Thứ Ba, 31 tháng 1, 2012

January 2012 is yet another "green" month for Target Sports, and to date we've turned $5,000 into $185,000. Beat that, Wall Street!

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Please see note at bottom!


January is shaping up to be another profitable month for Target Sports (it's just a matter of whether or not the win for the first month of 2012 is over or under $6,000!).

We had a bump or two along the way, but the pattern of wins and losses has settled down into a relative walk in the park since I gave up on trying to match each day's big bets with the shortest odds available.

Month after month, the message from the numbers is that random selection rules!

Every time I try to out-think the process, I get into trouble, so from now on I'm sticking with letting the dogs lie where they may.

For a while I ditched +100 as the lowest acceptable qualifying marker (aka even money) and bumped the floor up to +105, based on my discovery that even-money bets had cost us more than $40,000 since this transparent pretty much daily trial began more than 18 months ago.

Then I looked a little closer, and realized that the damage was done while I was listening to dissenting voices and straying from the original random concept.

All this began almost three - or is it four? - years ago when a globe-trotting gambler whom I refer to from time to time as "Peter Punter" began blasting me with e-mails suggesting that sports betting was a far better milieu for Target than casino table games.

His reasoning was that handicappers (known as cappers) all over the Internet are claiming win rates of 65% to 85% vs. a theoretical win rate of just over 49% for anyone betting money at blackjack or baccarat.

The fatal flaw in his reasoning was, of course, odds.

Cappers can claim those seemingly impressive win rates because most of the time they play it very, very safe and tout favorites.

And if your (say) 75% WR consisted of picks averaging odds of -200 (1/2 in the odds system I was brought up with), what looks good in a boastful headline on the web site is less than stellar down on the bottom line.

My initial advice to Pete was that he ignore cappers altogether and focus solely on underdogs, selecting them randomly and applying some modification of the Target rules to detemine daily bet values.

He ignored me, and over a period of a few weeks, lost his shirt.

The first open trial I set up (selections posted and e-mailed well in advance of game times) picked just seven dogs a day, and limited the bet spread from 1 to 100 ($5 to $500).

I accepted propositions at pretty much any odds, reasoning that although bets at +150 and higher (that's 2-3 in English) would win less often, their high paybacks would make up for their relative scarcity.

Wrong!

The one good thing (and it was a very good thing) that came out of that first trial was that it enabled me to accumulate a lot of valuable and insightful statistics.

In the current Target Sports trial, we have defied negative expectation by turning an overall bookies' edge of a tad under 10.0% into a win that represents 8.0% of our total action.

Along the way, I received all sorts of advice from sports and math experts, including a finger-wagging lecture that the 10% bookies' edge I could expect consisted of the rake on both sides of every proposition, and would not necessarily be reflected in a comparison between the number of losses vs. the number of wins.

Bollocks!

Bookies expect to win 55 out of every 100 bets, and that's exactly the way it has turned out with the 5,067 bets we have put in play as of January 30, 2012.

The exact bookies' edge at this point is 9.7%.

We have risked a total of $2.32 million since July 24, 2010, so our $185,570 win to date in hard cash, not fancy percentages, is, as I said, eight percent of our total action.

I count that as a resounding success, and I challenge any of those own-trumpet-blowing cappers to match it!

That's not to say we didn't have some scary moments. Last summer, when I was hindering random selection with the application of what seemed like common sense, caution very nearly cost us our (by then) six-figure bankroll.

We started out with random selection, then got greedy: That's the bottom line.

It's also correct (but not fair) to say that if we'd hit a $100,000 slump from the outset, then Target Sports would never have got off the ground.

As it is, we never used up our initial $5,000 buy-in, which had $20,000 in reserve.

Target's one irreversible failure has been the "5-a-day" trial which I spun off from the primary experiment just before its first anniversary last July.

I try to pay respectful attention to the views of others, and quite frequently, I would hear suggestions that 20 bets a day is just too many.

I'm not relying on hindsight when I say here and now that I never agreed with that - my contention (which is firmly on record!) was that we might be better off expanding the trial to as many as 50 bets a day, if at any time there were enough +100 to +140 qualifiers.

The only thing that stopped me from doing that was the logistical nightmare of expanding my Target Sports template to accommodate all those added bets.

It took me weeks of fussin' and cussin' to set up a model that rolled bets over from one day to the next and indicated all the things that matter, line-by-line and bet-by-bet.

More bets mean more days when multiple small wins help soften the blow somewhat when one or two big bets go south, and I surmised that the opposite would be true of a short list.

