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[alrelax]

The following will be a continuing series of posting.

Long and hard research here. Analyzing countless past play with why I did what I did, textbook study and a lot more. Now I will start this thread with the goal to allow you to change your response to what you cannot control, which is the presentments of the shoe.  But you can allow yourself to grow stronger and understand your decision making, which affects your buy-in, bankroll and producing a higher profit.

Know what is really happening at the game of baccarat, relying on your experience; is it a negative advantage? But truly using interpretation can be to your advantage.  You must know what the differences are and how they both affect the decision making process. 

Sit down and seriously measure yourself against your wins, losses and the decisions you made with the reasons you did. Interpretation of your experience is what will clearly give you real advantage with your decision making process in the game of baccarat. 

Interpretation occurs as the result of a combination of several factors. The mind has an automatic tendency to interpret an experience and create a story/a fallacy about it based on your memory, past realizations, and situations you have encountered yourself or with others when you were present. Your mind then selectively gathers data from within the experience(s) to support its interpretation. It may seem to you that your mind is simply trying to figure out your experiences, but really it's screening for evidence to support the decisions you are making from your story it is clinging to. However, your story is delusion because your mind is being clouded by extremely strong emotions brought on positively or negatively with each hand presented from the shoe.

Therefore, a crucial skill for minimizing emotional chaos and sustaining clarity in your baccarat game is the ability to distinguish between your experiences and your interpretation of your experiences. Your experiences are simply whatever is happening at the moment; the hand, the wager won or lost, the camaraderie, high-fives or fist bumps, the long faces and the banged chips against the table, etc. etc.

Your interpretation is your minds reaction to those  experiences. One way to understand this difference is to picture that when you are directly experiencing a moment similar and you are within it. When you are truly interpreting it, you will put yourself outside of it and give yourself a true advantage.

You must become committed to a particular and interpretation regime to the point that it becomes a habit, a story that you repeat in related circumstances. For example, your interpretation generated by your reactive mind usually will become your primary experience which will usually be opposed to whatever is actually happening in the game of baccarat that needs your full attention and be considered advantaged response. Then what normally happens is we continue on with the shoe, but our attention is split and far less than complete. That causes us to allow frustration, emotion and disarray to sit in fast which will add poor decision making forcing us to revert back to our experiences having no direct correlation to the shoe we are playing.

The shoe is not your battle ground! Your mind is your sole battle ground you face at the table. It is the place where the conflict resides, the place where we develop habits that put us in direct opposition with the reality of the shoe being played. It's where the things we figured would happen, never happen; or were the things we believed and desired to happen actually happen. But we fell prey to our own train of thought because of direct opposition with reality. Therefore, if we were right we tend to repeat and we all know the game of baccarat will never repeat itself over and over the same way we want it to. And on the other hand, if we were wrong then we correct ourselves and the shoe reverts back to producing what we believed was wrong. 

That is what you call direct opposition with reality in the game of baccarat.

It is where our expectations get the best of us and we fall victim to our own trains of thought, again and again and again. It is our own fault within our own mind, not the shoes fault, or the shuffle, or the cut, or the other players wagering against us, or the dealer, etc. etc.

Truth be told, in the game Baccarat we will receive a unique set of unexpected and unknown limitations and variables within a shoe. The advantaged question is:  How will you think and respond to the hands being presented?  You can either focus on the lack thereof (experience), or empower yourself to play the game resourcefully with full and real advantage, making the very best of each outcome as it is presented (interpretation), even when it's hard to accept with a loss of your wager.

The bottom line here is, that you cannot control what is happening around you and with everything that has already been set. So you challenge yourself to control the way you respond to what is happening to straighten out those habitual, spiraling patterns of thinking that clearly the highest majority of all baccarat players engage in. But that is much easier said than done though, for all of us. Because it is hard to change the habits we engage in mostly at a subconscious level. But we can get better by bringing more awareness to what we are doing through our own experience and proper interpretation of such that will give us viable advantages with our decisions concerning wagering.

Will post again when I finish my next part.

[AsymBacGuy]

Great post!

Math can't be bypassed, yet there are some long term consistent players around the globe getting the best of many considerations Al made in his post.

After all we players are getting a minuscule part of what could happen at baccarat productions, so trying to focus about what is really happening could be an additional force to get a profit or to enlarge profits. Or, more likely, to reduce (a lot) the inevitable losses.

as.

[KungFuBac]

Alrelax in the initial post on this thread:

"...Sit down and seriously measure yourself against your wins, losses and the decisions you made with the reasons you did. Interpretation of your experience is what will clearly give you real advantage with your decision making process in the game of baccarat.  ..."

    I think our brain is constantly /effortlessly calculating risk. Same as when we our wagering Bac as when we are driving a car. Our brain is constantly assessing other drivers perceived skill (or lack of), road conditions, speed,...etc.

The great thing about our risk calculation at Bac is that we also have the Laws of Probability hovering above each shoe to help guide us as well as history of that shoe, card removal,..etc.

Personally, I find my risk calculation at the bac table is more accurate when I drive a little slower/I wait for a junction in the highway where the Laws of Probability are also intersecting with shoe history, current trends, knowledge of what game wants to produce, what THIS shoe is producing,...etc.
I find it safer to not speed too much for too long.

More later and have a great day. Im getting on the road /headed to the office(cas).

Cheers,

[AsymBacGuy]

Very good post!

I agree with everything you wrote and speeding up for long is very dangerous at this game!

as.

