Think back to where your dice-influencing skills were one year ago.
Have they improved at all? Has your understanding of how dice-influencing works, and how best to optimize your skills when you have money on the line, changed at all in the last year?
If you've been at this for longer than a year; has your appreciation for the finer points of nuanced advantage-play changed at all since you began this journey?
If there is one thing I have learned about the whole art and science of de-randomizing the dice, it is this:
Evolving D-I skills often require evolving BETTING-Methods, as well as evolving, updating, and refreshing your advantage-play IDEAS and BELIEFS.
Evolution is part of the whole dice-influencing experience, and as your shooting-skills improve; it is absolutely necessary that your betting-methods and your understanding of how best to optimize bankroll growth, evolves with it.
Five years ago, I looked back on the five years before that and I figured my shooting had advanced about as far as it was ever going to get...and I was quite happy with that.
Now, I look back on how far my shooting has advanced even further over the last five years, and I can't believe how much it has improved...and again I am quite happy with where it is now.
Will it continue to advance and evolve?
Almost certainly.
The same holds true for my betting. That too has evolved so much over the last ten years, that it bears absolutely no resemblance to how I was betting 10 years ago.
The same holds true (but not as dramatically) for the last 5 years. For example, back then, I never would have thought that my Table-Adaptive Field-Harvest method would be able to produce an average of +3.8 net-hits per hand ('net-hits' are the number of Field-wins minus non-Field losses including the final hand-ending 7-out).
Another example would be how tightly-focused my betting has become. Six years ago, I never would have believed that I could make more money by staying on my top two or three box-numbers (and using a portion of the profit from prior sessions to up their starting-values, instead of being overly concerned with pressing them up with just-won same-hand profits) and instead of spreading out to more and more numbers.
It took me a while to wrap my brain around that, because the 'non-exorcised gambler' in me found it to be somewhat counter-intuitive, or at least counter-gambling-instinct.
In fact, I think that in itself may be one of the chief reasons why many skilled D-I's are so reluctant to change the way they bet too. They see an outcome that they don't have money on, and they feel like they're 'missing out', so they put money on that one. Then the next outcome reveals another number that they 'need' action on. A couple of rolls later they go with a hunch and put some money on another new one too. Soon they have all bases covered, so that nearly any outcome will produce a payoff; yet they can't understand why they never seem to make enough money...or at least as much money as their talented shooting deserves.
Advantage-play dice-influencing DEMANDS that our betting-methods evolve as our skills improve and our knowledge-base advances.
Another example of how evolving skill and evolving understanding of optimized advantage-play has affected my game, is in the number of hours that I play per week, as well as how constantly evolving skill and a clearer understanding of optimal advantage-play has affected my hourly earn-rate.
I guess we could break it into two parts; Pre-WONG and Post-WONG.
A couple years before Stanford Wong's Pi Yee Press published my book, we would have long back and forth discussions about all things "Dice-Influenced Advantage-Play." This went on for months and months.
Let me just mention a couple of things that came out of all that challenge-the-status-quo and justify-where-your-money-is-invested discussion:
~WOTCO...Working On the Come-Out. Now the concept of WOTCO isn't new, nor was it new back then; but the idea of abandoning the idea of treating the Come-Out cycle and the Point-Cycle as separate "Game Within a Game" elements, and treating them both as part of the same bet-when-and-where-you-have-the-BIGGEST-overall-advantage was new to the dice-influencing community. In other words, using the C-O as a PRE-extension of the actual point-cycle, actually adds a much steadier (and net-larger) stream of profit to your bankroll than the occasional bigger-but-rarer GWAG-win does.
~Field-Harvest...this was one of those serendipitous finds that often come out of free-flowing discussions (I intentionally left out the word 'intellectual' from that phrase for fear of offending anyone who objects to free thought). Stanford was talking about some experiments he had been doing with the S-6 (Straight-Sixes) dice-set, and they just happened to coincide with some that I had been doing too (but on an entirely different D-I thesis). When we looked at the Foundation Frequencies and at the resulting edge-per-roll that that S-6 set generated; we both reached the same, "MP should be harvesting the Field-bet" conclusion.
Now as far as hours-of-play per week is concerned; I came to find that if I concentrated most of my 7-exposure money on my top two or three highest-advantage numbers (instead of spreading the same money too thinly across too many box-numbers, as I had been doing); I could generate far more money much faster.
I'll candidly admit that I was extremely reluctant at first about cutting back on my bet-spread. I mean, I was making great money off of my widely-spread box-number action, and frankly I didn't see the full benefit of the trade-off (though academically I understood what SW was continually driving at); so I gave it a try.
The rest as they say, is history.
Once I validated that approach for myself, it was just a simple matter of putting more money where it would do the most good, and reducing it (or completely eliminating it) from where it wouldn't.
Now I know that sounds simple, but you have to remember that I was doing pretty freakin' good without Wong's advice, so it was a huge leap of faith for me to even try some of his advantage-betting ideas out.
As a scale of comparison; Pre-WONG, I had been playing 30 to 35 hours per week...Post-WONG, I was able to ratchet it back to 25-to-30/week...then to 20-to-25...then to 18-to-20/week...and now to my current level of around 15 hours per week...all without reducing my net D-I earnings at all.
In fact, by ratcheting up (and super-focusing) my bet-values, while simultaneously ratcheting back my hours of play; my hourly earn-rate has actually increased exponentially.
The upshot of all of this?
Evolving D-I skills often require evolving betting-methods as well as evolving, updating, and refreshing your advantage-play ideas and beliefs.
As always,
Good Luck and Good Skill at the Tables…and in Life.
The Mad Professor
Copyright © 2009