And that was how it turned out.

It all went well for about six months, and then stats and probability caught up with us.

The cost was about $8,500, which technically should be trimmed from the primary trials profits.

But I don't want to do that because the losing project was a separate experiment, even though the five bets picked out were always the first five selections on any day's big list.

Perhaps when winnings from the long list top $210,000 I'll make the necessary adjustment.

Then again, perhaps I won't.

After all, I don't factor my casino winnings into the bottom line for Target Sports, even though the profits are attributable to the same betting strategy.

The monthly wins chart above has been going out most days for weeks with a max exposure figure of -$217,000 for October, 2011, an error that was belied by all the other data in the summary. Somehow, my Target Sports model added up a succession of much smaller numbers month by month to get that awful grand total, and the idiot who wrote the workbook (me) didn't spot the screaming error until today. My apologies to any subscribers who may have felt pain because of the mistake.

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._

Thứ Năm, 26 tháng 1, 2012

Vegas casinos relying more on baccarat

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In the days previous to the Chinese New Year festivity began this week; 6 high rollers sat down at the confidential baccarat tables one day at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and began throwing down wagers of $100,000 to $200,000 a hand. It was a scene hardly out of place these days in Sin City.

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Big-time gamblers, primarily from Asia, are flocking to Las Vegas to play baccarat and providing a big lift to the overall bottom line of the city's casinos.

Baccarat has easily surpassed blackjack in terms of casino revenue in Las Vegas and now represents nearly 60 percent of the MGM Grand's table games revenue over the past year. It's especially popular this week with tens of thousands of tourists from Asia in town to celebrate the Chinese New Year.

"For us to make money in gaming today without baccarat is almost impossible," said Debra Nutton, senior vice president of casino operations at the MGM Grand hotel-casino. "We need the big whales to make money."

In Las Vegas parlance, a "whale" is a big-time gambler who easily wagers more in one night at the tables than most American families make in a year. Casinos cater to them with plush, secluded gambling salons inside the top casinos — with baccarat games that often start out at a minimum $10,000 per hand.

The whales typically favor baccarat — a game romanticized in James Bond flicks and highly popular in Macau and Singapore.

Thứ Hai, 2 tháng 1, 2012

Apple's Steve Jobs believed his way was the only way and made enemies by refusing to compromise. I sympathize: Sometimes there's no middle ground!

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I just finished reading the Isaacson biography of the late and often great Steve Jobs, and the impression I got was of a guy who couldn't understand why everyone else on the planet didn't think the way he did.

He was wrong from time to time - he didn't think it was a smart idea to allow outside apps for the iPhone, for example! - but he was right a lot more often than he wasn't, and the battles he won have changed a lot of lives.

Now, I'm no Steve Jobs, but after wading through thousands of posts to online bulletin boards dedicated to gambling, I'm stunned by how stubbornly wrong smart people can be about simple arithmetic, and can appreciate his aversion to compromise.

Setting aside for a moment the sad fact that most boards are diminished and degraded by foul-fingered bickering authored by a small minority, it's amazing how much time contributors are willing to spend discussing betting strategies that can't be supported by common sense, let alone mathematical analysis.

In the month I spent posting to Baccarat Forums, I was routinely blasted for defending a strategy that recommends a betting spread as high as 1 to 5,000.

The rationale for rejecting Target seemed to be that a betting plan that is out of the reach of more than 99% of all gamblers is at best undeserving of consideration, and at worst a criminal attempt to coerce idiots to hand over all their money to the casinos.

Target is, of course, a disciplined but relatively modest take on progressive betting, a concept that has been around for about as long as wagering itself.

What I find surprising is that so many presumably sensible players are willing to keep believing that there is any long-term alternative to progressive betting, and to spend countless hours discussing short-term maneuvers that can only work if they get lucky.

I haven't posted here for quite a while because I have been working instead on a baccarat article that started out as a piece for this blog, then kept growing and growing like a beanstalk on steroids.

It's still a work in progress, but I have posted it to my website, and readers who consider themselves experts on baccarat are welcome to read it and get mad at me whenever I repeat the plain truth that the game can only be beaten by progressive betting.

As with every other game with a long-term negative expectation, baccarat will in the end chew chunks out of a gambler's bankroll that approximate the percentage value of the house edge, meaning that for every $100 wagered back and forth, at least $1.35 will find a permanent home in the casino's coffers.

That's the theory, anyway. In truth, most players will lose much more than 1.35% of their total action by betting erratically, emotionally and stupidly.

