greater than the anticipated return.

In time, a wise investment will pay back the initial outlay and the gravy train will keep chugging down the tracks.  But time and money are two essential ingredients that most gamblers either can't or won't stir into the mix.

A few months back, I was with a guy in Las Vegas who was headed for a craps table with a $50 minimum, and he asked me to refresh his memory on the rules of Target 3-Play, which is about as simple and effective a strategy as you will ever find.

It took maybe half a minute to run through it again: After an opening loss in a new series, bet at least 3x your first bet, then double it if there's a second loss; after three losses, drop back to your minimum, and stay there until there's a win; after the win, bet your loss to date plus one unit per round, and be prepared to double the bet just twice before retreating to the minimum. So, three losses, drop back...how hard can that be?

Great! said he...then I watched him lose almost $2,000 without once following the Target rules.

When I asked him what went wrong, he told me he couldn't remember the strategy in the heat of the game because it was too complicated.

I'm blogging again today because I suspect a lot of people are just like my friend in Las Vegas, and suffer a sudden brain seizure the moment the going gets tough.  And that, of course, is exactly when discipline and confidence (and sometimes lots of CASH) are most important.

What progressive betting is all about is managing our money so that over time, we consistently win more when we win than we lose when we lose.

That's essential, because we can be certain that in the long run, we will lose more bets than we win.  The house advantage will see to that.

Using 3x as the second bet increase (I prefer 5x, but never mind that for now), we might see a sequence of rounds that goes -1, -3, -6, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, +1, -27, +54 giving the house an overall edge of -8/12 or 66%, indicating a probable loss of our action of about 66 units.

Instead, we lost 10 bets for a total of 43 units and won two bets worth 55 units, giving us an overall win of +12/98 = +12.2%
It's not always that simple, obviously.

Then again, a few scribbles on the back of an envelope will confirm that -1, +3 = +2 and -1, +1 (how most people bet) = 0.

I think we can all agree that breaking even is not a long-term winning strategy.

The way the numbers work is that about half of all decisions in these games are followed by an opposite decision, about half of those (roughly 25%) are followed by a same decision, and half of those see a third consecutive same outcome.

So, WWWL or LLLW, WWL or LLW and WL or LW collectively account for more than 85% of all rounds in any house game.

That arithmetic in turn gives the house just a 15% probability that it will see more than three consecutive wins.

Target needs two consecutive wins to recover prior losses in a downturn...and that's a 25% probability.

Sure, 4 to 1 is a long shot.  But because we apply damage control in response to a negative trend, we're able to keep our losses under control until the next turnaround opportunity presents itself.

Each time we fail, bets are recalibrated to ensure that next time we are given a chance of recovery, we will have exactly the right amount of money on the table.

Timing is everything in gambling, as it is in life, and if all we ever do is recover in two bets what it took us three bets to lose, we won't be "making a contribution" to the house's groaning coffers.

Most gamblers are random bettors, so they have little hope of a quick recovery once bad timing has dumped them into a deep hole, and the harder they struggle, the deeper they sink.

In contrast, we know that two wins in a row will always save our bacon.

Meanwhile, every time the chips pile high in the betting circle, our chances of winning are just a little less than 50-50.

All I can say to readers who have run out of money before turnaround came is that it is senseless to take on a Sherman tank with a pea-shooter (although given today's news about Russia's $200m update of a weapon that has been obsolete for more than 50 years, maybe I should substitute Armata for Sherman?).

The best way to build confidence in Target is practice, practice and more practice against games that won't cost you a cent.

I recommend the demo games offered by Pinnacle Sports, not because we can graduate to real money (they won't let us) but because they are in my opinion the straightest simulations available anywhere on the 'Net.

And don't pay any attention to lectures by professional shills like the Wizard of Odds who insist that no betting strategy can win in the long run.

Mike Shackleford's page should be retitled "The Half-Truth About Betting Systems" because his billion-bet sims limit betting spread to 1-6 and are in any event divorced from reality because of what I call an inertia assumption.

Here's how it works: If you keep betting like a robot through even the worst losing streaks you have ever seen, you will eventually crash and burn the way the casinos and their shills require.

Mr. Shackleford and his casino-sponsored peers like to deride the whole concept of progressive betting by saying that its supporters just keep increasing their bet values until they score a win, making any "proof" they offer meaningless.

But the Wiz and his pals have no problem creating "proofs" that require a player to be inert and insensible for millions upon millions of bets!

If, however, you act like a real human being and apply educated damage control according to a strict betting strategy, you will ride out the rough spots through thousands of rounds and stay ahead of the game indefinitely.

Here's a screenshot from a single iteration of a verifiable random sim which does not rely on a suicidal half-wit to behave as no real person ever would.

Instead, it features a much smarter player who follows the Target 3-Play algorithm and defies the "laws" of mythematics that are so enthusiastically supported by casinos and their hirelings!

Common sense and consistency really do work wonders together.

For instance, the "Zumma 1,000" baccarat data set available to all on the Internet hits Player with a -1.6% overall negative expectation, but Target 3-Play returns a +5.2% "player edge" after the equivalent of more than 1,000 hours of play.

Scary exposure?  Yes.  Occasional very large bets?  Yup.  Spreads wider than the Wizard's weedy 1 to 6?  Hell, yes!

But the point is that according to experts like the Wiz, no strategy can hope to stay ahead against a data set as large as 85,000 rounds.

Oops.

In reality (also known as Las Vegas), it is possible to bet as little as $5 and as much as $25,000 a pop without special dispensation, but not at the same table.

Table limits are irrelevant to a strategy player, because if the next bet is too high for the current location, the odds of winning are unaffected by suspending play and moving to a higher rent proposition.

Sometimes, winning can put a serious strain on shoe leather, but even if a recovery stretches into hours or days rather than minutes, it's always better than losing.

If this is your first visit to this blog, you would be smart not to believe a word I tell you until you have spent several hours testing and learning the Target strategy against games that won't bankrupt you.

Target 3-Play has a win progression, too: +1, +2, +4, +4, +4, +4, -4, (15).

Against baccarat, I recommend doubling any bet under 100 units in response to a tie. I like to triple after a 7,7 tie and double-double after a natural tie, but just ask Mike Shackleford: I'm a crazy person.

At blackjack, double after a push up to 100u, and do the same at roulette (single-zero only!) after a zero or any middle-line number, win or lose. Bet black or red or any of the other even-money propositions, and don't hop between them (stay on black or red, odd or even, first or last).

At craps, bet only on the field when 6,6 pays 3x (avoid the game otherwise) and double up to 100u whenever the shooter sevens out.

The point of all these double-ups is to improve the recovery profit without getting greedy.

Greed bankrupts more gamblers than free booze or sheer stupidity, so be grateful that the Target rules don't just tell you when to bit big, but when to bank your profits and fall back to a minimum wager.

You will quickly learn that having no decisions to make is a huge relief.

I'm talking about betting, obviously, since blackjack is the only relatively safe game in the house that permits the player to alter his hand after placing his bet and before the dealer's hand is exposed.

