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(Target's sports betting experiment continues to prosper! For current information, please go to the Sethbets website)
I have been accused of being naive because I think it's wrong that online casinos can manipulate the results of virtual table games - and wrong that they let funny-munny players win so they can take them to the cleaners once they start to bet "for real."
I'm also, apparently, naive to think that casinos have any interest whatsoever in the way people bet, the argument being that how (and how much) you bet can have no long-term impact on the house advantage.
Worse, I'm told I am deluded to believe that Martingale punters are at work in casinos every day, betting just two or three times at any one layout and hopping from one game to the next in search of the single win they need to land a big score.
Never mind that I have been a regular player in Nevada for more than 30 years, and have lived in the Silver State for 25 of those years...I am, I am assured by some of my readers, an innumerate idiot.
It gets better: Experts tell me that table and house limits are logistical constructs that have nothing whatever to do with controlling the way gamblers bet (they exist because small fry don't like to play with big fish, and vice versa).
I have to admit that even to me, playing thousands of rounds against Bodog's no-money versions of baccarat and blackjack seems an insane waste of time, especially since casinos with real games that are regulated and presumably trustworthy are less than 20 minutes from my front door.
But there is, I promise you, method in my madness.
I decided to press on with the Bodog tests to demonstrate that once the "casino"'s crappy limits were replaced with real-world bet spreads, Target would prove a winner.
So I endured Bodog's 1-200 baccarat restriction, and the 1-500 spread for blackjack, fully expecting to lose as I dutifully wrote down the result of every round.
You have seen the final baccarat numbers already: a limit-induced loss that was more than double the -1.41% expectation for the sessions replaced with a 7.6% overall WIN when Target was able to bet within reasonable limits that are available in casinos all over the world.
The blackjack sessions are on-going because I figured I might as well gather 5,000 outcomes and see if Bodog's "practice" game actually reflected real-play negative expectation by the time I reached that point.
Right now, it seems clear that Bodog's freebie game is meant to be a pushover, so that players who truly are as naive as I am sometimes accused of being will assume that the real game is just as beatable and open an account.
No such luck.
Right now, after 4,700 rounds, I have won 1.7% more bets than I have lost.
That's so dramatically adrift of statistical expectation that it's safe to assume something fishy's going on.
Bodog will probably suggest that I can't track results accurately, and their shills (Eliot Jacobson, Ph.D., and his buddy the Wizard of Odds among them) will say the data sample is too small to mean anything.
But I challenge those worthy gentleman to play that many hands of blackjack in a "real" casino and come out with substantially more winning bets than losing ones.
The great irony is that because of the Bodog table limits - and because I have been betting with a pretty aggressive set of Target rules - I'm still down -0.75% of my total action in spite of a 1.7% "player edge."
And that's no surprise at all. Table limits are intended to make losers out of everybody, including the lucky stiffs who somehow evade the house advantage and win more bets than they lose.
Blow those Bodog blackjack bet limits away, and Target delivers a "player's edge" of almost 14.0%.
Yes, it took money to make money. But that's always how it is when the house has the edge - or when it gooses its chances by imposing tight table limits.
The "no limits" Target win to date looks like this:
What matters more is how things "woulda" turned out if all of Target's fancy bells and whistles - rules variations that increase profits but are primarily intended to camouflage the strategy - were to be turned off.
Here's the answer:
Risk plummets - and so do profits.
But the core principle of Target - responding aggressively to a mid-recovery win - is mathematically vindicated.
Target permits a bet to be as high as 10x the win that preceded it, a jump that in my long experience causes dealers and the pit staff behind them to become very interested in a dramatic departure from "normal" player behavior.
Remember, most players impose a very tight betting range on themselves - 1 to 5 is about average - because they wrongly believe they are limiting their losses.
Apply even a 1 to 50 range limit on the Bodog blackjack outcomes, and you end up with a story that looks like this:
A win, yes - but one that could only have occurred with a very unlikely 1.72% "player's advantage" that Bodog certainly would not permit once anyone was betting with cold, hard cash!
And look what the spread limit does to the process: Instead of maxing out at 30 or so bets, it takes almost 2,000 rounds to recover in one instance, and the average recovery time sky-rockets from 5 or 6 bets to almost 400.
That's not a workable strategy: It's likely to end in a one-way ride to the funny farm!
I won't be playing any more baccarat rounds against Bodog: I can get all the written records I can use while playing for real money in my neighborhood, but if I produce pencil and paper at a blackjack table, all manner of alarms go off!
Casinos are not mindlessly paranoid about their thin margin at blackjack (less than +1.0% against a disciplined player).
They know full well that progressive betting will consistently bite big chunks out of their bottom line when it's done right and they will do whatever it takes to prevent its use.
That includes cheating.
Here are the final baccarat reports:
The moral of this story: Never play without a plan!
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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