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(Target's sports betting experiment continues to prosper! For current information, please go to the Sethbets website)
I just wrapped up my final Bodog freebie blackjack session, and it ended pretty well.
But of course as always, the result you see here doesn't prove a thing.
All it does is suggest that even against a house-imposed spread as narrow as 1 to 500, it's possible to win once in a while.
Or it would be if we didn't already know that Bodog uses its "practice" table game simulations to reel in real-cash customers with softball numbers that can only be seen in the virtual world.
Then, when there's cold, hard cash at stake, the game switches from a pushover player advantage (+1.58% in almost 5,000 rounds for me) to a crooked game more punishing than anything you would find in a regulated bricks-and-mortar casino.
The screen shot above is, I want you all to know, misleading: I busted out three times before Target finally got the upper hand, so the final "win" is actually $4,000 less than it seems to be.
As it happens, this last Bodog battle was not as player-friendly as some have been.
There was a house edge of 0.74%, meaning that according to Eliot Jacobson, Ph.D. and other gambling "experts" I should have lost $305 of my total action of $41,000 in this farewell 269-round session.
As you can see from the Bodog screen shot above, in this case something went wrong with the experts' prediction.
And overall, the experts were just as badly off the mark.
What matters most is that the set of Target rules that thrashed Bodog's funny-munny blackjack game did the same against the online "casino"'s baccarat simulation.
It is, to use a word that gambling's mythematicians adore, axiomatic that while it is possible to devise a betting strategy which will beat one data sample, the same method is certain to fail against any other sample of similar or greater size.
I am much more concerned with the fact that when all of Target's bells and whistles are stripped away and only the critical "LTD-plus" response to a mid-recovery win is applied, negative expectation remains a harmless irrelevance.
It doesn't take fancy footwork to defeat the dreaded house advantage - just good old mathematics.
But I am, I admit, very fond of my bells and whistles.
They exist to help camouflage the fact that from time to time, very large increases in bet values are required, making the strategy's next bet (NB) up to 10 times the value of the previous bet (PB) in response to a qualifying win.
Dealers notice little details like that, and dutifully report them to the pit staff behind them when they take their breaks from the exhausting business of emptying customers' wallets.
So I prefer to bump bets after any win, and to confuse everyone but (hopefully) myself by doing the same after some losses.
Target needs two consecutive mid-recovery wins to achieve turnaround, which is an elegant way of describing the very satisfying recovery of all prior losses plus a modest overall profit.
Because of that, it faces roughly twice the challenge of a Martingale, which achieves turnaround with a single win after one or more losses, but can at times demand some even scarier bets than Target.
Against the Bodog blackjack sessions, for example, a Martingale player would have "won" $54,000 in virtual chips after risking $46,000 - whereas I "won" $115,000 after at one point sliding almost $90,000 into a nasty hole.
The good news is that before double-up got into its worst case scenario, it was more than $50,000 ahead. And at its low spot, Target had begun its nightmare slump with $45,000 in winnings. That counts for something!
Most of the people who read this blog are looking for a nice-'n-easy way of making big money with little or no risk, so I have to keep saying that in my long experience, such a thing is not possible.
Even casino operators and bookmakers have to accept risk is part of the cost of doing business, and so it is for gamblers who expect to be consistent long-term winners.
Billy Walters, my role model among professional gamblers, says he's often had losing days, weeks and even months - but never a losing year.
Some days, Walters has $1,000,000 or more in play, spread out among dozens of Las Vegas sports books with the help of a network of "associates" who are very well paid for fronting his bets.
He knows that it takes money to make money, that you can't win without losing, and any number of similar Las Vegas cliches.
Billy Walters uses a complex computer handicapping algorithm to pick his sports bets, and given his year-to-year success, it's clear that he knows what he's doing.
When it comes to sports betting, I barely know a baseball stick from a hockey bat, so I prefer to make my "picks" randomly (I put quotes around the word because the truth is, my selections choose me!).
And that takes me to the point of the headline at the top of this post.
However brilliant you might think you are at blackjack or whatever other game in which you choose to invest, the only thing that can make a difference in the long run is how you select your bet values.
One of the regulars at my local casino is a dapper, serious fellow who rarely plays blackjack anywhere else and is perfectly happy with the house's $300 table limit.
He plays every day but never for more than two hours at a stretch, he sticks devoutly to basic blackjack strategy (except for a couple of personal quirks) and if he loses $300, he goes home, reverting to a minimum $5 on his first hand next day.
He insists that he never loses more than $2,000 a year, and because we're both polite gentlemen, I naturally believe him.
However, if that $300 loss limit, along with his $100 max per bet, were to be applied to the Bodog blackjack sample, the result would look a lot like this:
Not too terrible, you might think - except that this ultra-conservative method failed to make long-term headway even against a sample of outcomes with an overall player advantage above 1.5%!
It is a mathematical fact that the narrower (or tighter) your betting spread, the more likely you are to lose in the long run.
In spite of its occasional very high bets, a Martingale - especially with the win progression enhancement I use in my models - is by far the most effective method of progressive betting, given that it only needs one win to recover all prior losses.
That makes it the most effective winning method there is, period, because in the long run, only progressive betting (aka money management) can consistently beat a game with a negative expectation.
I devised Target almost 30 years ago because I could see that a Martingale simply wasn't playable.
