It would be great to win all the time, but the gambling industry would hate us for it. So how about a 99.989% win rate?

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Last time, I put up data that showed target betting flipping a $3 million LOSS betting Banker only into a $3 million WIN simply by compensating for the damage done by the 5% commission on Banker wins.

We have already seen that backing Player only against the same data set, avoiding commission entirely, would have been very profitable using the target betting technique.

So how about "the Wobble," my Americanized name for a bet-selection method the French call avant dernier (thanks, Google, for helping me discover the correct word order and spelling for "before last" en Francais)...?

The idea is that you catch streaks either way in baccarat or roulette by betting on whichever even-money option came up in the hand or spin before the last won, so P,P would call for a bet on Player, and B,R would indicate a bet on black.

It's not a bad way to go, because there is nothing more frustrating than zigging when the shoe or wheel zags (or vice versa!).

Given a six-bet Player streak at baccarat that was preceded by P,B you will catch 5 of 6 wins, or 4 of 6 if the streak was preceded by B,B.

Being right two-thirds of the time is certainly better than missing every switch in the kind of ping-pong pattern that is common in both baccarat and roulette.

Wobble comes from win before last (WBL), and it is a useful escape from brain strain for those players who need a break from blackjack or (horrors!) refuse to play it at all.

My reluctance to allow the house to withhold 5% of the win that just turned around a losing sequence and put me back in the black has kept me away from Banker bets for years.

I now accept that that was probably a mistake.

It is certainly true that when Player is getting hammered for hand after hand, the voice in my ear that whispers "just bet Banker" gets louder and louder until the only alternative is to stand up and walk away from the game.

I would like to be able to report that adding the 5% skim to target betting gave WBL a solid win against the baccarat data set, but it did not happen, and here are four good reasons why:

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
When I first posted my ideas on an Internet gambling forum a dozen years ago, target betting was quite a bit more complicated than it is today and I was repeatedly "flamed" (such a '90s term!) to a crisp when I suggested that players with more than half a brain do not stick around when the dice, deck, shoe, wheel or whatever turns against them.

Damage control is a non-viable concept, said the experts, because no one can ever know if backing away from a downturn will be jumping from the frying pan into the fire, or if the negative trend would have reversed itself if the evasion tactic had been ignored.

Overall, they say, it's a wash: a little less than half the time, damage control will help, and a little more than half the time, it won't.

The "experts," I want you to know, are full of it.

For a fixed-bet or random player, they may actually be right. But for a target bettor (a progression player is another way to describe him) they have it all wrong.

Take another look at the fatal four-pack above.

The experts tell us that when a prolonged spike in the house's favor occurs, pushing the HA far beyond standard negative expectation for the game, there is no reason to hope that it will be substantively offset in time to enable recovery of prior losses.

Again, that may (or may not) be true for a random punter. But for a player who can get out of the hole with two consecutive wins, and more than half the time can make a profit with just ONE win, ducking a potentially deadly downturn will prove right far more often than not.

Each of the killer streaks above was followed by offsets that would have handed target betting a turnaround in a heartbeat. They just didn't come soon enough for the robot player who opted to keep taking punches on the nose instead of picking up his chips and walking away.

Runaway sims "beat" any betting method ever devised by requiring the preposterous assumption that a player would not respond to a downturn like the ones you see above.

He would just keep on betting until his bankroll ran out.

Common sense does not support that conceit any more than science does.

Because of spread limits and the constant need to maintain a low profile to avoid casino interference with a winning method, a target player does not have to trust his own judgment to figure out the right time to bail out of a downturn. The strategy rules do the job for him.

I recommend a 1-5 spread limit in any one location, except at an opening layout (one where you started with a minimum bet), where 1-20 is probably OK.

In the "killer" series above, target betting would have been out of the first one 11 gets in with a $300 loss and a ($575) LTD.

The fatal series in #13 began with seven consecutive losses, and a move would have come before the 11th bet at -200 (-375).

In #20, we would probably have been out at -100 (-100) after four consecutive opening wins, and certainly after the next loss (-200).

Finally, #23's black hole would have ended after at most seven bets at -200 (-375).

Applying those strict rules would of course have affected countless other series and required a whole lot of healthy exercise and worn out shoe leather.

But one thing we know for sure is that on average, recoveries come in less than SIX bets, and series dragging on for TEN bets or more are substantially less than a 10% probability.

And let's face it, probability is what gambling in a casino is all about.

You have to know the numbers, and how to exploit them for consistent profit.

Usually, I figure at least a 99.992% win rate for target betting.

This time, the strategy delivered 99.989%, darn it.

Against a 1.35% HA game, a random punter's win rate will be 49.335%, giving him an expected 5,068 losses in 10,000 bets.

Target betting's performance betting the Wobble against the baccarat data set was ONE loss in 10,000 series (about 55,000 bets!).

You choose: 1 loss in 55,000 or 27,870 in 55,000!

OK, it's a trick question, because of course target betting will lose as many individual bets as any other method. The house advantage will see to that.

The 1 loss in 55,000 rounds is not just a loss, it is ruin, crash and burn, wipe-out or whatever else you might choose to call it.

What matters is that with target betting, more lost bets than won bets will not result in an overall loss of money 99.989% of the time.

The reverse, in fact.

Except once in 55,000 rounds IF you are dumb enough to sit still and suck it up when the house edge goes haywire.

Here are the data for the WBL "skim" run-through:


An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
_

Math orders the universe, so you can be sure it won't wait outside while you are betting the farm in a casino.

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On the face of it, it's tough to argue with the mathematical rationale that "proves" that the house advantage at casino games of chance cannot be beaten in the long run.

So most people don't bother to try.

The logic goes pretty much like this: Even if you bet Banker all the way at baccarat, winning more often than you lose, the 5% commission on all wins will see to it that your are in the hole at the end of the day.

That's because each time you win, you are paid a little less than even money, but every losing bet is 100% in the toilet.

Here is an example of what you can expect in, say, three years of playing baccarat for five hours a day, five days a week:

Total rounds excl. ties 315,049
Average bet value ABV $527
Banker edge 1.36%

Total action $166,047,465
Total wins $83,588,338
Total losses ($82,459,127)
Gross win $1,129,211
Commission on all wins $4,179,417
Net outcome, a LOSS of ($3,050,206)

This is not good news!

What happened in the scenario above was that bet values were in effect randomly selected, and the "Banker edge" was simply not enough to offset the 5.0% gouge.

Winning more often than you lose is a rare privilege in a casino, especially after sitting through more than 315,000 wagers!

But if the so-called "5%" commission at baccarat is going to leave you with a whopping liability that's almost 4x your total win, what's the point?

Now let's try the same scenario with target betting applied at every step to ensure that (sing along with me) you win more when you win than you lose when you lose.

Total rounds excl. ties 315,049
Average bet value ABV $527
Banker edge 1.36% (4.46%)

Total action $166,047,465
Total wins $86,837,610
Total losses ($79,426,415)
Gross win $7,411,195
Commission on all wins $4,341,881
Net outcome, a WIN of $3,069,315

AWB/ALB 109.33% vs. W/L +1.36%

There is nothing magical or mysterious about the results achieved in the second scenario. It's just math.

Note the two numbers after Banker edge, above. The first is the actual value (AV) derived from dividing the difference between the greater number of wins and the lesser number of losses by the total number of outcomes. The second is (money won minus money lost) divided by (overall action).

Now check out the AWB/ALB percentage (for average winning bet divided by average losing bet). That is target betting's sole objective.

The bottom line was a healthy positive number in the second scenario because although the total bets won (as opposed to the total money won) was the same in both examples, target betting won far more chips than haphazard wagering did, and lost fewer.

What we see here is discipline (a PLAN!) at work. And I think we can agree that winning is better than losing.

