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:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
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:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
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:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

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:-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
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):

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
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).

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
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.
_

Beating the house is like safe driving. You have to pay attention, be alert, and steer, brake or accelerate as conditions require.

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Runaway sims may be enough to satisfy mythematicians that the house edge in casino games is unbeatable, but they have very little to do with actual play.

Take camouflage, for example.

The double-up method of progressive betting (call it the Small Martingale, if you like) is unplayable because after a handful of redoubled bets at the same layout, you might as well pull out a klaxon horn and blast it in the pit boss's ear.

Double-up makes money, for sure. But it also makes waves. Big ones.

Consistent winning is, as far as the casinos are concerned, a crime akin to outright cheating, so if you want to play on undisturbed (and of course, you do) you have to dodge and weave a little from time to time.

The core of target betting is the rule that you must at all times know your loss to date (LTD) and be ready to cover it with an LTD+ bet when the right "trigger" comes along.

All the other rules, profitable as they may be, are essentially window dressing, in place to distract and befuddle the enemy.

That means that you can vary application of those rules as you see fit, tapping the "brake" or the "gas pedal" when you feel the moment is right (Cialis costs extra!).

All of the target betting spreadsheet models are required by the rules of fair testing to maintain the same set of parameters or protocols throughout. That means that like runaway sims, they do not tell the whole story, although unlike sims, they at least tell no lies.

Human beings playing with real money in real time against a real game quickly develop a sense of when things are going well and might continue to do so, and the reverse. And so, like a driver on a country road, they know when to speed up or slow down.

All the target betting models are based upon a minimum bet of $5 and a "house limit" of $25,000 and the method is backed by a bankroll of $1 million in make-believe moolah.

My models permit doubling the bet up to an added $100 in response to a push, and all the other target betting rules are there, including open and second loss responses, win progressions and the mid-series loss "do over" option (see the rules if this is all Greek to you!).

Missing from the mix are my recommended responses to a dealer natural (NB=PBx2) and a dealer 3+ (three cards or more) 21 (same as a push), both of them useful ways to improve profitability without adding too much extra risk.

It's worth noting that the "push rule" alone adds about $11,500 to the overall "win" from the current blackjack trial, which as I type this stands at 6,695 rounds and 1,130 recoveries unblemished by a single bust. You get a 10% increase in profits along with a 22% increase in action, which can be interpreted as potential added risk. Is it worth it? That's for a human player to decide, something a runaway sim cannot do.

Other real-life complications that are tricky to model in a simulation include "round-ups," meaning the conversion of a clumsy number into whatever units are currently in play, a variable value.

For example, when a $500 win leaves you with an LTD of $45, you would be more likely to push out a $100 chip than a $25 and 4 $5s, and a $15 LTD calls for a $25 bet. Sure, I can do that in my spreadsheet models, but why bother? (the money isn't real anyway!).

For years, I have had a habit of betting a limited spread at local "low roller" casinos where the table minimum is $5 and the max $200 or $300, accumulating several apparent "busts" to be played off when I can make a visit to Stateline or Reno, where the limits are higher.

The effect of this approach is that while very often a tight spread can be profitable, in the long run I am a loser at my neighborhood haunts. I don't broadcast the news that hanging series are always recovered down the road (literally and timewise!), because no one else needs to know that.

Among the most powerful advantages of target betting is that it tells the player when to stop winning.

Let's say that I take a half dozen incomplete NB/LTDs into a high-rent casino, each of them frozen at 200/500, meaning that I am $500 x 6 "in the hole" and the next bet required by the rules is $200, matching the wager I lost before suspending the series for later recovery.

I am not planning to bet at the $200 level indefinitely, but only until the dangling series have been recovered. If things go well, I will wrap up all six incompletes and then fall back to whatever minimum bet applies at my current location (probably $10-$25).

Without a betting strategy, I would be starting out with $200 bets, winning $3,000, then trying to decide whether it's time to quit while I am ahead, or keep on playing knowing that if I get 15 bets or less behind the house, I am going to be back in the red.

Target betting does not permit that risk. Once the suspended series have been recovered, a new contest begins back on the first rung of the ladder, with uncertainty and greed both erased from the picture.

This is a process you can see repeated over and over again if you scroll down any one of the current set of target betting models.

The average EOS for target betting comes in less than six bets at blackjack, which generally has faster turnarounds than baccarat because of naturals and winning splits or double-downs that happen to coincide with a potential turnaround bet.

