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(For updated information about Target's ongoing sports betting experiment, please go to the Sethbets website, or click here for an introduction to progressive betting, and here [20] and here [5] for current picks). You can also find a guide to the most basic Target strategy applied to more than 80,000 verifiable baccarat outcomes by visiting Google Docs.
My fall foray into the murky world of Internet gambling forums has become a major distraction in recent days, and I have been neglecting the online platform that I care about the most: this one.
The good news is that the to-and-fro about Target on Baccarat Forums has brought me a very healthy number of new readers - I welcome them and would be very happy to hear from them.
The issue on BF, as everywhere with gambling as the sole topic of discussion, comes down to the same old same old: Is it possible to win consistently at games of chance without progressive betting?
And the answer is the same old same old: NO!
Baccarat players are as obsessed as anyone else with the smokescreens that casinos artfully build around the ways they have devised to part fools from their money.
There's talk about cuts and burns and penetration (sounds like an S & M forum!), and patterns and trends and "predictiveness" (whatever the hell that is) and it all sounds very serious and scientific.
Unfortunately, it is all irrelevant.
However much we might like to think we can change the end game with skillful bobbing and weaving, in the end, it's always going to come down to the same inescapable truth: We will lose more bets than we win.
And that being so, we have no option other than to bet in such a way that we win more when we win than we lose.
To do that, we must bet progressively according to a strict set of rules, so that we can recover in as few bets as possible losses that took many more hands or rounds to accrue.
Regular readers of this blog might at this point be saying, "Jeez, again with the 'win more' thing!" but my BF adventure has taught me that even people who consider themselves experts on just one game are somehow able to overlook the math and convince themselves that they can win while betting flat or randomly.
There's one guy on BF who keeps saying over and over again that because Banker always, over time, will win more bets than Player (45.86% vs. 44.62% according to the widely-accepted expectation percentages), Banker can be counted on to "lose less" and is therefore the superior proposition.
This such mind-blowing twaddle that I didn't feel it deserved a response - until I learned that many people on the forum(s) actually suck it up like mother's milk.
One response made good sense: "Dying more slowly is still dying!"
Beyond that, the argument always ignored the plain truth that as long as you bet flat/fixed amounts or bet randomly, winning more often will not help you win more money.
And if that's so, why bother backing Banker at all?
I admit I took pleasure in playing Devil's Advocate and recommending a total ban on Banker bets - and it wasn't serious mischief, because that's the way I play on the rare occasions when I desert blackjack for a game that I find comparatively tedious and unrewarding.
On the BF board, the phrase "bet selection" is taken by the majority to mean the choice between Banker and Player (Tie, too, if you really want to lose your bankroll quickly).
What it should mean is selecting the amount you bet, not where you pile your chips.
In the last couple of weeks, I was directed to a "thousand shoe" sim output page put up by the Wizard of Odds (OK, I have mentioned this before, but bear with me!) and it gave me a wonderful opportunity to lay out some truths not just as I see them but as they demonstrably are.
Those 1,000 shoes were the product of a simulation, and I have consistently railed against simulations in this space and questioned their relevance to real play in real time for real money.
But in this instance, all that concerns me is that the 83,640 bets were published by someone who is a widely-known advocate for the gambling industry, so it can be assumed that there is nothing "soft" about them.
Just as important is that I'm not the source of the data - whatever I say about the "WOO" shoes can be readily checked and verified at the link I have already provided.
One of the many, many factoids that came out of the Target processing of the WOO shoes is that although the strategy lost 1.24% more bets than it won, it came out ahead by a little less than 2.0%
The "win" (in quotes because no money changed hands) worked out at about $90 an hour for about 1.2 years of continuous play, which sounds like slave labor to me, given how much I enjoy the watching-paint-dry nature of baccarat compared to blackjack.
But what's important is that against data over which I had (and have) no control, the Target version of progressive betting successfully overcame negative expectation and delivered a profit.
Along the way, I was provided with a full digital version of the 1,600 shoes from two "real shoes" sets put out last century by Zumma Publishing.
As some of you will remember, I tested the Zumma shoes against Target years ago, then repeated the tests using the same data a few weeks back, getting this result:
The only difference between this run-through (a "player's edge" above 4.0% against a house advantage of 1.29%!) is that I allowed the next bet (NB) value to go as high as 10x the value of the previous bet (PB) rather than 4x for the WOO shoes.