[alrelax]

Second post in my continuing series.

Recognize your game.

Your conduct produces the result of your decisions. Those decisions will either generate losses or wins.

The highest majority of baccarat players fall prey to what the game represents and how it is presented by most all casinos. Players become senseless, callous and outright stupid. Unfortunately. There are no rhymes or reasons that could make sense for doing things that seemingly could never work.

Realize you cannot change what is going to happen. When you look at the scoreboard and see what has happened, do not believe anything will reappear or continue.

The one item that is always present in the game Baccarat is uncertainty. Most of you will say that is easily dealt with by either ignoring conscious thought about it, or claiming to wager only on certain advantages. However, uncertainty plays a much larger dominant role with our mind and affects our decision making process more than anything else.

Why?  Because when confronted with a difficult experience the untrained mind wants to be anywhere but in the present moment, where it perceives acute unpleasantness.  The mind becomes anxious whenever it is uncertain and reacts as if one's survival is at stake. In this case the mind is attempting to protect the buy-in and the bank role but doesn't have the protocol to do it.  So rather than staying with the experience and determining the best possible way to relate to it, the mind jumps to creating a story that involves worrying about the future or judging oneself and others based on past experiences. This pattern of resistance to staying present in experience is an automatic response arising from the LIMBIC BRAIN as it detects threats.  And you have already programed yourself that losing money is a threat. Ironically, the story imparts a false sense of knowing what's going on and therefore can seem temporarily soothing while you sit wagering at the baccarat table.  But you wind up grinding yourself down is all that happens.

When we start to interpret an experience, the thoughts generated by our reactive mind become our primary experience, as opposed to whatever is actually happening that needs our full attention and considered response. Important Note:  Which is how the hands are presented from the shoe and we so frequently become oblivious to what can happen and usually does happen.  Usually we continue on with the activity, but our attention is split or less than complete by far.

Is it any wonder that we don't do our best under such conditions? And so frequently we just continue the activity no matter the outcome or how much we lose.

And sometimes we just can't continue the activity or we should not. IMO, one of the most common triggers that affects any of us negatively, is "shutting down" and forbidding us to continue with clear and conscious thought.  The mind starts spinning and has to wait for the episode to pass. Numerous triggers can trip the negativity at the table, how other people wager clearly against you, how others do not engage in any form of camaraderie, how you planned on certain events to occur or be absent and did not realize anyone of them, etc., etc., and so on.

You too may have triggers that cause you to get lost in interpretation rather than staying present; you may even have a pattern of interpretation that shuts your mind down but have never realized it's happening because you are so accustomed to it. For sure, there are so many different experiences vying for attention in any given moment that in order to deal with what seems like an overwhelming amount of stimuli the mind rushes to interpretation to gain a sense of control. In reality, though, interpretation creates a false impression of stability. As you start to become aware of your patterns of interpretation, be kind and nonjudgmental towards yourself. It is not helpful to fall into self-blame or self-loathing, both of which are forms of interpretation. Be careful.

[alrelax]

Bricks you place in front of yourself...

Every single brick that you place on the wall, makes it harder to penetrate-makes it harder to profit – makes it harder to stay with the shoe presentments as they are happening. That is the way it is.

Information that is worthless and absolutely false in many senses, will be a brick you allow to be inset into a wall in front of you, directly between yourself and the shoe as it sits on the side of the dealer.

When those bricks are there, they are there no matter what, no matter how strange-weird-not ordinary-against all odds, etc., etc., etc.

Bricks are intangible. Same as systems, counts, data, mechanical wagering based on anything, etc., etc., because none of it will allow guaranteed hand after hand wins. None.

You know, but you really don't know.

[alrelax]

Now, in my opinion, comes the hardest thing to become habitual doing. You have to break the habit of allowing yourself to automatically interpret every experience by believing what happened-happened for a reason.

That is what throws off so many, so quick and so ruefully fast!    Plain and simple!

[KungFuBac]

alrelax above:
"..You too may have triggers that cause you to get lost in interpretation rather than staying present; you may even have a pattern of interpretation that shuts your mind down but have never realized it's happening because you are so accustomed to it. For sure, there are so many different experiences vying for attention in any given moment that in order to deal with what seems like an overwhelming amount of stimuli the mind rushes to interpretation to gain a sense of control. In reality, though, interpretation creates a false impression of stability. A.."

Good post. I agree for most part. I think ones triggers are sometimes helpful(or hurtful--depending how one interprets) if one realizes it is shoe specific(only this shoe), and may or may not extend to future shoes. It is easy to confuse a correlation as being causal. When, it actually is just something that is correlated with a desirable outcome.

*A funny story. A few years ago I was at a table that displayed Ties as green balls. It was early December and my wife/I had just decorated our Christmas tree and for whatever reason she wanted red balls at the distal end of each tree limb.
The next day I was at the Bac table and noticed the first two Ties(green ball) were at the end of a B streak of three or four in a row and the next decision always cut to Player(Green ball at bottom end of red B streak displayed on tote board). I reflected that was similar to our Christmas tree decoration pattern.  I typically don't wager Ties and do not really note much about Ties. However,  I started wagering for Player everytime I saw a Tie(at end of B streak). This shoe had 13 Ties (all at end of a Banker column),and every T cut to Player. I picked up a Win after every Tie from starting with the third tie onward.

Correlation and certainly not causal. I've never noticed since.



Continued Success,