I revisited the baccarat data and plugged in the missing requirement that all potential EOS bets be boosted by 5% to cover commission due on a turnaround win.

Here's how it looks:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
I am still inclined to recommend that betting Player only and avoiding commission is the best way to apply target betting to baccarat if you really must stray from the blackjack tables.

But the effectiveness of the 5% "skim" makes a compelling case for flexibility, and it is certainly true that the more options you permit yourself in a casino, the more likely you are to win while maintaining a low profile.

Field bets at craps can be lucrative, even-money bets at roulette too. Even 3-card poker can boost your bankroll, if you ignore Pair-plus and halve your LTD before making a potential EOS bet (ante the first half and bet the rest if you have a hand worth backing).

But whenever a series starts to get serious you should back away from a high-HA game and take your chips and your LTD/NB numbers to a friendlier game: blackjack or baccarat.

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.
_

Gambling is not sensible, logical or rational. Mathematics is nothing but. So what am I trying to do here? Win sensibly, that's what!

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I have spent most of this week testing my idea that the crippling effect of the baccarat gouge (the so-called 5% commission on Banker wins) can be overcome by arithmetic.

I plowed into the problem well aware that every baccarat book ever written says the game cannot be beaten, and that no less a gambling luminary than Prof. Edward O. Thorp gave up trying way back in the 1980s.

I actually met the man at a backgammon bash in Pebble Beach, Calif., more than 30 years ago, and the author of the best-selling blackjack bible of all time told me then that he had baccarat in his sights as his next gambling target.

Pity it didn't work out for him...

First, a summary of the results achieved when what I now think of as "skim theory" is applied to the 315,000 baccarat outcomes mentioned in earlier posts.

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

The highlighted columns contain results from individual data sets for Player only bets, Banker bets without the "skim" modification, and Banker bets with the anti-gouge LTD adjustment applied.

The surprise to me is that the new method turns out to be an even better bet than staying away from commission wagers entirely (+2.22% of overall action vs. +1.53%).

But I should be used to surprises by now: the good ones help me to do a better job, and the bad ones teach valuable lessons before I bury them forever.

Academic mathematicians and others who oppose the idea that the house advantage in casino games of chance is vulnerable will reject these results. That's their loss, because there is a lot they could learn here if they would only open their minds!

They will doubtless argue that 315,000 outcomes is not a representative sample, or that I somehow managed to massage that huge data set until I came up with a rules combination that beat over 4,000 shoes of baccarat. Sorry, guys.

As always, my methodology has been scrupulously careful, fair and accurate. Any other approach to the challenge would be a waste of time and toil.

The bottom line here is that backing Banker all the way does not have to be a losing proposition in spite of the fact that every win pays less than even money.

Beating one of the most artfully camouflaged rip-offs on the casino floor does not require any change to the rules of target betting other than the deduction of 5% from the value of each win before it is applied to the loss to date (LTD).

My erstwhile baccarat buddy would probably tell me that this new approach is a no-brainer and that he does it already. But unless he has changed his ways in recent years, he doesn't and he won't. His "method" is to apply target betting rules to a point, then abandon them at the time he needs them the most. And as a result, he is a certain long-term loser, with no hope of recovery.

The effect of the "skim" is that a recovery series continues until enough has been won to offset prior losses PLUS all commission due on winning bets throughout that series.

And the rules modification is greatly helped by the fact that over time, there will always be more wins for Banker than for Player (betting under those conditions is a unique experience for me!).

It sounds simple, if not simple-minded, but consistency is the key to beating the house advantage, and that is a very uncomplicated concept.

Hard as I try to get everything right, the one thing I did not build into this week's test is a 105% boost to each potential EOS bet to offset commission due after recovery. I'll get to that later...

Note that the total action required for the modified method to win $6.3 million before commission is fractionally less than the action necessary to make Player a $2 million winner.

And I don't doubt for a moment that even better results could be achieved by letting "The Math" identify a more efficient antidote to the gouge.

I don't want to get into that here because of the academic prohibition against "twiddling and tweaking."

As things stand, the models apply bets that would be rounded up in real play, inflating overall action but hopefully also benefiting the final win. That is one problem with a mathematically accurate, nit-picky approach: precision must sometimes be compromised to a degree to reflect reality, but only after a theory has been proved.

Speaking of reality, here's a chart of the win-loss pattern (WLP) that was disastrous for Player-only bets against the Rodriguez/Jones baccarat sets and led to the one "bust" in more than 50,000 successful recoveries:-


Bear with me a moment and ask yourself if you would stick around for an over-the-cliff plunge like this if you were playing baccarat for real money and a shoe went this far south this fast.

If your answer is No, as mine sure is, the next question that's begged is, Would it make any difference in the long run if you walked away from every egregious "house spike" in the hope of finding a friendlier WLP elsewhere?

The academic defenders of the status quo say no, absolutely not. But both mathematics and common sense say they are wrong when gambling is set aside and target betting replaces it in the equation.

For a fixed or random bettor there will often come a point where the hole he is in is too deep for the longest ladder (in the form of a partial reversal of a negative trend). Once he is 20 or 30 bets behind, as in the pattern depicted here, he's dead meat.

But the target strategist is only seriously threatened when he reaches his maximum bet value, which has nothing to do with table limits and all to do with how much money he has behind him.

Until then, two wins in succession will get him out of the hole...a mighty short ladder by any definition. And more often than not, a single win will save his bacon.

So while the mythematicians who manipulate arithmetic in the service of the gambling industry are not exactly telling a lie when they say you can't run away from bad luck, their "truth" does not apply to target betting.

I will be posting some more "over a cliff" sequences for your amusement from time to time. And I use the cliff analogy with good reason, recognizing that seeing into the future is a little easier on the road than it is in a casino.

Imagine that you are driving down a mountain road and you see a sharp curve coming up and what could be a 1,000ft drop straight ahead. Do you apply the brakes and turn the wheel, or do you keep going? The answer (Duh!) is so intuitive that it now has a place in the Merriam-Webster American Dictionary: used derisively to indicate that something just stated is all too obvious or self-evident.

And that takes me back to the heading at the top of this post.

Mathematics is not disconnected from logic and good sense, however frustrating and impractical its precision may sometimes be.

Gambling, the way most punters interpret and apply it, is illogical, irrational, imprecise and ultimately chaotic and hopeless (which is not to say that its practitioners do not keep doing the same things over and over again while hoping for a happier result!).

Arithmetic can beat the house, as we see here. Luck cannot.

The runaway sims that mythematicians use to "prove" that the house edge is ultimately unbeatable rely on rare patterns like the one above to undo a betting method.

A car driven at high speed with the steering and brakes disabled will almost certainly crash and burn.

A safety-conscious, sensible driver knows how to navigate the worst roads and weather conditions and get home (or to the bank) alive.

Which ride would you prefer?

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.
_

Strange to wake up in the morning and find your brain has been working on a problem while you slept!

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Don't worry, this is not going to be a post about how dead people can help you win at baccarat (see the first blog entry, archived at left!).

But it is something of an experiment as I adjust to the process of allowing target betting to evolve day by day under public scrutiny.

As I have said many times, baccarat has always seemed to me about as exciting as watching grass grow next to blackjack, but now and then I feel obligated to revisit the game because of its huge international status.

As I drifted off to sleep last night, I was noodling the notion that since Banker always wins more hands than Player over the long run, target betting should be able to exploit that advantage by compensating for "The Gouge."

The gouge, of course, is the so-called 5% commission that, in my test, trimmed a $3.3 million funny-money win all the way down to barely $500,000.

My baccarat partner's long-ago suggestion that chips gobbled up by the gouge could be recovered with a post-EOS bet before NB reverts to the minimum did not at the time strike me as workable, and I still have my doubts.

