UPDATE January 31, 2012: 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 -150 (2/3 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 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 3/2 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!  Target's one 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 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.

UPDATE January 4, 2012: 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 a popular mantra, but it is a truthful one.

UPDATE November 1, 2011: October was beginning to look like it was destined to become only the fourth "red" month since we started this transparent sports betting trial way back at the end of July, 2010.  But a one-goal win by the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday (the 29th!) pulled us smartly out of the hole, just as it was meant to, and we're now back on top and looking back at well over 4,000 bets and more than $2 million in total action.  What matters most is that against a persistent "bookies' edge" of 10%, we have managed to win (meaning hold on to!) 8% of that enormous seven-figure churn.  The odds we have overcome are far greater than the house edge in casino able games, where roulette's 5.26% is about as punishing a HA as you're likely to encounter.  Blackjack is about a -1.0% proposition and baccarat is somewhere between -1.24% and -1.35% but I always believed that sports was an ideal proving ground for the Target method.  What's funny is that progressive betting as a concept is about as new-fangled as gambling itself.  I can imagine cavemen rolling actual bones, and one of them thinking, "If I double my bet each time I lose, when I win I'll be back where I started."  The simple Martingale (-1, -2, -4, -8, -16, -32, +64) has great appeal from a speed and efficiency standpoint, but I believe that in the long run, it pushes bets way too high and can only prevail if there are no house limits in effect.  That's not how it is in the real world, so Target, with its bells and whistles now greatly streamlined, is simply a practical compromise.  Instead of one win we're looking for two ("twins"!), and that makes it a very easy strategy to learn.  In sports, I do play a "Marty" for a limited number of losses (I stole the nickname from a contributor to Baccarat Forums!) but the only two situations in which doubling the bet is critical, I believe, are after an opening loss, and after a first turnaround attempt in a recovery series goes down the tubes.  Sports is a bit more of a challenge than other games of chance because of the double-digit negative expectation percentage, so it's not quite as safe to assume that a "house" win is likely to be followed by a house loss, or vice versa.  Still and all, the principles are not much different, and the greatest advantage of sports betting is that it's safe to do it online.  "Virtual casinos" can and do cheat when it comes to blackjack, baccarat and so on, but sports results are a matter of widespread public record, and stacking the deck is an impossibility.  So far, I'm very impressed with the efficiency of web-based sports books and the speed of their payouts.  The one thing to be leery of is the sign-up bonuses they offer: a 5x churn isn't unusual, and that means that if you accept a $300 bonus for a $1,500 buy-in, you won't be able to cash out one cent (not even a part of your original stake) until you have generated $9,000 in action.  The whole progressive betting advantage boils down to the Target mantra, winning more when you win than you lose when you lose.  Right now, the 20-line daily game stands at an average win of $640 and an average loss of $454.  That's a 41% W/L surplus, which alone accounts for us being almost $170,000 ahead after 15 months.  That's $11,330 a month!  The 5-line parallel trial hasn't been running as long, but there we're looking at a 12.0% "bookies' edge" and a 51.0% W/L surplus.  Bookies the world over should be trembling in their boots, you might think.  But of course they're not.  For every steady winner there are at least a dozen reliable losers, and our success (even when we step up the action and move into the big leagues) is just a very small part of the cost of doing business for them.

UPDATE August 4, 2011: Target finally turned around on July 24 after a struggle that had lasted for the best part of three months, and the new high point came courtesy of a couple of back-to-back winning streaks that to my great surprise ("Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit") some people find suspicious.  Never mind that selections are posted in advance every day or, more to the point, that the losing streak that had put Line #10 almost a hundred grand in the hole was about as far from statistical expectation as it's possible to get.  But then, that's how it goes when you defy the conventional wisdom: When you manage to get ahead, it's the result of an anecdotal, irrelevant fluke, but when times get temporarily tough, it's the norm.  No wonder most gamblers are losers.  I certainly agree that the recent upswing is anomalous, but no more so than the killer slump that preceded it!  A look at the updated chart at the bottom of this page very quickly confirms that Target almost rebounded three times before it finally hauled itself out of the hole, and I can't help but think that those critical shortfalls were created by the (as it turned out) ill-advised changes I made to the original rules in recent weeks.  I am under constant pressure, from myself as well as from well-meaning observers, to tweak and improve the method and I have no problem with that.  But changes that result in three or four successive wins being insufficient for a full turnaround are quite obviously not changes for the better.