In the current batch (#15) there are at this point 1,130 x EOS in 6,695 rounds, making for a 5.9-round average. But only one third of all series drag out to more than 6 bets from opening bet to recovery. That indicates that after resuming play at the suspended betting level, the odds are better than 2-1 in your favor that EOS will come in six bets or less.

Confidence and cold cash are both essential to a target betting player's long term success, but a little luck now and then does not hurt. What is important is that you always know when to quit, something that very few gamblers can claim.

There is a temptation to try for a fatter bottom line by dispensing with the "low roller" phase and starting each new series with a $100 minimum bet.

Don't do it!

Assuming a $5 minimum and an available house limit is $25,000, a $100 opener would slash your spread from 1-5000 to 1-250, and that significant "tightening" will eventually choke you. A 1-1,000 spread is about as tight as you should figure to go, if you want to keep winning without an excess of "brown-trouser moments." It's just arithmetic.

Here are more BST numbers...

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
Important data missing from the summary because of the error I described cover the comparative overall result for target betting and a limited 1-200 spread, as follows:-

bst090330c: AV/HA -9 = -6.08%, TB won $2,000 = 13.66% of $14,640 action, 157 rounds net incl 3-2 naturals, avg bet $99, bets of $1,000+ = 2

BST TL $5-$1,000: LOSS of ($9,000) = -5.73% of $157,000 action, avg bet $1,061, bets of $1,000+ = 148

It's the same old, same old...a loss forced by a tight spread, with far more high bets required and a result closely in line with negative expectation (-5.73% vs. -6.08%) and a very different story for target betting, which delivered a tidy win with a far smaller average bet value and just two bets of $1,000-plus.

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 million-dollar question: Is damage control just another gambler's fallacy, or can ruin be avoided intuitively?

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Human intuition or decision making is the critical element that the You Can't Win brigade omits from the runaway simulations they use to "prove" that the house advantage at games of chance is ultimately unbeatable.

They also eliminate cards, dice, wheels, tables, money, dealers and real time, and then pretend that a high-speed computer simulation based on a random number generator (RNG) is "exactly the same as a real game."

Once upon a time, I was able to ask who would be gullible enough to bet actual cash against a game that used RNG output to simulate blackjack, baccarat or roulette, and I was confident that the answer was clear.

Then the casinos came out with giant flat-screen TVs featuring curvaceously UN-flat, life-sized "dealers" and slots for suckers to push their money into. And by golly, some people do play these so-called games, lured perhaps by cleavage that they can drool over without getting their faces slapped.

The mythematical defense of sims is that at some point, a fatal negative pattern of losses and wins will occur in real play that is exactly like output from a RNG, and vice versa, and ruin will be unavoidable.

It is, as I have said before, like arguing that a car that crashes with no driver at the wheel and with the gas pedal and brakes disabled is inherently unsafe.

Sorry, guys, but gambling is a human activity and the human element really does matter.

Simulations are useful only because they run at very high speeds, saving a huge amount of real-time research, and can give some indication of how a new game (or a method of betting) will perform.

But when the Wizard of Odds and other experts sponsored by the gambling industry claim that casinos rely on simulations to evaluate new games or rule changes to old ones, they are being deliberately disingenuous.

Sims have a role to play, but is always a preliminary one.

Casinos know very well that the only tests that really matter have to be conducted out on the floor, and nothing new ever gets the green light until it has been exhaustively evaluated under real-play conditions.

I have gone to great trouble over the years to amass as many blocks of outcomes from actual play as I can, and target betting has so far recorded only one million-dollar crash-and-burn in more than 500,000 rounds of baccarat and blackjack (more than five years of play for a full time gambler, if such an animal still exists).

The pattern that caused target betting to crash and burn looked like this...


If you were to see a "deadman's drop" like this in real play, one that went on to give the house a 33.33% edge in 114 bets in which 34 more wagers went south than didn't, you would not wait for rock bottom.

You know for sure that if you were sitting at a baccarat or blackjack table and the shoe turned that vicious that fast, you would decide it was time to take a break long before your bankroll was in serious jeopardy.

As it happens, this spectacular nosedive followed eight consecutive wins that raked in $1,090 in profits before the ninth bet, for $500, lost.

For years, my rule for blackjack has been to keep redoubling during an opening win progression until the bet hits $200, add $100 each time if the winning streak continues, and accept a loss of $500 or more as EOS, happy to end the series with $590+ in extra chips, and fall back to a minimum opening bet at a different layout.