But what if the potential EOS bet itself incorporated commission paid out during the current series, so that the NB equation would be something like NB=1.05*(LTD+Tgt+Comm)?

The effect might be disastrous, pushing bet values and overall action into the stratosphere and risk along with them.

But because Banker always has a solid edge over Player, it might just work.

The experimental aspect here is that I have never before speculated on the effectiveness of a modification ahead of actually applying it.

Given that I have 315,000 verifiable baccarat outcomes to work with, courtesy of Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Jones, I think it's worth the effort to give it a try.

Once again, the spreadsheet platform rules! Running the test will be straightforward enough, and of course I will post the results here as soon as I am done.

The hard part will be figuring out the conditional formula to make the test accurate and effective!

Watch this space...

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.
_

A test of backing Banker all the way at baccarat, and how the "5%" gouge makes it a very bad idea!

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Baccarat may not be my favorite casino table game, but target betting certainly likes it!

Running queries for data on the effect of backing Player only, Banker only and WBL has in effect turned the Rodriguez and Jones combined data sets of 315,000 outcomes into a monster sample of 945,000, so it was well worth the effort.

Now the job's done, I am relieved to be able to confirm that there are no big surprises.

Many baccarat veterans recommend ignoring the Player option entirely, and my test indicates that if winning more often than you lose floats your boat, then that is the way to go.

But brace yourself for a very large "5%" commission tab that will slash your overall winnings by more than 80% (repeat, 80%, not 5%) and leave you with profits that pale against those achieved by the guy at the same table who used target betting to back just Player every time.

My baccarat buddy (the one who suggested cranking up the EOS bet to recover commission fees after a recovery) insisted from day one that the gouge or "vig" or whatever else it might be called was a non-issue.

I'd say that a penalty that slashes a $3.3 million win by more than four fifths is definitely an issue, but I don't play baccarat much so I will leave it to readers to decide.

I have known for a long time that target betting will prevail even if the outcome of individual rounds is reversed (win to loss, red to black, odd to even or whatever) but have never given it a whole lot of thought because blackjack does not offer that option.

It may be possible to apply the Wobble (WBL or win before last) method to 21, but I figure I have enough stuff to keep in my head when I am playing blackjack, and adding more might cause a gray-matter meltdown! So, I have never tried it. And I am hoping that having said that, I won't be tempted to investigate further.

In the chart and summary below, avoiding commission is confirmed as the right way to tackle baccarat, as long as target betting is the primary ingredient.

"Banker Only" sailed through the test with barely a speed bump, but that's not a surprise because (as we all knew before we got into this) Banker wins more often than Player.

I am still in touch with my former baccarat partner, who steadfastly refuses to do the smart thing and step up to blackjack, and he tells me that in Macao and other exotic gambling locations, commission has been replaced by a rule that gives the house a win on a 6-6 tie.

That change might be better for target betting, but somehow I doubt it. Let's face it, casinos very rarely make rules changes that benefit the player!

One of these days I might be able to evaluate the switch, but I have never bothered to record ties, let alone recommend putting money on them, so that is not on my to-do list for the current decade at least.

To me, baccarat is like dancing in deep treacle compared to blackjack, but I know there are millions of aficionados out there and I recommend that they give disciplined target betting a try.

Here's the promised data...

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
I get a kick out of the fact that, commission aside, target betting kicked butt three ways.

But I am not surprised.

The method did encounter a "bust" backing Player only, and it is true to say that the crash 'n burn could have come along in the very first series. However, given 55,000 successful recoveries and just one fatal downturn, we can conclude that "coulda, woulda, shoulda" the three most pointless words in the gambling glossary, do not apply here.

It makes more sense to speculate about what would have happened if the house spike that cost target betting a million bucks in funny-money had been subjected to the damage control that most players instinctively apply in various ways when the going gets extra tough.

It's moot in any case, because most players would prefer odds of 55,000 to 1 in their favor to odds of 49.33 to 50.67 (-1.35%) against them. I am excluding those gamblers who bet as if losing is fun, of course!

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.
_

Surprise, surprise! Gambling's biggest big lie, the "5%" commission, will make losers out of winners in the long run.

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I said last time that I would at some point process a notional 5% commission on Banker wins throughout the 300,000-plus baccarat outcomes provides by Messrs. Rodriguez and Jones, and as I typed those words, I knew curiosity would make me run the query sooner rather than later.

Curiosity is really what got me into this in the first place: I couldn't believe that something protected by mathematics (the house advantage at games of chance) could not be as easily defeated by mathematics once the key was found.

Spreadsheet archives of large data sets make it relatively easy to revisit the past and apply a "what if?" scenario to potentially point the way to a better future.

My critics say that constantly reworking old data is a sure sign that I am massaging and distorting the numbers to prop up my deranged dream of beating something that is unbeatable.

The truth is that the spreadsheet platform makes it virtually impossible to cheat, especially given that all along I have offered to make my work available for microscopic analysis by the experts who keep telling me that they are far smarter than I am.

The "five percent" question has over the years made me wary of baccarat, because when I looked into the game, I quickly determined that the French derniere avant method of bet selection (backing Player or Banker according to which option won the round before last) had real merit but was sunk by the commission on Banker wins.

I call the method the Wobble, for WBL or win before last, and I am happy to report that a faster computer and enhanced methodology have made it much easier for me to get the information I needed than it was the last time I tried it.

There was just one piece of good news to emerge when all was done and dusted: target betting won handily against what was essentially a whole new set of 315,000 rounds of baccarat, giving it added vindication.

Backing Player throughout resulted in a +1.53% overall win against a house edge that, for the entire 315,000 outcomes, came out at -1.35% (pretty much on the money for baccarat, expectation-wise).

WBL won a lot more bets than Player did, and that, of course, is why those French joueurs love it so. The method catches streaks either way, which would be a handy dodge but for that so-called 5 percent gouge, which of course is why the vignes exists at all. The overall AV for the data set was trimmed from -1.35% to -0.31%.

Backing Player all the way resulted in just one failed recovery in more than 55,000 successes. WBL turned up a second "bust" along the way, but that would not have been fatal without the commission factor, which turned an overall win of $1.17 million into a LOSS of $269,000.

Here's the summary chart...

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
I am tempted now to restart the what-if process to discover how target betting would have fared backing Banker only instead of Player only, although obviously the final win that I am sure would result would be turned blood red by commission deductions.

The big news is that target betting has now been shown to be successful against 630,000 rounds of baccarat and will almost certainly prove effective against an additional 315,000 bets.

The explanation for all this is unchanged from the earliest days of target betting's evolution: Outcomes in games of chance are individually unpredictable, but when grouped together develop patterns that are reliably repeated and can be consistently and very effectively exploited.

The "grouping together" does not imply selection but describes the natural chronological process that occurs as one bet follows another. It is meaningless to players who bet randomly, and is everything to the disciplined strategist who knows that if he follows his plan, time will hand him a win even after he has lost more often than he won.

The original Jones+Rodriguez data set is a representative sample in any terms, since it is equivalent to at least three years of play by a full-time gambler.

The guardians of the status quo are inclined to argue that any sample of outcomes that depicts an overall player win in spite of a clear house advantage must be dismissed as anecdotal and irrelevant. But they have an agenda that does not stand up to serious scrutiny.

I still play baccarat from time to time, and can never shake off the recollection that it was a game invented by a doting Queen to amuse her inbred, bovine son, who was befuddled by the rules of every other card game that then existed.

I like blackjack best of all, partly because of the double-downs, splits and naturals that can boost a turnaround bet into a special payday, but also because each hand has to be played as well as bet upon.