Casinos find all sorts of ways to shut out a double-up bettor, beginning with mild harassment and leading eventually to an outright ban.
The Martingale result against the Bodog blackjack sessions is impressive, and confirms that it does not have to be fatal even when you hit a table limit.
Mr. Expert, Ph.D., will tell you that the cards have no memory, yadayada, but the fact is that after you have been badly but not fatally wounded by a prolonged losing streak, you are likely (but not certain) to benefit from what Wall Street statisticians like to call a correction.
What matters is that you have enough money behind you to take you through a rough patch - witness the forty grand plus that my double-up player had to pull out of his virtual back pocket before the numbers settled back towards the norm and he was able to recover his losses.
For the record, when double-up hit its lowest point against the Bodog blackjack outcomes ($23,035 in the hole with a $23,040 bet on the table), it had seen TWELVE consecutive losses for a notional house edge of 100%.
At that point, while the odds of the next bet winning were on the one hand the same as at any other time (about 49.5:50.5 against), a 13th consecutive loss was theoretically just a little less likely.
Didn't happen, and Mr. Martingale made his money back plus a fat five bucks.
After 15 bets, the house edge for the series exceeded 53%. The next 15 bets swung the other way, giving a player edge of 3% and a 30-round house edge of 25%. After another 30 bets, the house edge since the beginning of the slump was down to 15%.
And so it goes.
I play strictly by the book in my models, making for bet values that would never apply in real play.
That $23,040 Martingale bet would have been $25,000 in the real world, for instance, with sensible rounding up also making Target's bets "tidier" to eliminate fiddling and fumbling.
There is, after all, no time for uncertainty when big money is at stake!
At blackjack, a religious adherence to basic strategy is always the best play, not just because losses will be minimized, but because it focuses all decision-making on bet values.
And, of course, Target further eliminates the need to think. Once you have the rules down pat, whichever version you choose to suit your style and your bankroll, you simply follow them.
Blackjack is, of course, the only table game that offers choices other than how much to bet and when.
I don't count pai-gow poker because its 5% house edge makes it a fool's game.
Baccarat offers the Player or Banker option, it's true, but I have always vetoed Banker bets because of the "5 percent" commission on wins.
Only a fool believes that the commission is truly 5%. Because it is not applied when a bet on the Bank loses, it can reduce your overall win (or increase your final loss!) by a percentage that is almost infinitely variable, often wiping out your profits entirely and leaving you with a commission tab outstanding.
Yes, it's frustrating when Player loses hand after hand - but it is always better than the alternative.
In the Bodog baccarat sessions, for example, Target earned a total of $141,000 in winning bets for a final profit of just over $23,000.
If half of those wins had been Banker bets (a reasonable statistical assumption), commission would have reduced the overall win by roughly $3,500, or 15.15%.
Five percent? Not even close!
I always advise students of Target to stick with blackjack whenever possible, or baccarat if they absolutely insist.
Both those games have a house advantage of less than 1.5%, which makes each round as close to an even money proposition as can be found in a casino.
I enjoy occasionally opening a new series with field bets at craps or even money (outside) bets at roulette, in spite of a house edge that can exceed 5.0%.
But when the going gets tough, I always retreat to blackjack or baccarat, simply because in the long run, they are a player's safest havens.
If you decide to try roulette, I recommend staying away from all but even-money bets (black/red, odd/even, first/last) and using the French avant derniere method to select your bets.
That means that if the spin before last came up Red, Red's your next bet, and so on (I call the method The Wobble, meaning win before last = WBL!). It means you catch streaks either way, and it can be a lot of fun.
But of course, fun is not really what we're about, is it? We're in it to win it.
Meanwhile, the casinos' very effective brainwashing machine insists that there's no way to win in the long run - but not to worry, because losing is FUN FUN FUN!
And pigs have wings...
If you take gambling seriously, treating it as something other than an expensive pastime, you will accept the fact that over time you are sure to lose more bets than you win, and think of losing not as "fun" but as a means to an end.
Regular readers will know that the Target mantra has always been that you have to win more when you win than you lose when you lose, so that losing more often than you win won't cost you money.
Only progressive betting makes it possible to achieve an average winning bet value (AWB) that exceeds your average losing bet value (ALB) by a percentage greater than the negative product of [losses minus wins divided by total number of bets].
In the Bodog baccarat sessions, for example, I LOST 1,139 bets totaling $117,620 and WON 1,104 bets worth a total of $140,865.
The house advantage (HA) for that data set was -35/2,243 indicating an actual value (AV) of -1.56% which softened to -1.41% when ties (or pushes) were factored in.
According to the experts, I should have lost $4,080 to comply with the "rule" that the end result of betting should come close to AV (or NE for negative expectation) x action (the sum total of all bets).
Because the experts are wrong - and know it - I actually WON $23,245 or +8.06% of action of $288,425.
That was possible because my ALB was $103 and my AWB was $128.
So when I won, I won 24% more than I lost when I lost.
Result: Happiness.
In the Bodog blackjack sessions, my overall ALB was $192 and my AWB was $238.
Again, I won 24% more when I won than I lost when I lost (24% is about right, but of course I'm happier when I can do better than that).
Similar or better results can be achieved with blind luck.
But luck, as we all know, never lasts.
Target does.
An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" such as Bodog, spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this._
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