Blackjack is the perfect game for target betting because "natural" pay-offs that exceed the value of the original bet (adding 50% or I'm not playing!) and well-timed splits and double-downs make it much more profitable than baccarat.

To make up the difference, I set the win progression cut-off much higher at $1,000 vs. baccarat, and that made the rules set vulnerable in just this one instance out of more than 60,000 successful recoveries.

The first baccarat trial, bust-free after 37,062 recoveries, delivered a virtual profit of $1.97 million and retired the original $1 million buy-in. The second baccarat series had one bust in 18,446 series and earned a little more than $110,000 (better than a break-even but not by much!). The current blackjack trials stand at a funny-money win to date of $1.75 million and counting. That's a total win of almost $4 million for five years' work, chickenfeed for a CEO but a big improvement on negative expectation.

It would be easy for me to change the baccarat results to eliminate the "bust" then claim that target betting was unbeaten against hundreds of thousands of real-play rounds.

But that would be cheating, and I don't believe in that (not because I am a saint, but because it is simply not necessary!).

For the record, changing the win progression rule to match my blackjack strategy would have turned a baccarat crash-n-burn into a win equal to 5.0% of the action for that same data set.

House-trained academics have a notion that systems promoters always have an excuse when their method crashes in ruins, and eliminate the problem simply by changing the rules.

So target betting's single loss of its bankroll stands in my book, reducing my method's win rate from 100% to -1/69,272 recovered series = 99.9985564%.

I generally claim a 99.992% win rate for my betting method, equal to favorable odds of 12,500 to 1. If I am in a cautious mood, I fall all the way down to 5,000 to 1 in a player's favor, figuring that even that has to be preferable to negative odds of 495 to 505 if you're a little lucky and play blackjack well.

And then there's the obvious wisdom of not claiming a 100% win rate, but instead encouraging the casinos and their tame experts to go public over and over again with "proof" that target betting cannot beat a runaway sim and is therefore worthless.

Let's face it, if gambling industry brainiacs can show for certain that the strategy is worthless, then they have no legal argument for banning its use in their casinos.

As for the ability of a thinking human being to recognize potential danger before it becomes deadly and take steps to avoid it, "simsters" know well that evasive, self-protecting tactics are difficult (meaning inconvenient) to model.

I have done it with what I call an interactive sim, which relies on the famously unreliable Windows RNG to spew out losses and wins with a randomness that may be questionable, but is at least out of my control beyond my insertion of a clear house edge of 1.4%.

In real play, several factors are likely to prompt a player to quit a series before recovery, then resume betting at the appropriate level elsewhere. A sim can't imitate boredom, hunger, fatigue or a need to pee, among other human responses, but table limits play a key role and they can be factored in.

The way it works is that the sim starts and ends series after series as a "live" player would, but the spreadsheet platform enables a human to scroll down, identify a spread limit trigger, and respond to it.

The job is done by "freezing" all of the outcomes or rounds up to that point, then refreshing the RNG to simulate play continuing at a different layout.

This is done whenever a spread limit trigger arises, and my assumption is first that at a $5 table, a $100 bet is as high as a real player would be able to go without attracting unwanted attention. After that, the rule is a spread of 1-5: lose a $500 bet after starting out with a minimum wager at a $100 table, and move on, then a $2,500 bet, and so on.

Series very rarely drag on for long (the average EOS comes in less than six bets) so this is not nearly as complicated or tedious a procedure as it sounds.

The point is that flesh-and-blood players do not suffer the kind of downturns that the robot at the heart of a runaway sim is required to ignore in order for the routine to "prove" that no betting method can ever beat the house advantage. It is simply not human nature to take a relentless beating when real money is at stake without taking appropriate evasive action.

Runaway sims are dishonest. But in some ways, that's not a bad thing for a cool, calm and disciplined player who knows how to beat the odds and win consistently.

Here's the latest BST blackjack data (playing the $500 win progression rule!).

(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.
_

The latest BST session should have turned out very badly. It didn't. Maybe next time?

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The conventional wisdom holds that because the house advantage at casino table games is immutable and invincible, any attempt to beat it must ultimately prove fruitless.

The message from the experts is that you can't win, so trying is a waste of time.

They tell me to "just do the math," and my problem is that the more math I do (applying far more strict standards of fairness and accuracy than most mathematicians I have encountered) the shakier and more vulnerable the house advantage proves to be.