However moronic and monotonous baccarat might sometimes seem to me, I need to get over it and accept that it has grown into the biggest of the big-money games, attracting more high roller dough than even poker (which, in any case, is not a house game).

Naturally (no pun intended) I stand by my recommendation that ideally, bets on Banker should never be placed, or should be limited to, say, $1,000. The real damage is done when critical EOS bets win just 95% of their face value.

It would not be hard to switch gears in mid-series and back Player only until EOS is achieved.

I once spent an enjoyable few weeks playing baccarat with a target betting convert who suggested that the "five percent solution" was to follow up a successful EOS wager with a bet calibrated to recover the combined cost of commission throughout the series that just ended.

So instead of following a $10,000 win on Banker with a reversion to the minimum and the start of a whole new series, there would be a supplementary bet of, say, $3,000 to offset the gouge.

I did not much cotton to the idea because it required a longer EOS winning sequence every time, and I mention it here only because it might appeal to some baccarat aficionados who can't live without bets on Banker.

I want to say again that results like those you see here could only be achieved two ways: By cheating, or because the invincible house advantage in all games of chance is not invincible at all.

It is safe to say that when you cheat, you don't win. And when you fail to follow a disciplined betting strategy that consistently delivers a profit from more lost bets than winning ones, you are in the same losers' boat. Sinking fast.

It is every weekend punter's dream to find a way to win time and again with little or no risk. It is also a hopeless fantasy.

Past posts to this blog offer a wealth of data supporting the plain truth that spreading wide is the key to vanquishing the house advantage, so long as it is paired with a viable betting strategy with a rule for every eventuality.

We have learned that a 1-1,000 spread is about as "tight" as we can go without feeling constant pressure from the house edge. Wider is better, and that takes money, sometimes a lot of it.

The good news is confirmed once again in the baccarat summary above. Target betting loses very rarely indeed, and as time goes by, the bankroll that backs it grows ever stronger.

You can see from the summary that backing Player only, target betting never had more than a fraction of its original bankroll on the line. There was just ONE "bust" spread across two data sets, and while that wiped out most of the method's prior winnings, the boat was not seriously rocked again, and the final win exceeded $2 million.

WBL and target betting together were 65% exposed at one point, but by the time the second "bust" came along, there was enough money in the bank to withstand it. Or would have been, but for the "5%" commission.

That tells us that target betting is viable. It may not be perfect and could be improved. But it WORKS.

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.
_

To answer questions about Oscar's Grind, it's better than flying by the seat of your pants, but target betting is better still.

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I get questions about Oscar's Grind from time to time, usually from people who want to suggest that there is a more than coincidental similarity between Oscar's variation on the money management theme and my own.

The two methods are as alike as an apple and an orange (both grew on a tree, both are spherical and have pips, both taste good and...that's about it).

I have always enjoyed the story of the origins of the Grind, which legend has it was created by a crusty old geezer who played just craps and used a stubby pencil to record the result of each roll in a battered notebook. Too many adjectives!

I'm more inclined to believe that like card counting, Oscar's creation is encouraged by the casinos because most people mess it up, and when they do, they lose more money than they probably would otherwise.

The idea as I recall it from Tom Ainslie's book How to Win in a Casino is to freeze the bet after a loss, add one unit after any mid-series win, and revert to a minimum bet after recovering prior losses for the series, plus one unit.

If the next bet in a series would exceed 20 units, it's Game Over and back to a minimum wager, and that's the part that makes me suspect that "Oscar" was actually a casino employee with evil intent!

A 1-20 spread has zero chance of winning in the long term, with or without following the OG rules. That's an absolute factual fact. With the loss limit removed, "Oscar" does marginally better than a random bettor on a winning streak and can stay ahead for a good long while with a decent bankroll.

Against the BST blackjack data set, for example, OG earned about 5.0% of target betting's win to date while racking up more than 50% of my method's overall action. That translates to a greater risk with a far lesser reward.

Mr. Ainslie's description of Oscar's Grind makes no provision for a win progression, which seems to me strangely short-sighted unless there is an ulterior professional motive. Incorporating +1u after an opening win, continuing until a loss, then freezing the bet per the standard rules and playing on until the loss is recovered +1u, pumps OG's win by more than 30% while increasing the action by less than 10%. Why not do it?

OG is a progressive betting method, of course, so it wins more often than not. It's just not a very good progressive betting method!

A simple Martingale does much better, my version of a Martingale is more effective than the original, and target betting knocks them all into the proverbial cocked hat (one of these days, I must look that one up!).

Now seems as good a time as any to revisit the topic of which games to tackle with target betting.

Blackjack is by far the preferred option because of its low net house edge and the extra profit opportunities offered by double-downs and splits and 3-2 payoffs for naturals (never play at a layout offering 6-5, unless you are stuck at the last blackjack layout on earth).

Field betting at craps is a great place to start a series and take a break from blackjack, because of the x2 payoffs for 2 and 12 that are still x2 and x3 in some casinos. The negative odds are more than 5x blackjack's with x2x2, so you should never let the bets get too high before bailing out for a safer game.

Baccarat is the #2 option, but you should never, ever bet on Banker. That so-called "5 percent" commission is one of the great lies of gambling because it can easily swallow all your winnings and leave you in the hole in spite of your best efforts. I'll be posting more about that one of these days, with the help of the baccarat data sets from Lee Jones and Lorenzo Rodriguez (all 300,000+ of 'em!).

Roulette is a wonderfully streaky game best played (in my opinion) with the "wobble" method of picking black or red, odd or even, or whatever - never "inside" bets. Wobble is from WBL which in turn means Win Before Last, or as the French have it, avant derniere (or is it the other way around? I can never be sure!).

The big problem with roulette, of course, is its 5.26% house edge. So, again, kick off a new series (or several) at roulette if you must, but always back off before the NB gets out of hand, and take your LTD/NB numbers to a more player-friendly game.

Just don't rely on old Oscar, may he RIP. Mr. Ainslie claims to have paid for several gambling trips to the Bahamas with that method. Guess he's just a lucky cuss...?

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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Some see it as a choice between excitement and monotony. It's not! It's between losing and winning.

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The average gambler's fondness for thrills and excitement (the fun of making badly-timed bets and losing yet again!) is the reason why target betting will never be a major threat to the casino industry.

Most people can't be bothered to "play smart." They would much rather go with the flow, even if it drowns them. To them, logic and practicality are anathema...they have no place at a gambling table, they believe.

I sympathize, I really do. Casinos are designed to exude the allure of temptation and guilty pleasure as effectively as a seductress wafts pheromones at her hapless mate. And money is meant to become almost meaningless, except as a measure of fun.

Some people can spend their whole lives gambling without discovering that winning is actually more pleasurable than losing. They win from time to time, for sure, but they see getting ahead of the game as a signal to take even more chances, having even more fun, until eventually they are back in the hole. Where they want to be.

When players like that come up against a prolonged negative trend (a hot dealer, or a cold table) they see it as a challenge, and keep piling on the bets in the belief that if they keep plenty of chips in motion, their luck will change. Sometimes it does..."and that's why they call it gambling."

The way I see it, dodging what often seems like certain destruction and making a little money against all odds is a whole lot more entertaining than following the script that the gambling industry has written for me.

But that does not mean that I think target betting is invincible. It is not. It needs my help to succeed. And that means knowing when to push, and when to pull back.

Table limits are theoretically a hindrance to target betting, but in practice they provide us with triggers and signposts that help us because we cannot ignore them without attracting unwanted attention. And attracting the attention of people who can interfere with our game plan is something we do not want to do!

I have talked before about rendering house spread limits harmless by imposing spread limits of your own, and the lesson is worth repeating.

Given a $5 opening bet, a spread of 1-20 to a maximum loss of $100 is probably fine, especially in a busy casino where a $100 bet is considered to be chump change.