Forget Pai-Gow Poker and 3-Card Poker along with Let-It-Ride and other game variations that essentially hand the house your head on a platter!

As for baccarat, avoid bets on Banker, because the so-called "5 percent" commission can easily clean you out (as in +95, -100, +95, -100, +95, -100 = -15 instead of break-even).

I hear squeals of protest whenever I say that, but it's the truth. Yes, Banker wins more often than Player, but the commission rip-off makes it the worst of the two bets in the long run.

In any two-choice situation, back the same one every time.

Think of a two-mole game of whack-a-mole and you have to concede that if you position your mallet between the two holes and wait for one or other of the moles to pop up, you're sure to miss more often than if you're poised over the same hole every time.

Give it a try next time you're at a fairground!

Good luck...at the tables (forget those pesky moles and make a little money instead).


(3-Play is a streamlined version of the progressive strategy that has been described here since March of 2009 and has been available to all since 1997.  At craps/field and roulette, it's not necessary to fall back to a minimum bet after three losses: you can simply suspend betting entirely until what would have been a win comes along, then dive back in with the appropriate bet.  At baccarat, you can sometimes sit out without leaving the table, and if you are at a baccarat or blackjack layout where the table minimum is higher than your own chosen minimum, you can either fall back to the smallest bet allowed, or quit the game and resume when you are in compliance with both the Target and the house rules.  Remember, your profit prospects are unaffected by stops, skips and switches.  Most gamblers believe they have to ride out a losing streak in order to benefit from an off-setting swing their way.  They're wrong.)


_ 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. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bodog/Bovada, spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this.

_

To all of you who have ever been ripped off by online gambling sites, a friendly reminder: Winning is the best revenge! And if you like to bet on horse-racing, I can show you how to make a long-term profit.

_

After five years of doing this (this is #250!), I have reached the point where I don't post to these pages unless I am confident that what I have to say will be of interest, and hopefully some value, to at least a few of the readers who click this way day in and day out.

I have taken a critical position against online "casinos" a few times in the past (see the long-standing note at the bottom of every post) but gave up the campaign as a lost cause when it became clear that politics and vested interests will never make the bet-from-home process fair and safe for players in the USA.

What follows is a restrained, corroborated rant about the hypocrisy of the term licensed and regulated outside of our borders.

But first, I'd like to offer an analogy to help illustrate misconceptions about what public protection safeguards are likely to amount to once large sums of money have legally changed hands.

It's Main Street in Anytown, Anywhere, and a fancy new restaurant has just opened in an area where eating out options were once bland and boring, and a menu offering items more exotic than burgers and hot-dogs or fried chicken and pizza has been eagerly awaited for years.

The place gleams with newness and cleanliness when the doors swing open, and a big official certificate out front confirms that the kitchens and dining areas have been thoroughly looked over by professional health inspectors, and everything is A+ perfect.

For the first few weeks, critics rave about the quality and freshness of the food, word of mouth spreads, and the new joint is filled to bursting point night after night.

Then someone reports seeing cockroaches scurrying under the tables, and soon after that an entire family has to have emergency treatment for food poisoning.

More horror stories are reported, and pretty soon everyone in Anytown knows someone who has been to the Fancy New Place and regretted it, sometimes after getting very seriously ill.

But miraculously, the local health department's A+ accreditation stays on display by the restaurant door.

As a result, people from out of town who don't know better keep ordering food and putting themselves at risk, thinking that the meals must be fresh and the kitchens clean because a respectable regulatory body says so.

Anyone who thinks to jot down the health department's phone number and put in a call to complain is given the same official explanation.

The A+ rating was posted right after the owners of the restaurant paid a $250,000 licensing fee, and submitted a food safety report from outside inspectors who were hired by...the owners.

The rigid official position turns out to be that regular spot-checks on health and cleanliness standards are never carried out.

And remote health department updates occur on a prearranged schedule just once a year, a few days after a renewal application (and another $250,000) is received.

Again, inspections are not carried out by the public authority, which instead supplies guidelines to an authorized sub-contractor, and rubber stamps a fitness report paid for by the restaurant operator.

Crazy stuff, right?

I mean, what regulatory authority charged by legislation to protect the public would put its own reputation at risk, let alone the best interests and safety of the public it was created to protect, for a measly few million dollars?

Here are a few names:

The (UK) Gambling Commission
Alderney Gambling Control Commission
Government of Gibralter Remote Gambling Commission
Isle of Man Government Gambling Supervision Commission in association with
Malta Lotteries and Gaming Authority

Early this year, an opportunity came along for me to spend an indefinite amount of time in England, and I jumped at it because it would give me access to online betting services that, officially regulated under the terms of a 2005 gambling law as they are, are certain to be honest and upright.

Or so I thought.

But here's the way it really works.

Because the British Government doesn't want to soil its pristine image by being directly involved in something as seedy as gambling but needs all the tax revenue it can get, it dodges the dirt by creating outside bodies to get the gambling money machine rolling.

Lotteries have been running for years in the UK, but what some people see as a tax on stupidity (and I'll admit, I buy lottery tickets most weeks!) has somehow become respectable the world over, and Britain offers games that are almost uniquely fair.

All prizes are free of income tax, hallelujah!  And a very large percentage of lottery revenues go to a variety of good causes without affecting government contributions (unlike in California, where the billions in lottery bucks that go to schools have enabled the state to pare its general fund education allocation, and squander our tax money elsewhere!).

So, schools in California are worse off than they were when the state lottery was launched for their benefit, while in England, stupidity taxes keep countless good causes and public projects running with more grant money than they ever saw before.

The UK Gambling Commission that was created in 2005 to oversee online "casinos" and bookmakers apparently didn't want to get its hands dirty either, so it promptly handed the groundwork over to a number of "approved regulatory authorities," most of which are listed above.

Not one of those bodies has any kind of mechanism in place to ensure that, in between licensing applications (and payment of fees ranging from more that $120,000 to $500,000 depending on anticipated revenue), its approved licensees actually run straight games.

There are rules that must be followed, and one of them at least is a huge improvement on the experience many of us can expect when we try to withdraw winnings from unregulated online operations in America.

In the UK, withdrawals from an online stash are credited to your bank account almost instantly, only very rarely taking longer than a couple of hours.  Imagine that!

My primary interest in British gambling sites, including those run by High Street bookmaking giants who have been in business for decades, is centered on home-based horse-race betting, which is made almost unworkable in the US because it is only offered as an afterthought.

I apply a variation of the Target progressive betting rules at the track, and focus entirely on favorites and second favorites, filtering odds without reference to any other data.

And because online bookies accessible back home provide very little information about changing odds going down to the wire, a 3-1 second favorite five minutes before the off can dwindle to 3-2 or less before the gate goes up.

That makes life tricky indeed for a betting strategy which relates next-bet (NB) values to a specific goal or target.

For example, if I'm down $500 and a qualifying entry—one that meets my odds requirements—presents itself at 4-1, I might trim my bet to $150 in anticipation of a little bonus on top of my win target, only to have the payback drop to 5-2 and leave me still in the red after a win.

The result in short, as Dickens would put it: Misery.