I thought it worth providing a snapshot of recent activity to underscore my argument that in fact, multiple back-to-back wins are really not unusual, especially when they have been preceded by an egregious departure from the statistical norm (whatever that may be).  The snap above confirms that when things got really tough, I drilled down to the nitty-gritty and placed just one bet a day on Line #10.  A snap for Line 10 alone looks like this:

We had close brushes with recovery well over a month before final turnaround, and close counts in this context because the core premise of the Target strategy is that two consecutive wins should get us out of the hole, but three might be needed if the second bet is kept down by the rule that no bet should be more than 10x the bet before it.  The conventional wisdom has it that progressive betting can't work in the long run because at some point, cumulative losses will exceed the value of the maximum bet the house will allow.  That's a bunch of malarkey because paired or grouped wins are common even in games with a house edge as high as the 10% that applies when you back underdogs at the sports book.  Moreover, table limits and even house limits are irrelevant because the odds (for and against) are not affected if you choose to delay your critical bet until you can find someone willing to accept it.  I'll say it yet again: Double-up players can be found in any busy casino, table-hopping (and annoying the hell out of both dealers and players) after two or three bets as they try to disguise their methodology and find a slot where their next bet won't raise any eyebrows.  Blackjack and craps are the most popular targets because once in a while, a turnaround bet will pay far better than even money, with a natural at 21 or a 2x win in the field.  Fact is, table limits are in place solely to thwart progressive bettors—they have nothing to do with protecting players from themselves or segregating layouts to sort the minnows from the whales.  The other day, I was sent a link to a website that repeats the simplistic saw that in the long run, a player's final outcome will always match the combined value of all bets multipled by the house advantage, as in $100,000 of action against a 1.41% negative expectation "must" end with a loss of $1,410.  Baloney!  The sacred saw (defined as "a trite phrase or saying") only applies to flat or random bets.  The most rudimentary random number simulation supports the efficacy of progressive betting every time, as long as what I usually refer to as the inertia factor is disallowed.  In other words, people don't play the way the way RNGs play—just think of the old story about the golfing gorilla!  Winning with progressive betting isn't always easy, but it is a very long way indeed from impossible.

UPDATE July 21, 2011: June and July kept up the pressure that began to build through May, and as I type this update, we're still $15,000 away from getting out of a hole that has been swallowing our bankroll in big chunks almost every day since the end of April.  I called a temporary halt to betting when it became painfully clear that the "purple protection plan" I introduced back in March to relieve at least some of the stress caused by any major slump proved to be doing more harm than good.  By the July 4 weekend, Line #10 (the source of all Target's woes) had seen two winning bursts of three wins apiece, but because of the protection plan, they were not enugh to effect a recovery.  Obviously, when three wins in a row won't deliver a rope to pull us out of the hole, something's seriously wrong.  I stepped back for a while, did some serious number-crunching with the data collected since this real-time, real-money trial began on July 24 last year, and learned that the brake on bet values was not the only problem.  Around the time that I chose to trim risk, I also deduced that from a logical standpoint, it made sense to match large wagers with shorter odds.  That meant that each day's biggest bets were paired up with what the bookies indicated were the most likely dog winners.  I discovered that in fact, dogs at odds of +105 or less have a much higher loss rate than those in the +106 to +140 range—at least throughout the 3,400-bet data sample collected since July 24 last year—and that tying big bets to low odds was a very bad idea indeed.  Now that we are once again within reach of a new best win to date, I want to explain how this seemingly miraculous change of furtune was achieved.  There was no sleight of hand, I promise you.  I simply went back to the original method of taking bets in numerical order (using the bet numbers the bookies and the leagues supply), and ignoring both "dog" odds and bet values.  The first qualifying bet of the day (no more negative odds, just +100 to +140) went to Line #1, the second to Line #2, and so on.  Once Line #10 was left as the only one of 20 lines still in the red, I stopped placing bets on 1-9 and 11-20 and zeroed in on the cause of all Target's recent pain.  Because I have learned that subjectivity is the enemy of profitable betting, I made up each day's wager list as if all the other lines were still in play, took the 10th qualifying dog per the official schedule, and made that the Line #10 selection.  I did that to avoid laying myself open to claims that I was somehow manipulating the numbers.  As of today, the bookies' edge for Line #10 (which has been bleeding red ink by the gallon since April 20) was down to 11.0%, or close to statistical expectation, after topping 30.0% for day after day after day.  Anyone who bets knows that the value of negative expectation is always a "big picture" number and that major short-term deviations from that percentage value are inevitable.  For that reason, a viable betting strategy must have the resources to slog through the bad times until statistical expectation is once again being complied with.  The core truth in sports betting will always be that underdogs must win a substantial percentage of all games in order for bookmakers to make the profits their boundless greed demands.  In the long run, that percentage must always be less than half, and in every sport, 45% seems to be the magic number that keeps the bookies rich and the punters happy.  Nobody knows the numbers like the bookies do, and while I was surprised that dogs at shorter odds do not, in spite of what logic suggests, win more often, we can all bet that what seems odd to us is just fine to the folks who take our wagers.  If you think about it more than I did before making my wrong assumption, longer odds on the underdog drives more punters to bet on the favorite, and more money on the favorite means more cash in the bank for the bookies when—surprise!!!—the favorite bites the dust.  They're a clever lot, those bookies, which is why we have to do our best to figure out what their odds are telling us, then bet with them rather than against them.