Walking away from a low-limit table after every failed $100 bet wastes time and opportunity, so it makes more sense to make a mental note of each incomplete series, fall back to a minimum bet, and keep playing until there are enough saved targets to make stepping up a level worthwhile.

Above the bottom rung, a 1-5 spread is about as wide as you should go, following the same procedure as before. And you can keep on "stepping up" until you hit either your own maximum or the house limit.

You will always lose more EOS bets than you win. That is a fact of life, just as it is inevitable that over time, you will lose more bets of any kind than you win. What matters is timing, and target betting enables you to have the right amount of money on the table at that moment when you beat negative odds and win for a change.

Here's the latest BST set:-


This time I suffered brief brain fade and omitted comparisons between $5-$1,000 spread limit results and the outcome for target betting unchained, so here they are...

bst090410a HA/AV -1 = -0.43%, target betting wins $7,408 = +8.14% of $90,987 action, 253 rounds net, avg bet $406, bets of $1,000+ = 17

BST spread limit result loss of ($248) = -0.26% of $93,603 action, avg bet $418, bets of $1,000+ = 66

bst090410b HA/AV 22 = +9.57%, TB +$8,525, +1.92% of $443,235 action, 248 bets net, avg bet $1,979, bets of $1,000+ = 32

BST spread limit wins $8,678 = +13.94% of $62,258 action, avg bet $278, bets of $1,000+ = 40

bst090410c HA/AV = -25.5 = -14.66%, TB +$3,193 = 14.83% of $21,523, 177 bets, avg bet $96, bets of $1,000+ = 30

BST spread limit wins $453 = 1.99%/$22,743, avg bet $102, bets of $1,000+ = 39

This session was a rarity, one in which a tight spread involved less risk than target betting and for once managed to deliver an overall win! Target betting did much better, of course (about $20,000 vs. $9,000) and we expected 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.
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The conventional wisdom says a million wins don't matter and losses are all that counts. True, but false at the same time!

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A mathematician arguing for the YCW (you can't win) philosophy will tell you with a straight face that progressive betting can never be profitable because more bets lost than won must always result in more money lost than won.

No amount of evidence to the contrary will be considered acceptable, in the same way that for centuries, the conventional wisdom dismissed data showing that Planet Earth was not flat.

It is of course completely rational to warn against a betting strategy that will occasionally suffer a catastrophic loss that will always wipe out all prior profits and bankrupt the player.

But progressive betting will only match that caveat if the method is applied the way the casinos and their house-trained experts want it to be, in real play or in computer simulations.

That means that the player must keep on betting through prolonged downturns, and meekly throw in the towel whenever his next bet is prohibited by the prevailing table limit.

The ideal gambler is, in the view of all casino operators and the mythematicians who promote the gambling industry's ordained right to the contents of all our wallets, an impetuous spendthrift who comes to the table with an inadequate bankroll. He then bets a very narrow spread, and sheds first his inhibitions under the influence of "free" booze, then his stash.

It is theoretically reasonable to suggest that since target betting my way lost just once in some 70,000 recoveries, that loss might have occurred in the very first session, and therefore the method is potentially too hazardous to merit consideration.

It is theoretically equally reasonable to argue that since 1 in 70,000 American motorists will be killed or seriously injured in a road accident on any given day, the car in your garage is potentially unsafe at any speed and you would therefore be ill-advised to drive it ever again.

I cannot refute a statistically supported recommendation that the only certain way to win in a casino is to keep all your money in your pocket and, better yet, never step across the threshold.

But short of an outright ban on gambling, the evidence shows that progressive betting is a better way to win than any of the alternatives.

Those of you who come to agree with me after a few hundred hours of cautious exploration and practice (I certainly do not expect you to take my word for anything!) will learn that target betting can be modified in all sorts of ways to suit your gambling personality and your resources.

In fact, the more modifications you develop, mixing and matching them as you see fit, the less likely you are to be identified by casino pit personnel as a player who wins "too often" and should be stopped.

Elsewhere in this blog is data that show that even the much-derided Martingale or double-up betting method (-1, -2, -4, +8 etc.) demolishes the house advantage in the almost 400,000 real-time, real-play outcomes that are the subject of the current trial.

Played right, double-up can be a powerful antidote to the house edge. If the casino you have selected allows you to play it at all, that is.

Target betting with my rules applied is far harder to spot, and the modifications that I recommend or that individual players will develop for themselves make it even more effective in the real world.

Here's the latest BST data set:

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

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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There's no escaping the fact that math rules in the casino. And it's also easy to see that mathematics does not rule out progressive betting.

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The consistent success of target betting or any method that breaks the fixed or random mold is assured by the fact that outcomes in games of chance are collectively predictable.

In blackjack, for example, a reasonably representative sample (say, more than 1,000) will confirm that pushes occur about 9% of the time, player naturals bring in a little extra from about 4% of all hands, and doubles and splits governed by strict basic strategy play will win about 20% more often than they lose.

You can also be sure that paired wins or losses will occur about half as often as isolated wins or losses, triples will be encountered roughly half as often again, and so on.

"Roughly" and "about" are words that academic mathematicians hate to hear, but the smaller the sample of outcomes, the harder it is to predict what will happen with absolute certainty.

Luckily for the target player, absolute certainty is absolutely unnecessary.

Regular readers will know that I say with monotonous regularity that If you can win more when you win than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win won't hurt you.

A picture is worth a thousand numbers, so here's a summary for the 100,000-plus baccarat rounds supplied by Lorenzo Rodriguez and Zumma Publishing:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
The first thing to notice is that after a single crash-n-burn and 13,640 successful recoveries, the AWB/ALB number is a relatively unimpressive 104%, but still enough to deliver an overall profit.
The overall HA/AV for this set was 1.6%, which is high for baccarat but not desperately so.
Two out of three recoveries were achieved with a single win, although as negative expectation required, more recovery/turnaround attempts were lost than won (the house had a 1.16% edge in that area).
Series requiring 10 or more rounds to recover were less than 9.0% or 1 in 11 and 62% of all series were wrapped up in five bets or fewer.
The average bet value was high according to some at $592 but bets of $1,000 were required only 4.4% of the time (less than 1 in 20).

Many a mythematician might be inclined to dismiss 114,000 rounds as anecdotal or non-representative, so keep in mind that the sample is equal to well over a year of play for a fulltime baccarat fanatic.

Also keep in mind that according to the same self-styled (and often house-trained) "experts" the results you see above are impossible.

Now please consider a much larger sample of baccarat outcomes, more than 200,000 supplied by Lee Jones, a systems promoter who can verify their accuracy and with whom I have no connection (he might even consider me a most unwelcome competitor since I don't charge for my ideas and his are for sale).

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
The AWB/ALB product is higher at 109% vs. a more standard house edge of 1.18% and the average bet value is way down at $352 ($592) but the rest of the numbers in the summary closely resemble those for the smaller and quite separate sample from the Zumma books via Lorenzo Rodriguez:

EOS 1-5 62.5% (62%)
EOS 6-10 29% (29.3%)
EOS 10+ 8.5% (8.7%)
Positive series 35% (35%)
Neutral series (29%) (28%)
Negative series (36%) (36%)
1-win EOS 66% (66%)
EOS wins/tries 49.1% (49%)
Bets of $1,000+ 3.6% (4.4%)

The biggest difference between the two baccarat samples lies in the final target betting win (2.86% for the larger data set vs. 0.16%). The reason, of course, is that the first sample included a bust, one that was triggered by such a precipitous plunge that only the "robot" at the heart of every runaway sim would have sat through it!