Another win will come along to mop up the red ink eventually, but delayed and unreliable information makes off-track horse-race betting in your underwear (or whatever) a frustrating business.

First-rate online tote-boards at some of the top US tracks take some of the anxiety out of the process.

But overall, there is a shortage of data that makes it smarter on the whole to stick with props in which the odds are relatively stable.

At one point, I was reasonably confident that shrinking odds after a bet was placed could be compensated for with frequent adjustments in the loss to date (LTD), but in the end I had to accept that flying at least partially blind was a problem.

I also had to concede that America's unlicensed and illegal online bookies had too much power on their side, able to stymie horse-race bettors by forcing them to wear blinkers, and even manipulating the odds on events that had more comprehensive coverage.

The UK's online bookies offer a veritable horse-race punter's paradise in comparison.

No-strings free bets abound.

Winnings are handed over almost as quickly as they would be at a High Street bookie's counter.

And most books offer a "best odds guarantee" that gives you absolute certainty not only that the odds when you placed the bet won't shorten, but that if the price actually improve before the start, you'll get the higher payback.

On top of all that, you can back either the Unnamed Favourite or the Unnamed Second Favourite, which is a big help if the odds on two or three entries are close,and it's hard to guess which of them will end up matching Target's filter requirements.

Target HR is anathema to horse-race purists who, like sports bettors everywhere, believe in stats analysis and "educated" betting.

They react with horror to the heresy that picking winners is all about numbers and only peripherally linked to form, pedigree, trainers, jockeys, track conditions and other variables.

Never mind that in 8,000 or so races in the UK and Ireland so far this year, favorites won 35% of all races and paid an average of 1.8 to 1 (9/5 or +180), second favorites won 21% at 3.6 to 1 (+360), and the bottom-line numbers for 2013 are almost identical.

At some point, I will have multi-year data covering starting prices on the four shortest-odds entries in every UK/Eire race for the past decade, but that's going to take a while.

In the meantime, consider a recent analysis that looked at more than SIX MILLION races in the USA and concluded that flat-betting favorites has a long-term disadvantage of better than -6.0%, or nowhere near the -30.0% negative expectation suggested by simply looking at the number of wins versus the number of losses.

Betting flat or fixed amounts or determining bet values randomly will still result in a long-term loss, but Target applies a modified set of its long-published progressive betting rules to make betting on both favorites and second favorites consistently profitable over time.

Information about the Target HR methodology is available elsewhere, so let's get back to the topic of UK-licensed casino-style games which all the gambling regulatory bodies above say with hand on heart have an average house advantage of not more than -4.0% (the minus sign indicating negative expectation for the player).

Years ago, I played several hundred hands of blackjack on the Bodog (now Bovada) website and discovered a house edge of close to 60.0% overall, about 60x the NE in a real game and plainly as crooked as a dog's hind leg.

Here's some recent UK data:

SkyBets "SkyVegas" craps, 62 rounds, 19 Wins, 37 Losses, House Advantage 29.0%
SkyBets baccarat, 143 rounds, 51W, 92L, HA 28.7%
SkyBets blackjack, 270 rounds, 85W, 185L, HA 37.0%

SkyBets all games, 475 rounds, 155W, 314L, HA 33.5%

As it happens, I play blackjack strictly by the book and I am a very disciplined, consistent player—but I would have to be very lucky indeed to beat a house edge of 37%.

Baccarat and craps demand no player choices at all if you always back the same proposition (player at baccarat, the field at craps).

So the only legitimate reason for results like those I saw is an exceptional run of bad luck...so exceptional that it happened three times in three separate sessions, then twice more.

There's a more likely explanation than bad luck when the unexpected happens again and again, and that dog's hind leg I mentioned before comes back to mind.

A couple more "casino" sessions in the UK:

Betfred blackjack, 40 rounds, 11W, 29L, HA (also expressed as actual value or AV when a sequence has been logged) 45.0%
William Hill blackjack, 45 rounds, 9W, 36L, HA 60.0%

The amounts of real money involved in these transactions are completely irrelevant, but every one of the examples quoted is backed up with account data downloaded from each of the "casinos" involved and available for verification.

We're not talking about a huge number of bets here, less than 600 in all.

But the pattern is crystal clear: five sessions, five losses, with a combined house edge vastly larger than the 4.0% claimed in filings that boast a 96% RTP (return to players), a figure that the "regulators" accept without question.

Not one of the five sessions with three different online casinos saw a house edge of less than 28.0%.

And, of course, the gouge in each and every session bears no resemblance to the numbers that apply to the actual games these robbers are imitating: craps, blackjack and baccarat.

Oddly, if you click up a demonstration version of any of the games on these websites, you will encounter conditions about the same as those you would find in a bricks-and-mortar casino.

You won't win every time, but if you use Target rules against games that mostly have a house edge below 5.0%, you will do well.  You just won't have any cash to show for it.

The very significant difference between the house edge at free-play games and what happens when you switch to real dough should be enough of a red flag to get the online regulators rushing to our rescue.

But wait...they weren't set up to protect players, were they?  Their function was, and is, to give the illusion of careful oversight while collecting millions in fees for doing nothing at all.

The official position of the "regulatory bodies" responsible for assuring fair play on the part of licensees paying up to $500,000 a year for government permission to steal from their customers is that casino software is merely required to prove an acceptable RTP over millions of outcomes.

The figures are never checked.  They are taken at face value.

And as long as complaining customers are clearly informed by a licensee that whatever their experience, it is "statistically insignificant," the casinos' humble servants in Alderney, Malta, Gibralter and the Isle of Man will consider the matter closed, time and time again.

It's simple enough to create a random-number generator that will simulate a house edge at different levels of player pain.  And if the authorities were truly concerned about regulation and control and the protection of trusting gamblers, they would do it themselves.

If they did, they would find that in order to get repeated numbers of the order I saw from consecutive sessions totaling 600 rounds, the simulation's HA must be permanently set at 20.0% or higher.

Of course, the only sure way for an "oversight body" to truly oversee gambling operations is to spot-check games by actually playing them.

And it has been made very clear to me that no such thing is ever going to happen in the UK.

Pity the poor rubber-stampers in Alderney, a tiny island in the English Channel with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants.

They pull in close to £20 million a year in license fees from gambling operations in exchange for cloaking them in fake legitimacy, but 90% of the loot is grabbed by nearby Guernsey, the local authority that brokered the cozy money-for-nothing rubber stamping deal with the UK government.

No wonder the six employees (four part-time) of the Alderney Gambling Control Commission couldn't care less about fairness!

As for the arithmetic of games of chance, it may be true that anyone who bets on a simulated game that does not include actual cards, wheels, balls or dice may deserve to lose.

And if that's the case, then regulation of online games is not needed at all, and supervisory bodies that give the impression that Internet "casinos" are properly monitored and controlled are operating under false pretenses.

My guess is that the only way the integrity of online games will ever be properly tested is if thousands of players get together, log their bets, download casino-generated account records for corroboration, and share their experiences.

