A.P Heat

The saga of the 14 gamblers who won $1.5 million from the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City by exploiting un-shuffled cards in mini-baccarat continued this week.

The Dragon Side Bet for EZ Baccarat is simple to describe. This side bet pays 40-to-1 if the dealer’s three-card total of 7 beats the player, otherwise the bet loses. In September, 2011, I realized that this side bet was vulnerable to a card counting methodology of advantage play. I worked over the next few days to evaluate the appropriate systems and their value.

The Dragon Bonus (DB) wager is arguably the most common and popular side bet for baccarat on the market. DB allows the gambler to not only wager that either the Banker side or Player side will win, but that the winning side will crush the losing side by a significant number of points.  The larger the margin of victory, the larger the payout for the DB wager.

While looking around for what to do next, I decided to visit one of my favorite sources for interesting baccarat side bets: the website ukcasinotablegames.info . There I found the “Colour Match” (CM) baccarat side bet.

According to an article in the Daily Mail, Phil Ivey is soon going to get a chance to appeal the 2014 ruling that allowed Crockfords Casino in Mayfair to keep the $12 million Ivey won playing baccarat i

As I write this commentary, charges have just been filed against six Baltimore police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray.  Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby said, "...

In this post I described beating the Lucky Pairs (LP) baccarat side bet. The method I described was called “Targets and Weights.” In that post, I considered the case when a pair pays 11-to-1, with a baseline house edge about 10.36%.  For many ordinary players, that edge is too high for them to be interested in playing LP.

That's right, I kid you not! For about a month, a Las Vegas casino offered a baccarat side bet with a misprinted pay table that gave the player a 10.32% edge over the casino. Just sit at the table, make the side bet and collect your profit.

If you're expecting naked people, pictures of Las Vegas, or paint being removed from a house, this post isn't for you. If you're looking for a good time, read on!

“The advantage in two-handed blackjack, long supposed to lie with the dealer or the house, was converted recently to the profit by Edward O. Thorp, a young assistant professor in the mathematics department of New Mexico State University.”

— The Atlantic Monthly, June, 1962

I am beside myself with disgust at the thought of the IRS using casino player’s cards to track slot winnings.

The question of why advantage players do what they do is answered in the popular media by images of glitz, glamour, parties, piles of chips, cat and mouse, and youth. The motive is greed and the time frame is now. But there is another class of advantage players (APs) who definitely do not fit this Hollywood stereotype. I’m talking about professional APs – the life-timers.

Shuffling cards is a challenging task. It is the one part of the game where we humans directly interact with the randomness of the hands that follow. A hand shuffle never fully randomizes the cards. However, if enough goes right with the shuffle, then it can be considered random enough to effectively defeat shuffle-based advantage play.

It is easy to get the impression when writing articles for this blog that the average reader fully understands the mathematical ramblings I present. Then I am brought back to earth by E-mails and comments like this one I received a few weeks back:

There were two articles in the news over the last week having to do with players getting the edge over the house.