A.P Heat

Card counting baccarat side bets is one of the strongest ongoing opportunities for advantage players. These opportunities arise from the intersection of four game protection deficiencies, none of which has a good solution. Consider:

The Natural 9 (NAT9) side bet is the wager that the Player hand or Banker hand will be a natural 9. NAT9 is actually two different side bets, as the wager can separately be made that the Banker hand will be a natural 9 and that the Player hand will be a natural 9.  Similarly, the Natural 8 (NAT8) side bet is the wager that the Player hand or Banker hand will be a natural 8.

At G2E (2013) last week, I came across a baccarat side bet I had not seen before at the Galaxy Gaming booth, called “Lucky Win” (LW). The side bet can be made on either the Player hand or the Banker hand and it pays when the winning hand totals 0, 1, 2, 3, or 5.

A short time back, I was contacted by a casino interested in offering a high rolling blackjack player a 30% cash rebate on  losses he had incurred. The player apparently made this demand to the casino, saying he would not play again unless he was given this rebate.

Baccarat side bets are often named after exotic or mythical animals. SHFL has the Dragon Bonus side bet. There are the Dragon 7 and Panda 8 side bets to EZ Baccarat.

When an AP finds a dealer on Ultimate Texas Hold'em (UTH) who is vulnerable to hole-carding, it is not unusual for her to expose the bottom card of every packet of cards she delivers (see this post for an introduction to UTH).

Ultimate Texas Hold'em (UTH) is among the most vulnerable novelty games to hole-card play. Between the dealer's two cards and the five community cards, the player has seven opportunities to get some extra information. With the ability to make a Play bet that is 4x the player's original Ante bet, any extra information can be leveraged into a big edge.

Many of the side bets I analyze on this blog are small-time opportunities that are unlikely to get much action from card counting APs. That is not the case with UR Way Egalite (URE) baccarat side bet or its first cousin, Super Pay Egalite (SPE). The ordinary Tie bet allows the player to wager that the result of the hand will be a tie.

At the table games conference last week, there was an ironic incident that I would like to share with you. It occurred during one of the premier panel discussions: "What You Can Learn from Table Game Players Who Are Smarter than All of Us," on Tuesday, November 19, 2013.

The Dragon side bet and Panda side bet for EZ Baccarat have known card counting issues. Recently I received an e-mail from an employee in surveillance at a major casino asking if this was still the case, or if I had retracted my work. I discussed this surprising e-mail in this post.

When an AP finds a dealer on Ultimate Texas Hold'em (UTH) who is vulnerable to hole-carding, it is not unusual for her to expose the bottom card of every packet of cards she delivers. This includes exposing one of her two hole-cards as well as one of the common cards.

I originally posted my analysis of the Dragon side bet for EZ Baccarat in this post on the Wizard of Odds website. Shortly after, Michael Shackleford made this post, describing a card counting method to beat the Panda side bet for EZ Baccarat.

In this blog post I covered the basics of advantage play against the Lucky Pairs (LP) baccarat side bet. In the most common variation of LP, the player can wager that either the next Player or Banker hand will be a pair. A winning wager pays 11-to-1. With eight decks, the off-the-top house edge is 10.361%.

Yet another side bet that can be counted in California card rooms:  the Total Shot Bonus (TSB). Formally, this side bet is for the baccarat variant known as Supreme Baccarat. This variant is simply the commission free version where a Banker winning total of 6 pays 1-to-2.  Like ordinary baccarat, the main game is not vulnerable to card counting.

ZooBac is a collection of four independent baccarat side bets, the Rabbit (see this post), Tiger (see this post), Monkey (see the zero/zero tie in this post) and the Zo