But that's not going to happen either, because gambling is fundamentally a solitary pastime, even when 30 players are elbow-to-elbow around a craps table, all yelling their heads off.  The fun is shared, perhaps, but the wins and losses are not.

That leaves us with online betting propositions that can't be rigged, fixed, fiddled or faked, and horse racing is in my view the best of them all, at least in the UK.

Just remember, bet only on favorites and second favorites, and apply Target HR filtering and betting rules with absolute discipline, knowing that while the result of individual races may be unpredictable, and long-term numbers barely change from year to year.

Purists may hate to hear it, but like every other betting market in the world, horse-racing results are in the long run random.  So while experts, including the stewards, may do their best to predict the outcome of any one race, no one really knows a damn thing about what's going to happen.

We know that in 1,000 races or so, favorites will win x% and second favourites will win y%, but that is not much help if we are setting bet values randomly and behaving as erratically as the stats themselves.

That's why, as with all games of chance, it is essential to apply a progressive betting approach that exploits winning trends and limits the damage from prolonged losing streaks as much as possible.

It is mathematically impossible for random betting to win against a large sample of random outcomes.  And because their egos drive them to bet emotionally, the only experts who are certain to win in the long run are those with inside knowledge that is unavailable to anyone else.

Then, of course, they wouldn't be gambling.

Target HR is not for sale, but I will gladly give it away to anyone willing to help me expose online casinos—the dark side of book-making operations that have no choice but to be honest and accountable when it comes to sports betting—and the august public bodies that pretend to regulate them.

At the very least, I will need a log of bets clearly copied from a genuine "casino" website, along with proof that a complaint has been made to, and rejected by, the operator.

I'm willing to bet that if we pool all our data and analyze it with strict, verifiable accuracy, we will see a twisted house edge much closer to the 33.5% I experienced than to the 4.0% that "regulatory bodies" are naively bamboozled into believing...if in reality they believe them at all.

It's possible, I suppose, that an unbeatable algorithm has been secretly incorporated in the game software by its designers and that the "96% RTP" often quoted by commissioners actually includes a hefty skim to pad the percentage of the take paid to the game runner.

The online casinos would then be horrified to discover that nobody can win at their friendly games, and refunds in the millions would be dumped back into bank accounts all over the UK.

Duck, everyone...there's a flying pig headed our way.

_ 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. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bodog, spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this. _

A friendly challenge for blackjack aficionados with iPhones and iPods! Use the Target rules to match or beat the bankroll I have built up using MobilityWare's 21 simulation.

(Quick update: The Sethbets website is once again open to all)

I'm not claiming to be the world's greatest blackjack player, and I have no doubt that there are people out there who can make my million-plus in unspendable funny-munny look like chump change.

What I am saying is that my real-play experience, supported by what I'm able to do on the small screen of my iPod Touch in maybe a half-hour a day spread over 14 months, tells me that progressive betting is the only way to beat negative expectation in casino games of chance.

The gambling industry knows it and probably always has, which is why every game layout has spread limits, and why casino personnel are trained to quickly jump on a progressive bettor, and even show him the door if he can't be persuaded of the error of his ways.

Every time I say that, somebody somewhere will start an argument.  But the fact is that anyone who sits down at blackjack or baccarat in particular and bets a standard Martingale (-1, -2, -4, -8, -16, +32) will very soon encounter what might be described as polite interference.

The only solution to that is to keep moving after two or three bets at any one location, switching games if necessary but maintaining the correct bet values at all times.

The surprise to me is that I have been able to rack up the above win against a persistent house edge that at 4.0% is about four times expectation for blackjack while betting a much tighter spread than I usually recommend.

I start with a $25, and if I lose it, the next bet is $200.  Aggressive, yes, but what happens more often than not in these games is that a loss will be followed by a win, and vice versa.

If the second bet goes down, the LTD becomes 3,4 (three $100 units down, four units out) and the third bet is $400, followed by PBx2 (previous bet x2).

After three losers, there's one more PBx2 bet, and then we freeze until a mid-recovery win triggers two consecutive attempts to recover prior losses.

If those turnaround tries fail, start halving the bet...unless you have hit the max, in which case, NB=PB (next bet is a repeat of the previous bet) until recovery.

The max bet for this sim is $5,000, which provides a 1:200 spread.

It all sounds crazy, but by golly, it works, as the screen shots above confirm.

I fall back to a minimum $25 bet whenever the LTD reaches $100,000, and you will find that the stop-loss does not happen often.  How could it?  What matters is that cumulative wins cover those rare bail-outs, and the numbers above are equal to a fantasy win of more than $100,000 a month!

The simple rules above can be applied to baccarat, craps (including field bets) and even roulette, but my policy is to head for the blackjack tables whenever I'm looking at an LTD in the high double digits.

Blackjack offers the best table game odds in the house, but it is important to play basic strategy with absolute discipline, and to choose games with optimum rules (as many doubles and splits and redoubles and re-splits as possible, in other words).

I do have a couple of basic strategy quirks that I will vigorously defend whenever I face criticism, blackjack being a game that almost everyone seems to think they know everything about!

I will always hit my 12 or 13 against a dealer's 2 or 3, and I don't think twice about doubling down on a 10 against a dealer's A, 10 or paint-card (K,Q,J).

Earlier versions of the MobilityWare app have a couple of quirks of their own: Re-splits and repeat double-downs are not permitted, but if a player natural coincides with a dealer natural, the player wins!

Since 2-card 21 occurs only about 4.0% of the time, and the app is in any case dishing out about a 4.0% negative expectation instead of 1.0-2.0%, I believe that's a wash.

Pushes or ties are something else.  In blackjack, they're a particular pain, and I cringe every time I hear another player utter the platitude, "A push is better than a loss."  Playing to break even is a waste of time...

I prefer to double my bet after a push (or a tie in baccarat) up to an added value of $500 unless I'm a long way from a turnaround try, in which case I venture 2x the PB whatever the amount.

So for example, if your LTD in $100 units is 7,8 and you push, the next bet (NB) is 12u, and a win will take you way over your target (8).  But it's a one-time bonus: Lose, and the NB/LTD is 19,20.

If you take the trouble to log your play, you will find that doubling after a push adds as much as 40% to your overall session profit.

You will lose a little more frequently than you win, because that's the name of any house game, but when they happen, you will get a big kick out of those "bonus" paybacks.

Throughout all my posts here, I have maintained that no one can hope to beat casino table games in the long run without a huge amount of money behind them, and a powerful combination of discipline and steel gonads.

It's only fair: Opening and running a casino is a massive investment, and if we could bite into the house's bottom line with a mere fistful of dollars, there would soon be no casinos and no games for us to play, and beat.

In recent years I have created countless interactive spreadsheet models that provide totally objective random outcomes (usually 5,000 at a time) and enable different rules to be applied to the same set of bets before a new data sample is created with a quick tap on the recalc key.

I have been fairly guarded about my models up to now, but I have reached the point where I'm willing to offer them for analysis and evaluation to anyone who can convince me that they are qualified.

The Target capped progression approach works dramatically well against most table games, but can be defeated in sims (including my own) by what I usually refer to these days as the inertia assumption.

