Eliot Jacobson Ph.D.

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.

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.