In this post, fewer words, more pictures. Here they are (and as always, clicking on any image will make it larger and fully legible)...


I'm not a big fan of double-up or Martingale betting, not because it doesn't work (in spite of what house-trained mythematicians will tell you, it really does) but because it is quickly spotted by pit personnel who will then do whatever it takes to stop it. The chart above shows that against the current BST outcomes, the traditional Martingale and my more aggressive version of it both overcame the house edge without exceeding the house limit I imposed (a house limit being the highest permitted table limit). The summary above also reminds us that target betting is a far better way to go.

The data below cover the current batch of BST trials (#15) and have a lot to tell us about the inherent weakness of the house advantage, as long as it is not bolstered by tight spread limits. Casinos do all they can to prevent players from "betting wide" but gamblers are themselves the strictest enforcers of this damaging rule. Very few weekend punters spread wider than 1-5, and those that do (mostly high rollers) do it randomly. Bad idea!



Of all the claims I have made for my methods, the one that attracts the most flack is the target betting axiom that "if you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, then losing more often than you win won't hurt you." Yeah, I get it, they tell me, "You bet more when you know you are going to win and less when you know you are going to lose." Funny stuff! And very un-smart. You don't need a crystal ball to achieve this important objective, but you do need a strict set of rules and the discipline to apply them consistently.



In the latest BST contest, as in most of them, target betting could not succeed against a $5-$1,000 spread limit. And as always, I am not in the least surprised. Don't tell me that the bets that target betting requires are too high or that the risks my methods impose are beyond the reach of the average part-time punter. Tight spreads are far more dangerous than a controlled progression, as you can see (AGAIN) from the latest BST numbers. And this whole thing is not about making "recreational gamblers" rich on a shoestring budget: it's about proving that as well as not deserving to win as much as they do, casinos do not have to win as much as they do. The Math repeatedly proves that point.


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

You will never be able to predict the outcome of the next bet, but target betting makes sure you always bet the right amount at the right time.

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"Negative" is a word that frequently crops up in discussions about gambling and how to win, and the axiom is that negative expectation must eventually have negative results.

It's nonsense.

The truth is that the house advantage at casino games of chance can be the player's good friend, because the baseline percentage value can never be large enough to make winning impossible.

Casinos would be happy to offer games with a house advantage far greater than blackjack's +/- 1.0% or even roulette's 5.26%, and sometimes it seems not a day goes by without some new "side bet" appearing on table layouts to tempt easy money from players who can't or won't do the math.

The gambling industry knows, however, that winners play a critical role in their business. Why? Because games that could not be beaten would very quickly run out of suckers.

Casinos rely on the fact that most players are unconcerned about odds: they just want to be able to win once in a while, so they won't feel foolish. The only way that can happen is if the house edge is kept in check (usually less than 1.5% at mega-money games such as baccarat and blackjack).

Because of the random nature of all games, the house edge will sometimes tip far above the known expectation of 1.0% or whatever, a negative trend that will occur only a little more frequently than an opposite pattern.

Especially interesting to me is the fact that most players will bet more during a losing streak than they will against a winning one, making it almost impossible for them to "get out of the hole" when a prolonged negative trend is finally over.

It stands to sense (and simple arithmetic) that flat or random betting against negative expectation is more likely to lose than to win. So the only alternative to losing long term is a disciplined method of money management that minimizes the damage from losing trends and maximizes the profit from a positive pattern.

In two words: progressive betting. In two better words: target betting.

The casinos and their house-trained "experts" work very hard to make sure that the words above are perceived as dirty ones.

That's because progressive betting consistently upsets "the math" for the house, repeatedly and indefinitely enabling the player to make money in spite of losing more bets than he wins.

Obviously, you will never see those proliferating side bets I mentioned earlier flagged with signs warning players "Don't waste your money, this is a seriously dumb bet."

And for the same reason, people who bet stupidly without taking the trouble to learn the game they are playing are never taken aside and given helpful advice on how to protect and conserve their bankroll.

The only way you will ever prompt a lecture on odds and optimum play from pit personnel is if you are spotted betting a progression. (Please see the comments at left under the heading, "An easy way to test the lie that progressive betting can't win").

If you want the house to love you to bits, showering you with sundry "comps" to induce you not to go next door or across the street, bet randomly within a very tight spread (1-5 is standard for most weekend punters), and keep telling yourself that losing is fun.