What that means is that if a player is willing to sit still for a losing streak lasting dozens or hundreds of rounds, remaining inert and unaffected, and if the house is willing to allow him to bet as wide a spread as he wants at one location, that player will eventually be bankrupted.

But since neither of those conditions apply in real life and real play with real money, occasional crash-n-burns don't tell us much except that if you play like a fool, you will lose like a fool.  Surprise!

Target's algorithm can also be successfully adapted for horse-race and sports betting, the key there being to avoid bets that pay less than even money, and pull back further in a losing trend than you would in casino house games with a house advantage of less than 3.0%.

Odds are much tighter away from the casino, and winning takes longer, too.  It's tough to get more action than at blackjack, where it's possible to place a bet and see an outcome every 10-15 seconds or so.

To me, baccarat and craps, where 100 rounds an hour means blazing speed, is like watching grass grow without the benefit of stop-action wizardry!

Whatever your game, you cannot hope to make consistent money if you depend on luck, which runs both ways, or on some half-baked "predictive" selection method that claims that a given outcome is more likely in the next hand, roll, spin or coin-toss.

Target doesn't depend on a win being probable next time, because a win is never probable before your bet is placed: If the house edge for your game is, say, 2.0%, then every bet you place faces a 51% probability of losing, which means that over time, you are sure to win less often than you lose.

Blackjack has some exceptions to the probability percentage thanks to supplementary bets that are permitted after your first blind wager.  But even if you double down on 11 and catch a 10, a win is still not certain: All you know for sure is that at least you can't lose.

Success in the long run is about getting maximum bang out of every win when you beat the odds and chips come your way, which means knowing at all times exactly how deep is your current "hole" and calculating bet values accordingly.

It's the arithmetic, mate, as Bob Hoskins once said in a very bad movie about London casinos.

Just know that in a casino, whether it's in London, Las Vegas or Timbuctu, players who consistently fail to do their duty and leave money behind when they push away from the table are considered to be the enemy.

Short-term winners are good for business; the other kind are not.

Winning really is possible, and that promise has to be valid in the long, long term or what would be the point?

It's possible, but that does not mean that it's easy...

_ 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. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bodog, spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this. _

Most people don't think they can win and some worry that because gambling is "wrong" they don't deserve to win. So they're suspicious of anyone who tells them they don't have to lose!

_
An e-mail dropped into my inbox this week that came as quite as a surprise because it was from a website that touts mystical strategies that claim to be able to predict winning trends.

I paid polite attention because the betting strategy, simply named "2-2-1," was a less-aggressive version of the "3-Play" method that I posted here more than six months ago.

Pure coincidence, I'm sure, and I am not about to claim that I was the first person to come up what these days is often referred to as a capped Martingale.

I have been writing for years about players who exploit the effectiveness of progressive betting by placing no more than two or three successive bets at any one layout, before moving on in search of the single win that will get them out of the red, and back into profit.

I see them at work pretty much every time I play in a crowded casino, and yet for years I have been hearing that they don't exist or can't exist, or if they did exist, they'd go broke in a heartbeat.

All I can say to those who insist that they have never seen Martin Gale at work is Pay attention!

The truth is that both 3-Play and 2-2-1 work well because they take advantage of the fact that most of the time, potential losing streaks are terminated by a player win within two or three consecutive player losses.

I have posted reams of corroborative RNG output on that topic, so there's no need for me to repeat it.

All I want to say this time as that in spite of detailed proof that long-term winning is possible against casino table games and in the sports books, the majority of players would much rather lose than win, and will never try strategies that would make gambling profitable for them in the long run.

I came to the conclusion long ago that it's all about guilt!

Most players (especially weekend punters on a shoestring budget) feel in their hearts that when they place a bet, they're doing something they probably should not be doing, and subconsciously they expect, even want, to be punished.

Those that don't have guilt in the back of their minds are pragmatists who assume that if it were possible for a player to win in the long run, casinos and bookies would not take bets.

And so, again, they expect to lose.

I found the 2-2-1 pitch contradictory, because the same source promotes courses and seminars that cost around $700 a pop, and claim to "teach" players how to spot a winning trend ahead of time, and milk it before backing off at just the right moment.

The truth is, of course, that both winning and losing streaks (or trends) can only be accurately measured after the fact, and nothing can change the mathematical reality that every bet is subject to the same negative expectation, give or take a tiny fraction of a percentage point.

Target, its 3-Play variation and 2-2-1 all exploit the plain truth that most of the time, a player loss is followed by a house loss, and vice versa, and that three consecutive player losses are a relatively rare event.

Use 2-2-1 and L, L, W won't make you money, but 3-Play will.

On the other hand, 2-2-1 will save you a little against a L, L, L sequence, and 3-Play will push you further behind.

Both methods require that you chase a potential winning streak if you are still in the hole after a mid-recovery win, and both are intended to protect you against a prolonged losing streak.

This blog has existed for more than four years, along with other posts I have been putting up since the late 1990s, for the benefit of the one player in a hundred who is willing to believe that losing is not an inevitable punishment for daring to gamble in the first place!

For even longer than this blog has been up, I have been demonstrating a progressive betting variation that is consistently profitable against horse-race and sports betting, in each case making selections essentially at random but applying an algorithm which is disciplined and fearless.

But as with casino table games, track and sports punters would mostly rather lose than win.

That's their right, of course.

For the sake of the few readers who agree with me that long-term profits from gambling don't have to be exclusive to casinos and bookies, here are a couple of summaries that compare 3-Play and 2-2-1 results against a random number generator set up to simulate field bets at craps.

As you can see, the house edge for the data set, which is of course the same for each of the above summaries, was far less than negative expectation for field bets at craps, which is normally just a pip or two better than -3.0%.

But in each case, after 5,000 rolls of the dice—equal to at least 2-3 weeks of continuous daily play!—the outcome bore no relationship to the negative outcome that would have applied if bets had been placed randomly.

2-2-1 delivered a solid win with the least risk of the three variations of progressive betting shown, 3-Play won a higher percentage of greatly increased action, and 2-2-2 won handily but was not quite as profitable as the other capped Martingales.

Those two deadly words, progressive and betting are routinely derided by casinos and bookmakers, and feared by most players because they conjure up a picture of huge risk for little or no reward.

In fact, progressive betting is the one and only way that negative expectation can be overcome, a statement that will come as no surprise to readers who have passed this way before.

Negative expectation is an immutable enemy that every gambler has to face down with every bet he makes.

But it can be beaten, again and again, and long-term player profits are possible in spite of it.

Unfortunately, most of you don't wish to know that!

 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. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bodog, spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this. _

3-Play kills the house edge at casino table games, but anyone who expects to win online has to be crazy. Online sports books are a different ballgame (really!) and that's where Target can make you a winner. Safely.

 _
It's been six months less one day since I last posted here, and my excuse is that I have been happily tied up working on the best online betting method since...well, since online betting began.

I don't want to push the 3-Play post too far down the screen (there's a lot of good advice there!) so I'm just going to provide a link and let readers weigh the facts for themselves.  In a few days, the Sethbets website will be password-protected.