Baccarat holds far fewer surprises (good or bad) than blackjack, but the stats for the first 75,000-plus outcomes in the BST blackjack trial are remarkably similar to the baccarat numbers, except for a much higher win percentage for target betting and a dramatic jump in the AWB/ALB product:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

And here are data for double-up (a Small Martingale) against the baccarat outcomes. The "win one unit" original version has the double disadvantage of being easily spotted and blocked, and a slow win rate that means that a single "bust" would wipe out years of profits.

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
We are now looking at close to 400,000 "real play" outcomes, which is a representative sample according to any objective, sensible standards.

We can see that ruin (the loss of our $1,000,000 bankroll) is a rare occurrence indeed, and that in spite of a single crash-n-burn, target's notional profit at this point is closing in on $4 million

Spread is the critical factor, we have learned. A spread of less than 1-1,000 is doomed, in the long run.

We do not have a monopoly on that knowledge: the casinos are well aware of the danger to their bottom line posed by progressive bettors with a disciplined plan and a fat bankroll behind them. They and will do whatever it takes to thwart them.

Obviously, a player confined to a single casino or, worse, to a handful of table options, can never hope to spread from 1-5,000 (the recommended optimum) or even 1-1,000, in the same place.

The solution to that is an over-abundance of patience, and strong legs. Spreading from $5-$100 (1-20) from the opening of a new series is plausible, but after that, 1-5 is the limit to aim for ($100-$500, $500-$2,500, $2,500-$10,000 and $10,000-$25,000, for example).

One player flying solo might find the range hard to achieve under ever-increasing casino staff scrutiny, and tough as it sometimes is to run smoothly, team-work is probably the answer.

For now, all we are concerned with is "The Math." And it is on our side.

If you doubt it, here are new numbers from the BST trial (I just began batch #16):


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.
_

Winning with target betting is easier, quicker and just plain better than all the alternatives. For the others, it's mostly impossible.

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When the contest is between progressive betting and the only alternatives (flat/fixed or random betting), it's no contest at all: progressive betting wins, the other methods do not.

And since this has always been as much a mathematical challenge as a practical one, tailoring my version of progressive betting to the needs of the underfunded player seeking to beat the odds during occasional weekend trips to Las Vegas has never been a priority.

One simple truth I never lose sight of is that my application of the demonstrably sound principle I call target betting (the rules that I apply from first bet to last in each recovery series) cannot be claimed to be the optimum approach.

There may well be a better way to do this, and I am confident that if I fail to find it before my final visit to a casino, someone else will, and hopefully they will tell the rest of the world about it for free.

Why not sell my ideas rather than giving them away?

It is not because, as some of my critics have suggested, my ideas are worth even less than I charge for them.

It's because for me, this has always been about exposing as myth an axiom that I always felt served the gambling industry far better than the people whose wallets the casinos suck dry.

More than 30 years ago, I experimented with the simplest, most basic form of progressive betting in several Las Vegas casinos, and in every case encountered impressively efficient interference by pit staff.

Drunks, neophytes and other suckers were committing fiscal self-destruction all around me, and I was the only one singled out for friendly advice about how best to preserve my bankroll and save myself from certain ruin.

Why are all these nice people so afraid of a betting method that they say is a danger only to me and my money? I wondered, since fear (or at best, self-interest) seemed to me the only reason they would take me under their wing while leaving everyone else to their own devices.

In the years since, gambling industry representatives (many disguised as truth-seeking academic mathematicians) have either denied that casino staff will ever step in to stop progressive betting, or have patiently offered up implausible explanations for a policy that anyone will encounter within minutes of starting a Small Martingale.

Some examples:

1. Anyone dumb enough to try double-up or Martingale betting has obviously never wagered in a casino before and is in serious need of advice and counsel. Interesting, but implausible. Pit people in reality never offer advice unless asked, at which point they are usually courteous but non-committal, often starting out with, "The book says..." if the questions are about blackjack, or "Some people like this bet because..." Drunks hurling their money down the drain are only cautioned or removed from a layout if they upset other players by hurling something else, or knocking over drinks. Idiots who play or bet badly but don't ask questions are invariably left alone.
2. Pit staff know that a double-up player can do very well for a short period of time but will always crash and burn eventually. They are just being friendly when they advise against the use of this suicidal betting method. And pigs play poker sty-lishly! The entire gambling industry is geared to relieving players of their bankrolls as quickly and quietly as possible, while constantly reminding them that losing is "fun." The notion that a betting method that is certain to fail would be blocked is beyond silly, but no one is ever allowed to bet double-up without house interference. Casinos are constantly devising new long-odds side bets as sucker bait to bolster the relatively low house edge at blackjack and baccarat, and adding non-traditional table games that make roulette and pai-gow poker seem like easy money. If the Martingale was a surefire loser for gamblers, casinos everywhere would be promoting it as an "Exciting New Feature!!!" and printing new layouts to highlight it. Instead, pit staff respond to it like vampires to bright sunlight (not that I am suggesting that those nice people are bloodsuckers, mind you).
   
3. A progression will always fail because once the bet exceeds the table limit, prior losses cannot be recovered, and casino staff feel you should know the risks you face. This is one of my favorites, because it betrays how little the experts think of the rest of us. A $5 opening bet at a $5-$500 layout will bump up against the table limit after 7 consecutive losses requiring an 8th bet of $640. It doesn't matter that a losing streak that long is less than a 1.0% probability: it happens. A Martingale bettor who has a bankroll that is up to the challenge (quite likely, because he never loses if he is allowed to play) simply takes his business to a layout with a higher table limit (say, $100-$5,000) and continues betting at the required level. One win, and he starts the process all over again. If he is playing blackjack and he draws a natural, he's in clover! Given a house limit of $25,000 a double-up player will have to lose 13 bets in a row to hit the "green ceiling" and that's just a 1/8192 probability. And he's not dead yet...although that's a topic for another time.
   
4. If double-up really was a winning method, more players would use it. No one does because it's suicide, and casinos discourage anyone who plays irresponsibly. This is one of the biggest of the big lies that gamblers are asked to swallow whole. And most do. In fact, anyone who has ever spent more than a few hours at casino table games will have seen "Martingalers" at work, probably without recognizing them. They are the annoying people who place two or three bets, lose, and move on, leaving people who have been glued to their seats for hours wondering why their game has been so rudely disrupted (or so they believe). It happens a lot in a busy casino when empty seats are hard to come by and dealers and pit personnel have too much going on to monitor any one player's movements. The rule is three bets at the most at any one layout, then on to the next game. Casinos try to thwart Martingalers by prohibiting "entry" between shuffles at blackjack and baccarat, but that's just a minor inconvenience. Craps and roulette tables are never restricted, and field bets at craps have special appeal because of the 2x payouts for 2 and 12, which used to be 2x and 3x before the accountants that devised 6-5 payouts for naturals at blackjack did a little more dirty work.
5. Progressions are a bad idea because the ancient laws of mathematics state that any amount bet against a negative outcome must eventually have a negative outcome. Pythagoras and his peers and successors were and still are in essence stating a rule confirmed by logic, which is that because negative expectation will ultimately result in more player losses than wins, more money lost than won is an inevitable consequence. And as long as bets are of a fixed or randomly selected value, a long term win is highly unlikely. However, a progression is not random. Bet values are determined by the immediately prior outcome, and while that outcome is random and subject to the negative expectation for the game, the response to it never varies. A Martingale is a bad idea not because it does not win consistently but because it is too obvious. It requires camouflage to avoid quick detection, and that is what target betting is all about.
   

My conclusion long ago was that constant re-doubling is impractical in spite of the satisfaction gained from repeatedly recovering prior losses in a single bet.

Waiting out a losing streak by freezing or reducing the wager and then going for a one-bet turnaround seemed like a mathematically-supportable alternative, primarily because in most table games, the house's chances of winning a given bet are only marginally better than they player's.