If you want to win, do as I tell you!

Here are numbers from the latest BST blackjack attack...

(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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Everybody gets lucky once in a while. Penny-ante punters depend on it. If you are target betting, you don't need luck (but be grateful anyway!).

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In the interests of political correctness, even though being PC is no longer fashionable, let me say right now that I have nothing against penny-ante punters.

I respect and welcome them, because without them there would be no casinos.

They mystify and occasionally (when they stray onto "my" blackjack table and play badly) they frustrate me, but I would not be without them for the world.

The latest BST session inspired me to state the obvious, as in the headline above this post.

But in a field where what little discussion there is tends to be dominated by academic mathematicians who may never have placed a bet in their lives, stating the obvious is essential.

Target betting succeeds with predictable consistency because win-loss patterns, regardless of the randomness of individual outcomes, are in themselves predictable and consistent.

When bet values are also selected at random, the house advantage is almost certain to win, the exceptions being lucky streaks (accidents!) in which the player wins more bets than he loses, or when by a fluke he achieves an average win value that exceeds his average loss value.

If you give target betting a fair and open-minded trial, you will learn that end of series (EOS) bets occur every three bets, on average (less, actually, but only mythematicians know how to place 0.7 of a bet!).

Most of those recovery attempts will FAIL.

The failure rate for EOS wagers is also predictable: roughly 53%.

But what might seem to you like a worrisome demonstration of the inevitability of more losses than wins is in reality the reason why target betting can fail only very, very rarely indeed.

That's because the value of each EOS bet is not randomly selected, making each failure just a temporary setback.

There will always be more failures than successes. But the combined value of the smaller number of successes will always exceed the total value of the greater number of failures. Result: happiness!

The first session in the latest BST trial (which now may not end until I have reached 100,000 outcomes) was a perfect example of how accidental good timing can improve the performance of a betting method that is already very difficult for the house to beat.

The sample had 7 more losses than wins, but in spite of that, the profit after the last EOS was $9,835.

That was with the BST 1-200 ($5-$1,000) spread/table limit in force.

Target betting without the wimpy TL did less well, but only because I'm still working on modeling my real-time responses to dealer naturals and 3+ 21s:

bst090327a: 7.5 net AV = +3.52%, target win $3,798 = 29.49% of $12,878 action
227.5 net rounds incl 3-2 naturals, average bet $60, bets of $1,000+ = 10

Modeling a $1,000 TL with the same target betting rules applied produced these results:

7.5 net AV/HA = 3.52%, target win $7,500 = +3.30% of $227,500 total action
227.5 net rounds incl 3-2 naturals, average bet $1,068, bets of $1,000+ = 213

The standouts in these data are the ones that always highlight themselves: a much bigger action number with the BST TL imposed, caused by a far greater need for bets of $1,000 or more (10 with a wide spread vs. 213 with a "house" spread).

I have to confess at this point that the last few BST summaries have exaggerated the number of big-ticket bets for the BST TL. It is one of the hazards of spreadsheet modeling that every once in a while, a "bad" cell will proliferate, skewing results until the glitch is exposed.

I am as a rule a demon error-checker, but this one got by me for a week or so. Turns out the exaggeration goosed the numbers, but not by much. Here's a revised summary with the miscount corrected:

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
As you can see, a tighter spread (1-200 vs. 1-5000) resulted in an overall loss for BST TL, along with 3.5 x target betting's total action and average bet value, and almost 20 times the number of $1,000+ bets for a method that most people would assume to be "less aggressive."

In every sample that had a negative net AV/HA, the BST table limit delivered an overall loss, rendering target betting as ineffectual as any other betting method, including fixed or random values. And that of course is the whole purpose of spread limits: to ensure that the house advantage exacts its ordained toll on players who dare to challenge it.

When a player is able to widen his spread to suit his current needs, the house advantage becomes almost irrelevant.

A wide spread enables you to win more when you win than you lose when you lose, so that losing more often than you win will not prevent you from walking away from the game a winner. Isn't that what everyone on our side of the tables wants?

The best news of all is that with target betting strictly applied, single wins are all it takes to achieve recovery around 65% of the time. That's important, because isolated wins occur about twice as often as paired wins ("twins"!).

So, if you gamble because you believe in luck and imagine that you can somehow get more than your share, be ready to lose. If, like me, you accept that luck is a fickle ally and a plan is a whole lot more reliable and predictable than flying by the seat of your pants, welcome to target 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.
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