Here's a quick summary of 2013 results to date:

There's a lot more corroborative data on the Target Sports web pages...

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. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bodog, spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this. _

Introducing 3-Play. It's not as much fun as, um, foreplay, but (for most of us) it's a whole lot more profitable. And by keeping wagers in check, it makes Target-style progressive betting just a little less scary.

OK, I confess I was planning to keep the "3-Play" modification of the Target rules to myself, since I'm not selling anything on these pages (or anywhere else!) and too many people going home with house money might force those sneaky casinos to make their games tougher to beat.

But then I saw the above bit of mythematical sleight of tongue, and decided to let everyone join in the fun.

Let me first of all make it quite clear that the analysis referenced by Imspirit in yet another of his stupefying attempts to spread gambling industry disinformation was not Target.

My version of progressive betting is perfectly capable of running in the green for more than 54,000 automated and human-free shoes of baccarat before being "debunked" by a one-in-a-zillion losing streak, but the author of the strategy in question was a gentleman whose PhD presumably makes him even smarter than I am.

Imspirit, regular readers will remember, was the guy who changed the rules of my betting strategy specifically to record a "loss" against a simulated baccarat data set that anyone can access online.

It took the guy weeks to agree to make his deliberately fraudulent work available for my analysis, and when I pointed out his multiple errors in methodology, he pronounced himself "not interested" in running his evaluation of Target again with the correct rules in place.

Oh, well, so much for accuracy and integrity.  Or being "just"...

The Lim Method Imspirit examined, probably without properly applying the rules, ran profitably for the equivalent of more than forty years of playing baccarat five hours a day, five days a week, for 50 weeks every year, before a spectacular crash and burn.

Imspirit was then delighted to pronounce the method catastrophic on the basis of two anomalous losing streaks that it is both logical and scientific to conclude probably would not have had a chance to prove fatal if a real player betting real money in real time had been on the receiving end of real cards dealt from a real shoe.

All simulations (my own included) assume the participation of a suicidal player with limitless funds on one side of the table, and on the other side of the game, a casino willing to accept bets from one to thousands of units at the same layout.  Neither element exists in real life, obviously, but "sims" save time and money so we're stuck with them.

To the nitty-gritty, finally:

Progressive betting is a strategy that recognizes and exploits the mathematical given that since in the long run no one can hope to win more often than he or she loses, the only way to consistently beat the house advantage is to win more money when you win than you lose when you lose.

It takes arithmetic to beat arithmetic is another way to put it.

The problem with progressive betting is that it can push bet values very high indeed before recovery or turnaround is achieved, and a losing session or series of bets is at last profitably concluded.

Target mitigates the draw-down problem to some extent by limiting increases in wagers from one bet to the next to a handful at a time (unlike, for example, a Martingale, which keeps doubling the bet until a win recovers all prior losses, and a new series begins with a minimum wager).

After telling Target students to be flexible and to tailor the strategy to their own style and resources, I usually recommend at least a 3x bet after an opening loss, followed by at least one double-up (-1, -3, -6) before freezing the bet until a win ends a losing streak.

Better yet, x5 after an opening loss, then x2 twice (-1, -5, -10, -20), but that needs a hefty bankroll and gonads to match.

3-Play is a more cautious way to go, one that's based on the mathematical certainty that over time, more than 85% of all streaks either way (for the player or for the house) will end in three bets or fewer.

The math is simple enough: In a relatively even game (blackjack or baccarat, for example), half of all outcomes will be followed by an opposite outcome (+1, -1), 25% will extend to one more win (+1, +1, -1, either way) and half as many again will be three like outcomes, followed by an opposite (+1, +1, +1, -1).

Add 50% to 25% to 12% and you will see that in the long run 87% of all house winning streaks will end in three bets or fewer.

The same applies to player winning streaks, of course, but we will get to that in a moment.

At a full-size baccarat layout with multiple seats filled, it's possible to apply 3-Play by sitting out after three consecutive opening losses in a new series (say, -1, -5, -10).

Assuming you're too smart to swallow the casino crap about Banker being the only smart bet in the game of baccarat, you would be backing Player and a nine-round Banker winning streak would look like this: -1, -5, -10, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, (0).  And after missing out on the Player win that ended the losing run, your Target bet in response to the trigger would be 26u.

As always, your chances of winning your hoped-for turnaround bet are no better or worse than for any other bet, namely a pip or two above a 49% probability at baccarat.

What we're saying in the bet sequence above is that we hope to win a minimum of 1u per round overall, although we won't complain if a "chop" (B, P, B, P, B, B, P, B) pattern persists throughout the shoe, and we end up with an even bigger profit than that.

The standard Target sequence for the above rounds would be -1, -5, -10, -10, -10, -10, -10, -10, -10, +10, making the recovery or turnaround bet worth 76u instead of 3-Play's 26u.

My recommended sequence would be in even bigger trouble after nine consecutive losses: -1, -5, -10, -20, -20, -20, -20, -20, -20, +20 (-(116+10) = 126u, cut to 100u if an NB=PBx5 cap is applied).

The idea is to accept a smaller overall win in exchange for fewer (I'm using the technical term here) brown-trouser moments, and 3-Play does a very good job of that.

However you choose to apply progressive betting, you're going to run into logistical problems from time to time, the most common being that your required next bet exceeds the current table limit, and you have to move to a more expensive layout to get the money down.

You'll also encounter baccarat games where sitting out for one or more rounds is not permitted by the house, in which case, you should simply drop the bet to the table minimum, and proceed that way.

The minimum drop is the only option at blackjack, too, but at craps and roulette you can skip as many rounds as you want without being hassled.  You're facing tougher odds at those two games, but that should not worry you until the NB (next bet) values climb really high.

As I am always saying, I dislike mindless sims.  But at least they help illustrate what can happen when a betting strategy's rules are modified against the same set of random outcomes.

For example, here's a 5,000-round RNG sample with Target backing Player throughout, with 3-Play applied with the sit-out option (-1, -5, -10, 0):

And next, 3-Play applied the same way against the same random data set, but with Target betting BANKER all the way:

We get a tidy profit whichever side we choose to bet, meaning that partners betting opposites independently at the same table would both be winners after 5,000 rounds (roughly 65 shoes, or two weeks of grind for a player with an extremely high boredom threshold!).

A pattern you will see repeated pretty much every time is that, in spite of the fact that the Banker bettor won more often against the same set of outcomes, the so-called "5%" commission saw to it that he or she went home with two-thirds of the Player profits.

Sure, Banker wins more often than it loses.  But the house gouge more than makes up for the difference, over and over again, and if you are a Banker slave (as many baccarat players sadly are) you will pay dearly for those extra wins.

Here's the same data sample with Target staying in the game with 3-Play dropping to a 1-unit bet after three opening losses:

...and Banker against the same outcomes:

Again, "Banker" took home 40% less than "Player" because of that ugly commission rake.

I have on occasion admitted to switching temporarily from Player to Banker after a prolonged losing streak, and I hate to do it.