Put another way, while each bet at a game with a 2.0% house edge faces negative odds of 49-51, there is no such thing as a fractional win or loss: you either beat the negative number, or you don't.

All of my blackjack and baccarat spreadsheet models track the performance against the same sample of outcomes of both a standard double-up method (the Small Martingale) and a variation that I call SM-Plus which modifies the progression to deliver a bigger win from drawn-out recoveries.

Against the blackjack outcomes (78,000 and counting) the standard double-up had one "bust" in 18,972 series, the pumped-up version had 3 busts in 18,055 series, and target betting had...no busts at all.

Here's the SM, SM+ and target betting summary for the blackjack trial to date.


(Click on the image to enlarge it)
The baccarat trial is especially relevant in this context because the data sets were supplied by two verifiable sources that are independent of each other and (more important) independent of me.

There were well over 300,000 rounds of baccarat in all, equivalent to almost three years of play for a very dedicated player putting in 30 hours a week with two days off each week but no vacation time.

Here's a summary of how a simple Martingale performed, along with data for the more aggressive double-up method, and for target betting.


(Click on the image to enlarge it)
I guess it's possible to make this stuff up, but why? The results achieved have been so consistent (predictable is another way to put it) that anyone applying the rules of these different approaches to target betting fairly and accurately is certain to see very similar numbers.

The other question always begged by results like these is how much better any disciplined betting strategy might do with human intervention allowed, meaning that prolonged negative trends might (or might not) have been avoided if defensive action had been taken.

High-speed simulations of any kind, my own included, require the wholly unwarranted assumption that a player in the early stages of one of those deadly downturns that we all know can occur (those of us who actually place bets in casinos, at least) would NOT back away from a punishing situation and resume play somewhere else. There are some certifiable masochists out there, I know, but I am not one of them.

The conventional academic argument is that since each outcome is independently subject to the same measure of negative expectation, attempts to escape a negative trend can have no long term benefit.

It may be true that a player who bets fixed or random amounts is as likely to get into more trouble after a move as he is to see an end to the negative trend that made him flee.

But for a target bettor, all that is needed is to get out of trouble is two consecutive wins, and the decision to bail out of a bad run is as much about morale as it is about math.

The math, though, supports preemptive "damage control" when a recovery begins to drag out uncomfortably, because the great majority of series (well over 60%) are over in six bets or less, and a tiny percentage drag on for 10 rounds or more.

As the Chinaman said, "A long losing streak must always begin with a short one, and it is better to lose a little than a lot."

Worth noting is that in less than 80,000 rounds of blackjack, target betting "won" (how I wish those quote marks were not necessary!) almost as much as it did in almost four times as many baccarat bets, confirming that blackjack is clearly the optimum table game for this strategy.

Here's the latest BST session...

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
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.
_

Confession time. As the latest BST set wraps up, an error is flagged. Target betting still reigns supreme, but tight spreads get a modest boost!

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When I launched this new online venture, I chose to let it evolve in chronological order, with my (occasional, but inevitable!) mistakes doing their part to comply with the warts-and-all nature of blogs.

The problem arose in the batch of BST blackjack sessions that just concluded because compliance with the BST 1-200 ($5-$1,000) table limit was not tracked as fairly as it should have been.

One of the big differences between target betting and tight-spread play (accepting that for many people, a 1-200 spread is far from tight!) is that the strategy player betting in real time will never abandon a series before recovery.

He will often suspend play in mid-series, but EOS is always required before the bet value can fall back to the minimum to signal a new contest against the house edge.

My models are all set up to "play" the same way, and that caused a problem for BST limit tracking because with a low table limit, recoveries took forever.

That, of course, is the whole purpose of house-mandated spread limits. The idea is that maximum bets should be kept low so that a player is likely to get into trouble sooner, and then after a while, it will be impossible for him to get "out of the hole" if bets are maintained at that level.

In BST #15, for example, the $1,000 limit player slipped deep into the red at round 323 and did not get out of it for 1,950 bets (about 13 hours of play!). The recovery was a minor miracle in itself, but the good times did not roll for long: at round 3,300, trouble returned, and when the set wrapped up at round 7,834, BST TL was more than 163 maximum bets behind.

It would take more than a minor miracle for recovery to be achieved again under those circumstances.

I corrected the anomaly by permitting BST TL to call it quits at the end of each session, win or lose, just as a hamstrung limit player would have to do in real play (if Peter Punter gets his clock cleaned to the tune of say $20,000, he goes home and licks his wounds, then starts afresh the next time he's dumb enough to go back to the casino for a repeat thrashing).

The effect of the correction was to make BST TL a less dramatic loser than before:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
Thanks to target betting, the $1,000 limit bettor (let's call him Max Grand) came out of the series of blackjack sessions with a loss that was just 0.19% of his total action, improving considerably on the net house edge of 2.0%.

Max had to make 1,989 bets of $1,000 plus ("plus" being acceptable because of splits and double-downs) vs. high-limit target betting's 398. In other words, the BST table limit did its job and forced Max to risk more overall before his inescapable end-of-session loss.

Max's total action was fractionally less than TB's, indicating that although TB ventured into high-roller territory only one fifth as often as Max, when he did so, his bets were bigger on average.

The critical information from the above summary is that Max lost a little more than $5,000. TB won $148,000, or 5.25% of his total action vs. Max's -0.19%.

The summary below explains how TB was able to win while Max tanked:-

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According to gross negative expectation of -5.82%, TB "should have" suffered a loss of $164,000. Net AV was a hair worse than -2.0% indicating a best result for target betting of -2.01% x action of $2,817,105 or a LOSS pretty much equal to Max's: -$5,665.

Didn't happen. And the reason it didn't happen is that TB's lesser number of wins (3,357) had an average value of $442 while his greater number of losses (3,813) had an average value of $350.

The whole point of target betting, as you know, is to Win more when you win than you lose when you lose so that losing more bets than you win won't hurt you.

TB's average win value exceeded his average loss value by +26% vs. a gross house edge of 5.82% and a net house edge of 2.01%.

I think we can all agree that 26% greatly exceeds both 5.82% and 2.01%.

Result, happiness for TB and misery for poor old Max.

As always, skeptics will point to those average bet values and scream blue bloody murder about the "big" numbers. None of the "experts" out there seem to have heard that in a casino (as in the rest of the world) it takes money to make money.

What's the best fiscal policy: risk less and lose almost every time, or venture a little more up front and win every time? You decide!

I am not about to apply the BST TL revision to all the other BST blackjack sessions (1-14) because the job has to be done manually and all I will end up with is a repeat of what we saw at the end of Batch #15.

The spread summaries remain fair and accurate because their purpose was to explore what would happen at different spread limits, starting with Peter Punter's standard 1-5 and working up the ladder.

Here's the #15 summary:-

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Again we see that a spread range of less than 1-1,000 is doomed to fail in the long run.

Casinos know that, which is why no layout exists that permits bets from $5 to $5,000.

It is certainly possible to spread that wide if a player is willing to start out with a minimum bet in one place and hop up the ladder by as many rungs as recovery requires, switching games as needed.

Very few gamblers do that.

A prolonged negative turn will bring out a stubborn streak in most players that glues them in place, when the smart thing to do would be to turn tail and RUN.

It will be a while before I have all of the baccarat spread data, but right now, my hope that baccarat's lack of doubles and splits might make it a little less of a challenge than blackjack is NOT being borne out (with just 5 of the 45 baccarat sets processed, 1-1,000 remains the magic number).

In light of all of the data I have collected and analyzed in 30+ years of target betting, I don't see how self-styled gambling experts can pretend objective honesty when they claim that progressive betting cannot win in the end.

Never mind that no other betting method (fixed or random betting being the only alternatives!) has a prayer against the house advantage.