I'm happy to have the Zumma shoes in their original form, not because the line by line results are any different (they aren't) but because I had stripped out ties and shuffle breaks because they are meaningless to Target.
With this method, if a shoe ends in mid-series, you keep on betting at the required level after the shuffle and cut (both of which are also meaningless) until the series has been recovered, and the beat goes on per the Target rules.
Everything I did was strictly above-board and triple-checked as always, but this time I was able to provide data about individual shoes for anyone to check against the Zumma data sets.
Now, it happens on bulletin boards like BF that when you put up data that contradicts the conventional wisdom, some members start out dismissive, then become angry, and end up astonishingly abusive.
You might assume that these gambling discussion groups are there to enable like-minded people to share their betting experience, and help each other become better players.
That's true.
But they also provide a platform for cynical, seasoned pros to do their part on behalf of the gambling industry, and dump all over anyone who dares suggest that there is a way to consistently beat the house advantage at games of chance.
Am I a conspiracy theory nut? Not usually - but my experience with BF reinforces my belief that the gambling industry monitors all relevant online activity and sticks its oar in to stir things up whenever it sees an opportunity.
It can't do it with messages that start out, "Hey, this is Charlie over at Wynn Las Vegas, and you're full of (bleep)" so instead it creates accounts under a variety of names, and hurls childish abuse at any threat to the status quo until sober and sensible board members tire of all the nonsense and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
It's a clever plan, as far as it goes. And unless the target of the abuse is very persistent, it works.
So, now I have wandered some distance from the question at the top of this article, and it's time to get back to it.
Let's first revisit the conventional wisdom, which says that any damage control a player may apply, by reducing or increasing his bet values or by walking away from a series that has turned dangerously negative, must be in the grand scheme of things a waste of time.
The CW insists that no player in any gambling game can escape his ultimate destiny, which is to LOSE.
Back when computers were steam-driven and achingly s-l-o-w, I devised a model which asked a simple question: "What would happen if I were to walk away from any shoe or session in which the house got more than five bets ahead of me?"
By "skipping" a potentially deadly downturn, would I be more or less likely to walk right into another one - jumping from the frying pan into the fire, in other words?
And by extension, how often would things have improved if I had stayed put and waited out a prolonged negative trend?
The old model didn't have shoe markers and shuffle breaks, so I had to set a series length (say, 50 rounds) as well as a "skip trigger" (say, -5).
I got some promising, consistently positive answers after my old Gateway had huffed and puffed for hours, but I moved on because I didn't feel the results could be said to be in any way definitive.
Now, I have a system with 6GB of RAM vs. maybe 2MB before, plus dual processors and a clock-speed that, in the words of one BF seeker after truth and wisdom, "I don't know and don't care."
Better yet, I have the WOO 1,000 shoes and the Zumma 1,600 with breaks where they are supposed to be, enabling me to drag out the old model, dust it off, and teach it some new skills courtesy of Excel 2010.
The algorithm was as simple as it would need to be in real play: If the house gets five bets ahead, sit out the rest of the shoe, then resume betting after the shuffle.
My results: the overall AV/HA (actual value of the house advantage) for the WOO 1,000 was cut from -1.20% to -0.11%, and for the Zumma 600 + 1,000 it dropped from -1.21% to -0.46%.
Some snips:
What you get over on BF when you post data like this is abuse from the voluble defenders of the casinos' You can't win in the end, so learn to love losing party line, sometimes including a confession that they haven't even looked at the material because it must be garbage.
The methodology snip comes from a model which runs an RNG for either 30,000 or 150,000 lines at a time, recording the comparative results from each iteration.
There's useful data there, which is more than you'll get from "testers" who will publish summaries like this without a word of explanation covering methodology or rules applied.
Imspirit includes in his dazzling array of numbers and charts a reference to Target Betting Flat-betting 1u...an impossibility, given that Target never, ever flat-bets 1u or 1,000,000u because flat-betting is always going to fall foul of negative expectation.
He's also given Target a spread of 1-10,000 instead of the recommended 1-5,000.
Doubling the spread may not matter much, but it does show a disregard for the strategy rules and suggests a deliberate hatchet job.
I say that because my WOO tests - and soon the Zumma 600+1,000 - have been posted online for anyone to examine line by line and verify against the original data sets, both of which have been in the pubic domain for years.
I'll put up the Skip Test RNG files as soon as I can so anyone can run it, although it's possible that files converted to to Google Docs won't accept Excel macros. If that happens, I'll send the file to anyone who requests 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. 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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