When I make the hop to the dark side, I hop right back to Player as soon as I rack up a turnaround.  And every potential recovery bet (defined as any bet that will get you out of the hole if it wins) is subject to a boost of at least 10% to cover the "Bank Tax."

Truth is, baccarat is in my view the most numbingly tedious game that isn't played on ice (sorry, curling fans) and its only saving grace is that in most casinos, routine table limits are higher at full-size layouts than they are for blackjack.

So, that's all I have for now on 3-Play, a great way to go for Target players who prefer to trade bigger wins for smaller risks.

And if course, like any other, my RNG can be prodded into showing a "catastrophic" loss for Target.  But in real play, I don't sit still for 27-round losing streaks, and my guess is that neither do you.

Target's overall win rate sits at 99.95% (five losses in 10,000 series is a worst-case scenario) and that's a very considerable improvement over the random bettor's 49.35% win expectation betting Player at baccarat.

Obviously, you won't win any more often with Target: Negative expectation will always see to it that over time, the number of your wins will be exceeded by your number of losses.

But you will leave the casino with more cash than you took to the game over and over and over again because (as in the first screen shot above) your average win (+19) exceeded your average loss (-15) by a percentage far greater at +23% than the actual value (AV) of the house edge for the same 5,000 outcomes (1.16%).

Given the AV, if you had been betting randomly and racked up the same action as Target, you "should have" LOST almost 1,000 units.

Instead, you WON more than 7,000u (almost +8.8% of your action instead of -1.16%).

And that, folks, is the name of the game when you play it with Target on your side.

(Here's the streak analysis for the 5,000 random outcomes that produced the screenshots above):

 


_ 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. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bovada (formerly Bodog), spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this. _

It's fine by me if the gambling biz wants to portray me as a clueless crackpot. But stupid? Now they have crossed the line! Oh, and if you're looking for gambling's holy grail* it's been right here for years...

...

Let me first reassure my loyal readers that I'm not the crackpot who's threatened to sue the author of the rant extracted above (which continues at length on his blog).

I'm a different crackpot.

As it happens, I would not trust this guy to accurately count his own fingers and toes, let alone run a fair and open-minded evaluation of a betting strategy intended to overcome the house advantage at casino games of chance.

That's because about a year ago, Virtuoid aka Imspirit ("wishing I were just") took it upon himself to publish a detailed debunking of my Target strategy based upon an algorithm that later turned out to bear scant resemblance to the progressive rules set that has been evolving for years.

When I was first directed to Imspirit's exhaustive demolition of my work, I scratched my head and wondered why someone apparently dedicated to the pursuit of accurate and unbiased mathematics would undertake such a project without first checking the rules with the source.

Target's methodology is a lot less complicated than it used to be, but it still has to be followed with discipline and confidence, plus a bankroll that will sometimes need to be very large indeed (it grows rapidly, so that problem diminishes over time).

I took Imspirit's failure to consult me as a clue that something fishy was probably going on, and pressed him for weeks to explain exactly how he got the results he did.

After more than a month, the blog supplied a link to a page that identified the Buzzard of Bovada's 1,000 simulated 8-deck shoes of baccarat as Imspirit's source of outcomes, and listed the "Target" bets line by line.

Surprise!  Imspirit had tossed out Target's limit on the extent to which a bet can exceed the value of the preceding bet, widened the recommended betting spread by a factor of four, and ignored a critical rule about what to do if a first turnaround attempt after a mid-recovery win is a failure.

No explanation.  No apology.  Nothing!

I was particularly offended by the Imspirit travesty, because the guy (the only other name I have for him is Dave) provided a slew of negative data and charts based on the blatant abuse of a verifiable source of outcomes that I knew for sure Target had knocked into a cocked hat, as they say in the old country.

Why, oh why would he do that?

The Buzzard of Bovada, by the way, is better known online as the Wizard of Odds.  I prefer to recognize his professional role not as someone on the side of the players, but as an unashamed and blatant shill for a web gambling operation with questionable credentials and a murky reputation.

You'll find Mike Shackleford's 1,000 simulated 8-deck shoes and 1,000 6-deck shoes by clicking on whichever you choose to look at.

Zumma's data sets are subject to copyright, but available to anyone with persistence and a commitment to accuracy that V/D/I apparently lacks.

For the record, here's a summary from a recent run-through of the actual Target algorithm applied to the Buzzard's 1,000 8-deck data set:

 And the Buzzard's 6-deck simulated shoes:

Plus for good measure, Target's result against 1,000 "real shoes" that Zumma Publishing put out years ago:

And 600 more Zumma shoes made available more recently:

 
Combine the four separate verifiable trials, and you get this:

Yes, there were some losses in there.  And yes, there are some very large red numbers along the way to the overall win against almost 250,000 verifiable baccarat outcomes.

But I ask you to keep in mind that in simulations like these, the "player" is required to keep betting through crippling losing streaks, and we are also assuming the existence of a casino that would permit bets ranging from two to six digits at the same layout.

Neither conceit has any application to real life.

The above summaries include at bottom right a breakdown of major threats to the bankroll in each sample of outcomes, and a threat is defined as any series requiring a maximum bet.  Would anyone keep betting against a baccarat shoe that had the house 21 bets ahead?  Or even 10 bets ahead?  I don't think so.

Periodically, someone challenges me for "changing the rules" of Target, ignoring the fact that since I first posted a progressive betting method online (in 1996!) I have stressed the need for flexibility and a commonsense approach to whatever the game might be.

There's really only one rule that matters, and that is that after one or more losses in a new sequence of wagers that began with a minimum bet, you must be ready to venture a sum that covers your loss to date (LTD) plus your chosen win target (hence the name of the strategy).

I have not updated the rules set available if you click for it at the top of this blog, and I don't plan to.

But the summaries shown here include the application of a couple of very significant updates: If the first turnaround or recovery attempt in a losing series is lost, bet LTD+ a second time, and set a limit on how large a multiple of the previous bet (PB) your next bet (NB) is allowed to be in response to a mid-recovery win.

Another cunning little wrinkle, which is entirely player's choice, adds 1 unit to the win target for each bet in the current series, so that if your potential recovery is triggered by a win on bet #8, your next bet will be LTD+9.

You can also cut the PBx factor after an opening loss to less than 5 if you wish, although I don't recommend less than x3 because that way, a win with bet #2 will give you a profit of 1 unit for each of the two bets in the series.

Simple enough, and very, very effective.  Unless, of course, you happen to be a gambling industry mouthpiece so lacking in integrity that you will change the Target rules in order to "prove" that progressive betting doesn't beat the house advantage in the long run.

Winning in a casino always comes down to this simple truth: Over time, you will lose more often than you win, which means that when you win, you must win more on average than you lose when you lose; the only way you can achieve that is by the consistent, confident and well-funded application of progressive betting.

Red or black, odd or even, Player or Banker...none of that stuff matters, and any betting strategy that claims to rely on patterns, trends or predictive switching is a load of hogwash, to put it mildly.

