Side Bets

When the patent on EZ Baccarat and its Dragon 7 side bet expired in September, 2013 (see this post), there was a bit of a land rush.

In this article, I discussed the “Rabbit” baccarat side bet. It is one of three distinct baccarat side bets that are collected together into a game called ZooBac. This article discusses another one of these baccarat side bets, the “Tiger.” The third wager in the zoo is the “Monkey” side bet.

Sometimes a side bet comes along that dwarfs the others in terms of its card counting vulnerability. Such was the case with the Slingo Bonus Bet 21 side bet for blackjack.

The Dragon Bonus (DB) baccarat side bet is by far the most popular baccarat side bet in the domestic market. Internationally, I have not seen it that much in my travels, but maybe I just haven't been to the right places. I considered card counting DB in this post, where I concluded that counting was useless.

Lucky 8 (L8) is a baccarat side bet I first heard about on the Wizard of Vegas website in this thread. As the name implies, a Player/Banker final total of 8 is key to winning this bet.

In this post I considered ordinary blackjack card counting (BJCC) for six decks. The purpose of that post was to compare BJCC to card counting the various side bets for the six-deck shoe game. This post presents the analysis for the two-deck game.

Baccarat insurance is a side bet that players can make during the play of a hand of baccarat. This side bet is really an aggregate of sides bets, some of which can be made based on the first two cards exposed, and some of which can be made later during the play of the hand. Each of these side bets has its own separate wagering rules and payout.

In this blog post I covered the basics of advantage play against the Lucky Pairs (LP) baccarat side bet. After looking around a bit, I found that several “live-play” online casinos offer LP. It is easy to use perfect play against live-play online LP.

One of my informal rules for this blog is that I don’t consider ordinary blackjack card counting (BJCC). Any easy Google search reveals myriad resources that give the minutia of every aspect of BJCC. At least three generations of APs have dedicated themselves to this game. For my purposes, the question is: how does BJCC stack up against card counting blackjack side bets?

Lucky Pairs (LP) is one of the names given to the non-proprietary baccarat side bet that simply pays 11-to-1 for a dealt pair. The player can wager on either or both of the Player or Banker side to be dealt a pair. This wager is also available for blackjack (player only), with varying payouts depending on the number of decks used.

The “Easy Six” (ES) baccarat side bet pays 6-to-1 if either the Player hand or Banker hand wins on six points, or if a tie occurs on six points.  Otherwise, the ES wager loses.

I first considered if the Dragon 7 baccarat side bet was susceptible to a card counting methodology in mid-2011 when it was exclusively a proprietary side bet owned by DEQ that was associated with the commission free baccarat variant EZ Baccarat.

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:

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.

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.