Here's how an old-fashioned Martingale would have done against the #15 outcomes:-

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In case this is your first visit to the TB blog, I will say again that I do not recommend double-up as a long term antidote to the house advantage, primarily because casino pit staff will always spot it quickly and step in to interfere with its use.

That does not mean that the method is sure to lose. Far from it. My SM+ variation boosts the EOS profit from a single $5 unit to multiples that, er, multiply as a slow recovery drags on. The rule is -5, -10, -25 (not -20), -50, -100, -250, and so on.

As you can see, neither Martingale version comes close to achieving target betting's win rate.

Finally, the all-bets-to-date summary at the end of #15:-

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The data above are self-explanatory, I hope, but I will pick out some highlights:

• Target betting won a total of $1.78 million or 5.12% of total action.
• The gross AV for 78,000 rounds of blackjack was -5.33% and the net AV was -0.78%
• Given the AV numbers show, target betting "should have" lost between $270,755 and $1.85 million. It didn't.
• Target betting's average bet throughout was $445.
• The strategy's average win value was $518 and its average loss value was $402, achieving its goal to "win more when you win than you lose when you lose."
• Target betting had a funny-money bankroll of $1 million that was less than 20% exposed.
• The strategy made 28,328 attempted recovery, EOS or turnaround bets, and LOST them 50.7% of the time, in keeping with the house edge for the game.
• EOS was achieved with a single win more than 65% of the time (mostly thanks to the OSL and MSL rules, but sometimes because of well-timed naturals, double-downs and splits).
• Bets of $1,000 or more were necessary less than 4.5% of the time through 78,000 rounds of betting.
• Target betting rocks...

That's it for now.

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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Confidence, consistency, cold cash and commitment: The keys to winning at table games can be summed up in two letters, P & S, Progression and Spread.

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Years ago, a Las Vegas resident who promoted himself as the world's #1 expert on casinos and gambling told me that no betting method ever devised could beat the games in his city.

"Even if it could be done, the casinos would find a way to stop it," he said. "All they would have to do is limit spreads."

He was right. The casinos have the edge against 99.9% of all players, reporting a win percentage that is several multiples of the negative expectation at the toughest table game, roulette (5.26%).

Meaning that most players make such dumb choices when they are in a casino having "fun" that they guarantee that they will go home with a lighter wallet.

But the house advantage and the billions in easy money it brings in every year is not enough for the gambling industry.

Whenever casino personnel identify a player who they believe is winning "too often" they first satisfy themselves that he's not cheating...then treat him as if he is.

When mathematician Ed Thorp published his card-counting best seller, Beat the Dealer more than 40 years ago, Las Vegas casinos over-reacted by changing the rules of blackjack to block counters, prompting howls of protest from customers who didn't know how to count cards and didn't care to learn.

Double-downs and splits were cut back, and most annoying of all, shuffles were increased, slowing the game to a crawl.

Pretty soon, the gambling industry realized it had used a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Players willing to study how the game could be beaten and able to apply their new knowledge with skill and consistency were in a tiny minority, and blocking them meant losing revenue from everyone else.

Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, time is money in Las Vegas, and the faster hands are dealt, the more chips are raked into the dealer's tray.

In a matter of months, blackjack's rules returned to normal, and the crisis that wasn't a crisis at all was over.

Running a game is for the most part a passive process that permits the casino to provide the layout (the rope) and let the players do the work (hang themselves).

The house's influence is subtle, limiting the ratio of the highest permitted bet to the table minimum, to reduce the players' ability to recover prior losses while knowing that most punters limit themselves far more severely.

Spread limits are effective only against players who believe that the only way to combat a downturn in a given game is to keep on betting in the same location, hoping that sometime soon the tide will turn.

But a surprising number of gamblers play that way. Badly, in other word.

Players with a plan know where there's a table limit, there is a higher one not far away. If the next bet needed exceeds the table limit, there is a simple solution: Go play somewhere else.

It is an indisputable fact that both flat and random betting must eventually fall foul of the house edge at all games of chance.

It is also true that most players who are "in the hole" will fall into a pattern of robotic fixed betting, or will randomly hurl good money after bad by cranking up their wagers.

The hole will get deeper and deeper and the ladder (the bankroll) will get shorter and shorter, until eventually there is no way out.

Haphazard betting won't work. Flat betting won't either.

That makes progressive betting the only alternative.

And the realities of gambling also ensure that progressive betting will be relentlessly targeted for derision by anyone whose livelihood depends on promulgating the conventional wisdom that in the end, you can't win.

Blind luck can make you a winner for a while, but as we all know, luck never stays around for long.

Never forget that losing is a progressive process, because with each loss, the amount you are "behind" gets larger.

Betting the same amount each round against a negative trend will not enable you to recover, unless of course the win-loss pattern (WLP) changes and you are able to win more bets than you lose.

Betting less won't help either because even a prolonged winning streak will not get you out of trouble.

Again: Progressive betting is the only viable alternative. And the irony is that as long as you apply a disciplined, consistent plan, progressive betting is also less risky than any other option.

Say what?

It's like this: The vast majority of players tackle casino table games with far less money than arithmetic indicates is necessary to prevail against the house edge.

So in spite of the fact that the house advantage has to be relatively tiny in order to make occasional overall wins by players possible (without them there would soon be no customers) its relentless grind against an inadequate bankroll almost always proves fatal.

"Underfunded" players lose. Again and again. And losing is a very expensive way to have fun.

Progressive betting demands more up-front money, for sure.

But it very quickly builds the bankroll with recovery after recovery.

And as time goes by, ruin becomes a rapidly-diminishing threat.

Look at it this way: If you can't afford to win, you shouldn't play. Why even think about taking on the house if you know you probably don't have enough money to get the job done?

All of the BST logs posted here demonstrate that table limits serve the house, not the player.

No big surprise to some of you, but many people do not think about the fact that the quicker you get to your green ceiling, the more likely you are to be a victim of the house edge.

In blackjack session after session, playing up to the table limit and never beyond resulted in up to twenty times the number of high-value bets that unrestricted target betting required, and in consequence, far higher average bet and overall action values.

More action always means more risk. That's a gambling given.

Here are data from the current BST blackjack set (#15):

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What we see here is that a betting spread tighter than 1-1,000 (the BST limit is 1-200) is certain to lose, over the long haul.

The two optimum spread ratios are $10-$25,000 (1-2,500) and $5-$25,000 (1-5,000).

$25,000 bets? That's madness! No, it's not.

It was never my hope, or my intention, to come up with a betting method that would permit a weekend punter on a shoestring budget to go home with his pockets bulging with casino cash.

That just is not possible, unless blind luck intervenes.

A successful player (not a gambler) has to think like the house, with big bucks up front and complete confidence that disciplined betting and The Math between them will make him a winner.

Look at the action numbers in the summary above and you will see far higher action/average bet figures for narrower spreads than 1-5,000, with a 1-500 spread losing after requiring risk that was almost ten times greater than the bet levels that optimum target betting needed to WIN!

A fluke, say the skeptics. A sample of just 7,300 hands is "not representative"! The data shown are anecdotal, meaning that they apply to this set of outcomes and have no relevance to future bets.

OK, so let's look at the summary for more than ten times as many outcomes (all the data sets in the current BST trial).

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Bigger numbers, same story.

In coming posts, I will provide data from the two extended baccarat trials of target betting, the Jones outcomes and the Rodriguez sets covering more than 315,000 rounds over which I had no control, and that are verifiable at their independent sources.

Not representative? Of course not! One thing you learn when you challenge the status quo is that any sample of data, however large, that upends the YCW (you can't win) conventional wisdom is always non-representative and anecdotal.

Here's more BST fun and games...



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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