In baccarat, I refuse to bet on the Bank if I can avoid it, which is 99 times out of 100.  When my arm is twisted, I goose the target after a win by at least 10% to cover the commission gouge, making a $500 Banker bet $550 and more often $600 so that if I win, I cover the house's outright theft of my hard-earned money, plus a little extra.  Again, a player's choice option!

Next, a summary that shows very effectively why Target in particular and progressive betting in general is the best and only safe bet in the long run.

The house edge for the quarter-million baccarat rounds was high at 1.43%...but Target kicked house butt anyway, and that's all that matters.

Sure, your chances of seeing the "twins" (two consecutive wins) you need to turn a losing series around are no better than the house's win probability at that moment, but that's not a problem because you just keep trying again and again until you prevail.

It's all about the right bet at the right time, a trick most players somehow don't learn in a lifetime of losing.

(If you want to start learning in your own time and in your own home, here's one way.)

An analysis of any truly random data set will show numbers very close to those above.

What we see (and always will) is confirmation that most wins will be followed by a loss, and most losses will be followed by a win.

Paired losses and paired wins are about half as frequent as isolated outcomes of either stripe, and triples are roughly half as frequent again.

Most important of all, more than 70% of streaks in either direction will end after two rounds (the rationale for Target's recommended -1, -5, ?10 opening sequence) and more than 85% and after three rounds.

Numbers, numbers, numbers: everything else in a casino is a distraction, and bet selection has no role to play.

Make a choice, stick with it through thick and thin, and with Target's help, you'll make money.

Without Target, you'll need a lot of luck.  I just hope you agree with the casinos that losing is a whole lot of fun...

Finally, I'd like to address Imspirit's claim that all "crackpots" base their loony claims on innumeracy and/or faulty computer simulations.

For all the years I have been doing this, it has been my habit to question every positive long-term result that my computer models indicate, and to build simulations that have built-in error checks.

The Target Betting rules can be modified in all of the models so that I can see the effect of each variation bet by bet or line by line.

That means that every Target "x factor" can be reduced to the lowest whole number above zero, and if the model is reporting accurately, the strategy's bottom line with a "1" in every trigger box will precisely match the sum total of all wins and losses.

So, if betting a single unit on every round shows a net result of -136 units after 10,000 bets (an actual value or AV indicating a negative expectation or NE of -1.36%) the Target summary block must show the same number or something's up.

Mistakes are a major time-waster and I won't tolerate them (although unlike Imspirit and other casino-sponsored mythematicians, I'm just a stupid human being and sometimes it takes me an hour or two to spot 'em and fix 'em!).

Let's imagine a roulette session in which a Target player with deep pockets and a razor-sharp talent for mental arithmetic bets Red and Black, Odd and Even and First and Last (aka Low and High) all at the same time.

Sure he's betting against himself, technically, but that's because he hates to lose!

Here's a sample output from a roulette model I created years ago but tidied up a little recently so I could let it out of the house:

First, I want to make it clear that results like this cannot possibly be guaranteed for six simultaneous bets against a game with an expected 5.26% house edge (this is double-zero roulette) and an AV that turned out to be a full percentage point higher than that.

I play roulette from time to time, but as soon as I get into just a little trouble, I take up my chips and walk to a less deadly game (usually blackjack).  But what the heck, this was a free trial...

Target's 6,000 bets in 1,000 wheel spins showed a net profit of +3.7% against an overall AV of more than -6.0%.

Imspirit and his casino-coddled cohorts would tell you that a result like that is impossible without blatant chicanery or a stupid mistake.

That's what they always say, because it's their job to keep you from finding out that if you bet progressively with a disciplined plan and money behind it, you will in the long run beat the bleep out of any casino game that has a house edge below 2.0%.

Next, here's what the same roulette model reports when all the Target switches or rules are "turned off":

The bottom line is that only my readers can judge whether or not I'm faking these results.

And all I can say is: Why would I do that...?

I'm not selling anything.  And please believe me, I am my own toughest critic! 

As for that ultimate scare word, progression, it is in the best interests of the gambling industry that whenever a player hears or reads that word, he or she should think of the Martingale and endless doubling, and reject the whole idea as suicidal.

As it happens, a capped Martingale can do very well for a very long time, and the casinos know that and will do whatever it takes to protect their profits from its unwanted effects.  Try it sometime!

Target Betting is, of course, a progression (it's also progressive, but that's something else again).

The big difference is that Target interrupts progressive betting as often as is necessary before recovery is achieved.

It slams hard at the front end of a losing streak, backs off, slams again, and keeps on switching from tiger to tabby cat and back again until a profit has been achieved.

The probable long-term success of the method is predicted by the chart above, which confirms that over time, streaks either way usually do not last long.

Let's look at a Martingale sequence with Target's approach alongside it:

Sure, I have manipulated the numbers here to create a worst-case scenario with a 0.006% probability, but it serves to illustrate the difference between a restrained progression and what the casinos want you to think the word progression means so that you will avoid it.

Here's a more likely scenario:

This time, the Martingale (aka 2x, double-up and other scary aliases) did better in percentage terms, but once again lagged in bottom-line profits.

With Target, you can basically do whatever you want after the second or third loss in a losing streak, but you must revert to the LTD+ win target rule in response to a mid-series win.

Some Target players prefer to slow down the escalation of bet sizes by refusing to bet more than a parlay after a mid-recovery win.  It slows the winning process down and because of that I don't recommend it...but it still works.

I have heard from other Target followers who choose to keep on reducing their bets during a prolonged losing streak, saving their chips for an extra hard SLAM! in response to a win.  I don't recommend that either (I'm a purist)...but it works.

Target's win rate is confirmed by error-checked and fully verifiable simulations to run at around 99.97%.  If those predicted three losses in 10,000 bets are sure to wipe out all your prior winnings, what's the point, you might ask.

That begs another question: Why play at all...?

Without an effective betting strategy (one that makes all your decisions for you and frees you from the extreme hazards of random wagering) you have less than a 50-50 chance of winning in the long run.

A win rate of 99.97% may not be a sure thing, but I'm just stupid enough to believe that it is a big improvement on all the alternatives.

(For more about accuracy, please visit this page at Sethbets.com).

* Caveat: If you are looking for a way to pile up profits in a casino with a shoestring bankroll and little or no risk, you should pass Target by and continue your quest through the rest of this life and into the hereafter.  The bad news: They don't have casinos in heaven, I'm told, because everyone there is already a winner.  In hell, the casinos cheat, although they do that here on earth anyway.  What table games come down to is that as long as the player has full control of bet values and has the discipline to fully exploit that control, the house edge can be consistently beaten.  But casinos apply spread limits precisely because they know this to be a mathematical fact, and players cripple themselves by applying stringent spread limits to their own play (usually because they can't afford to do otherwise).  A spread of less than 1 to 100 can make a player a steady winner for hours on end, but always at some point, a much wider range will be called for, and by then, 99.9% of all punters will be broke.  I have been saying this for years: If you can't afford to win, you shouldn't play. Getting those words out to people who I believe need to be wiser is the sole motivation for this blog and all the other words I have ever written about progressive betting.

_ 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. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bovada (formerly Bodog), spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this. _