We had a great discussion about this ongoing series during last week’s open-to-everyone Chat Night (held on the first Thursday of each month at 10 pm Eastern/7 pm Pacific on the main DiceInstitute.com site). Our good friend, Appistappis brought up a humorous, but very-telling point when he said, “I tell the players that the casino makes money because the players are willing to LOSE more that they are willing to WIN”.
That is sooooo true, especially in regard to talented dice-influencers who put extremely tight win-goals on their successful triumphs, yet put extremely loose loss-limits on their failures. I mean, what good does it do if you have a loss-limit of $300 per session, but a win-goal exit-point of $100. That means you have to have three-times as many winning sessions as losing sessions just to break-even.
That’s indicative of a gambler’s mindset instead of an advantage-players mindset. The idea behind dice-influencing is to first create an edge over the house on certain wagers, and then to bet on that edge in a compelling way when you have the dice in your hand.
Most skilled shooters still approach the game with the original gambling tactics they first learned before they took up dice-influencing. They start small and try to build their bets as the hand moves along.
Unfortunately that approach fails to recognize the most basic tenets of shooting with a positive-expectation edge; and that is to use your advantage as SOON as possible and as OFTEN as possible.
If you wait for a hand to start to turn into a mega-hand; then you won’t be taking advantage of your edge very OFTEN, nor for very LONG.
So too if you start with severely under-sized wagers and try to press them into what they should have been appropriately sized to in the first place.
That ass-backwards approach is chiefly what keeps most highly-talented D-I’s in the frustrating break-even phase of their development for far too long (often years and years at a time, even though their talent indicates that properly-sized and properly-targeted bets would put them into high cotton immediately andconstantly if only they focused their money on to wagers where their highest true edge actually is).
Instead they waste months, years, and sometimes even decades chasing bet-trends with under-sized but over-pressed wagers that zig and zag all over the placelike some crack-whore wandering from blow-job to blow-job looking to scrape together enough crumpled up bills to pay for her next fix.
That sort of " tactics without a coherent strategy" is pure insanity of the highest order, and it will steadily kill a bankroll, no matter how friggin’ TALENTED you are.
The key is to avoid what ancient warriors called “The Four Poisons of the Mind.”
These are: fear, confusion, hesitation, and surprise.
If you are not prepared to deal with the four mind-poisons of fear, confusion, hesitation or surprise when you are at the table; then you are at risk of ruin.
Ruin means that your money is gone, and the game, for you at least, is over.
How can you avoid the four poisons of the advantage-play mind?
• Replace fear with faith—faith in your dice-influencing abilities and your geared-to-edge betting-plan. Fear of 'missing out' on something not only distracts you from the task at hand, but it also diverts critical investment-assets away from where they will do the most overall good.
• Replace confusion with being comfortable with toss-to-toss uncertainty, and completely discard the idea of zigging and zagging your bets all over the place trying to catch lightning in a bottle. That’s for fools, degenerate gamblers, and the feeble-minded; and though they each may thump their chests in momentary victory; they’ll invariably give it all back in many other less-fruitful chases over the next session or two. Long-term loss becomes their only long-term accomplishment.
• Replace hesitation with decisive action, and put your money where your validated in-casino edge is. If you think it’s on more than two or three box-numbers and full PL-Odds; then you are sadly mistaken…so go back and refigure where your true properly-validated edge really is, and then focus on putting your money there and excluding it from everywhere else.
• Replace surprise with taking nothing for granted and preparing yourself for anything, principal of which will be some outcomes that you do not have an active bet on. This is to be expected; it's not something that should surprise you at all or catch you off-guard, or start you thinking that you are missing out on things.
If you've got a long-term validated edge over the 6 and 9, but you just tossed two 4'sand one 3; should you throw away everything you know and start Buy-betting on the 4 and Prop-betting the 3 even though your in-casino roll-stats have proven each of them to be more of a bankroll-sapper than a bankroll-builder?
Do you change horses in mid-steam, and abandon the proven and validated, and trade it in for the highly-speculative, unsubstantiated, and unsupported just because your attention-span and level of commitment to your proven edge is never longer or stronger than a roll or two?
Loyalty to your proven edge and allegiance to your validated advantage is demonstrated over many, many tosses and should not be discarded or ignored or retreated from just because you threw an errant outcome or two that catches your fancy.
That is how degenerate gamblers play, but that is not even close to how a skilled dice-influencer takes proper advantage of his talents.
If you play and bet like a degenerate gambler; then you are going to lose like a degenerate gambler.
Success in dice-influencing is a long journey with many twists and turns. You can and will get there if you are patient, and watchful, and always on guard to ensure that your money is on the bets where you have the highest advantage, and awayfrom all others that don’t.
The temptation to chase un-covered outcomes that you don’t have money on will always be there, but it is how you resist that temptation that determines whether or not your overall edge will prevail.
No resolve to resist temptation equals little to no profit, regardless of how talented you are.
~If your temptation to zig and zag your bets based on what you just tossed is stronger than your discipline to stay the course and keep your money focused on the few box-numbers where you have the highest verified advantage; thenyou will continue to lose more than you win.
~If your impatience for “action” is too strong, or your desire to collect winnings from almost every outcome that you toss is your main objective; then you will continue to lose more than you win, or you will continue to win far less that your D-I talents deserve.
~Advantage-play dice-influencing is a game of survival and of exploiting your proven edge.
~The spoils of that laser-focused effort is profit.
~It’s your money, your life and your future. You have the power to survive andflourish if you put your money where you have the highest proven edge, and keep it away from all the places where it is lower or doesn’t exist at all...
…or in the words of Sun Tzu...
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory.
Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
Until next time,
Good Luck and Good Skill at the Tables…and in Life.
The Mad Professor
Copyright © 2009