Tight betting spreads and unrealistic stop-loss limits are popular among many players looking to limit their exposure, and all they do in the long run is absolutely guarantee that the house will win in the end.

The obsession at BF is with finding a way to make the "right" choice between Banker and Player as a betting proposition, and absolutely no one is willing to accept the simple truth that unless you know for certain which of those two options is going to win the next round, your selection will ultimately prove irrelevant.

Baccarat is a two-hole version of whack-a-mole, in essence, and the more you hop from one target to the other, the happier - and richer - the house will be.

My big mistake during my month on BF was to dig in my heels and advise baccarat players to stick with Player to avoid the 5% commission on winning bets on Banker.

I was right to point out that although Banker invariably wins more often than Player over the course of several hundred rounds, the commission gouge serves to turn a rare positive into a certain negative.

But if critical bets on Banker are increased to cover the win target plus the "bank tax" the damage done by commission can be at least neutralized, and often can boost the profit from winning more bets than you lose.

All I want to say this time out is that no one other than an infallible psychic has anything to gain from switching from Banker to Player and back again.

And since all psychics are frauds, even someone claiming powers that don't exist will do better to stick with one selection all the way.

That's not to suggest that backing away from a tough shoe is not a good idea. I always tell players that it's not brave or tough to keep betting through a long losing streak - it's downright foolish.

Prolonged, persistent losing streaks are anomalies - aberrations that casinos rely on to reduce sane, sober and sensible punters to putty.

Someone once wrote that gamblers are not battling bad luck or long odds when they try to overcome the house edge, they're playing against themselves - another awful truth that most players refuse to deal with.

I have long preached that choice in gambling is a bad thing, and Target's continued success in sports betting provides dramatic proof of that!

As many of you know, the Target real-time, real money sports betting trial began in late July of 2010, and most days since, I have posted a list of bets well ahead of game times, followed by good news or bad when all the playing's done.

In 2011, the Target trial racked up winnings of $100,000 and is now just shy of $180,000 in profits since Day One.

I added a five-a-day "spin-off" in July of 2011, a more modest application of the same objectives, and right now, that trial is well over $8,000 ahead.

The idea has always been to focus on underdogs at odds between +100 and +140 (even money to 1.4 to 1) and to apply a selection process that is in effect totally random.

In other words, no choices!

So far, it's mostly worked like a dream - the only rough water that almost sank the entire enterprise came soon after I was persuaded that since random selection was doing so well, maybe "smart" betting would do even better.

I learned the hard way what I'd known for years and had for a time forgotten: In gambling, happenstance will almost always make better choices than I do - and just like you, I'm not stupid.

My message has always been that if you can't afford to win, you shouldn't play.

It's not popular advice. Many baccarat players posting to BF insist they have been winning for years without progressive betting, by learning how to spot trends almost before they begin and then ride them to riches.

That makes them them infallible psychics - rare birds indeed! Liars, too.

I'm just a dumb punter who never knows if his next bet is going to win or lose.

What I do know is that if I bet smartly and consistently, I will be able to exploit winning streaks to the maximum and control damage from losing streaks.

I also know that I'm not likely to come out a winner if I take $500 to a $10 table and count on blind luck.

Target has several powerful points in its favor.

It tells you when to press your bets for the fastest recovery possible, but just as importantly, it signals when to stop chasing a winning streak and fall back to a minimum bet.

Random bettors will almost always keep pushing their luck way past the point where they have already made a tidy profit and need to slow down and stop putting their winnings at risk.

The biggest losers were very often big winners at one point - but when their luck turned (as it always must), they refused to recognize it, keep some of their gains, and rein in their bets.

In my opinion, based on far more real-play experience than most gamblers can claim, having to constantly decide how much to bet and when is way too stressful.

Target makes those decisions for me, using a formula developed from analyzing millions of bets (most of them derived from simulations, naturally, since I'm still a young man!).

Some say strategies take the fun out of gambling. I say winning is more fun than losing, and losing is what most people are doomed to do.

Don't believe it when someone tells you that gambling games are unpredictable.

In the short term, it's true. In the long run, very little changes: patterns repeat themselves and probability rules.

Target relies to a great degree on "twins" - two consecutive wins in a recovery series in which the house may have managed to get several bets ahead (-1, -1, -1, -1, -1, +1, +5).

But 70% or more of all turnarounds will be achieved with just ONE win, thanks to carefully controlled doubledowns.

Betting on a whim is foolish.

Even a fool will win once in a while, of course.

Mostly, he will keep on losing.

And luckily for casinos, fools have very short memories.

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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