UPDATE May 2nd, 2011: April ended well, putting the fourth big slump in nine months behind us and leaving us within striking distance of the $140,000 profits milestone (an average of about $15,000 per month since July 24th, 2010).  I have had to eat a little humble pie over the BR protection issue, since the April dip would have been 3x nastier but for the braking mechanism I so reluctantly built into the Target rules to mollify participants who felt that we were risking too much on those rare occasions when underdogs performed badly enough for long enough to seriously threaten our prior winnings.  On the one hand, Target "without brakes" would by now be boasting profits well above $160,000—but then there's the awful truth that we would have had to pump half of our bankroll back into the game in order to generate enough momentum to get out of the hole.  Reward is almost invariably directly related to risk, and I have to concede the proven wisdom of accepting reduced gain in exchange for a little less pain.  When I say proven, I mean proven once.  So far.  It is logical to argue that any method that extends the bankroll, thereby making a greater number of bets possible, must give us a better chance of staying alive long enough to get out of trouble.  I am not entirely convinced, and for that reason, clicking on many of the summaries below will bring up data that show what might have been (would have been) if Target had been left alone.  I will only update that information right after a major slump has been turned around because most of the time, the only thing plain to see is that playing it safe costs money.  For example, right now, with the bankroll inching ever closer to $140,000 in profits, the minimum bet would be $125 instead of $25.  When the BR hits $150,000, that number will jump to $150 in the "no brakes" tracking file.  In Target's parallel universe, the minimum has already reached $150 and is well on its way to $175.  As you would expect, a much higher minimum bet gets Target into trouble more often.  But when the strategy prevails, as it has consistently for more than nine months now, it comes out of the hole stronger than ever.

UPDATE April 15th, 2011: With Thursday's relatively large loss (over $11,000), we are now in the middle of the fourth major slump to hit us since the real-time trial began last July 24.  Whenever our upward momentum slows and the roller-coaster takes us into a scary dip, the same people react the same way, with advice that we have to "protect the bankroll" and back off, perhaps by abandoning the line that is (for now) dragging all the other lines down.  The truth is that panic and an excess of caution are exactly what the bookies expect of us.  You cannot protect the bankroll by reducing bets to a level at which recovery becomes a mathematical impossibility.  And if you "spread the load" by relying on multiple bets to offset the losses, you will need to be very lucky indeed to avoid delaying recovery indefinitely.  The old Las Vegas cliche scared money never wins describes the dilemma perfectly.  Abandoning a seemingly doomed line is always an option, but if you do it once you will be obliged to make a habit of it, and whatever profits you may have achieved will soon dribble away. I often quote the friend who I call "Peter Punter" and he recently supplied me with a perfect case history of a cautious but fatally flawed betting strategy that cost him winnings that took months to accumulate.  He thinks the Target Betting method is "too risky" but time and again, he sets aside a few thousand for a new assault on sports betting, wins for a while, then gets blitzed by precisely the kind of slump that we are in the middle of.  This time, he was sitting pretty until seven successive losses wiped him out.  A day or two after his bankroll was annihilated, the handicapper who was the source of all his selections hit a three-bet winning streak.  If Pete had followed the Target method, he'd be at a new high right now.  Instead, he's out of the game.  Until next time, when he will probably repeat the process.  I feel particularly frustrated right now, because for the sake of partners who are almost as risk-averse as poor, broke Pete, I applied a conservative modification to the Target rules, running it alongside the regular rules in my daily bulletins.  Because of that, we missed a classic turnaround situation at the beginning of this week, and now we're headed south in a slump that will probably end soon (they usually do!) but will in any event have proved to be a much bigger threat to the BR than if I had refused to apply so-called protection.  It's no one's fault but mine: I could easily have said NO.  But I'm not in this thing alone!

UPDATE April 1st, 2011: March was a great month for Target, rewarding the highest risk to date with the biggest monthly win since this trial began last summer.   We're now ahead $131,630 deducting the original $5,000 investment from the current BR, and the profit is our "hold" of action of $1.21 million on 2,418 bets - an average win of $588 a day vs. an average bet value of $501.  Staying more than one average bet ahead of the game each and every day isn't bad.  The bookies' edge for the data set is 8.4% but our win represents 10.9% of overall action, indicating that Target has turned negative expectation upside down and created a long-term player advantage.  The average win value to date is $638 vs. an average loss value of $439, which is how we managed to beat the bad guys: we won 45% more when we won than we lost when we lost in spite of the fact that every math "expert" out there will tell you that it isn't possible to do that unless you know ahead of the game that you're going to win.  I'll say it again (because I love hearing it): It takes balls to beat the bookies, but not crystal ones.  You all get bet schedules ahead of game times every day, so you know what I know, and what I know is that I can't be sure of anything until finals are in.  We don't win every day by any means (116 up days and 107 down days in 223 betting days since last July 24), but I'd say a $130,000 return on a $5,000 investment is acceptable.  Now for April...

Seth