If we'd think to play with an edge, two big enemies must be overcome in order to properly exploit it.

1) Betting few hands, that is selecting at most our betting options.

2) Being totally insensitive of the actual session's bankroll status, knowing that any edge needs time to get its full power.   

No surprises that by disregarding the point #2 even the point #1 will be invariably affected, meaning that when we're losing we'll try to find reasons to unnecessarily bet too many hands with the effort of breaking even.

That's why we advocate a basic flat betting procedure where W/L streaks and W/L spots aren't equally balanced within short frames.

So when you'd think to raise your bet consider the worst scenario (losing a lot more) than the hopeful situation capable to erase some losses by a lesser number of wins.
It's true that no matter what are the betting amounts we will place, once we play with an edge everything will come at our favor.
Yes, but we cannot be 100% sure about the current conditions making profitable our plan devised at different environments.

Then the house and besides the HE has at its disposal way more money than us, so serenely willing to accept a passive mood vs our wagers oriented to get an advantage by mere statistical reasons.

Probably the most wanted action any casino in the world would like to face is getting players betting every hand and raising their wagers with a kind of "sky's the limit" attitude.
So, in some way and generally speaking, our best action would be to play very few hands and always betting the same amount.

Next topic is so complicated I prefer to present it the next week.
Sorry.

as. 

Here is a great piece on what is actually kind of normal these days regarding forums and the internet.

The effects of self-selection.

Comments, forums, and chatrooms all usually require that you register or take the time to type out your thoughts. As a result, the only people who tend to bother doing such a thing are people who feel particularly positive or negative about something. All of the people who feel neutral or only slightly lean one way or another get lost because sharing their opinion is not worth the investment of time and effort for them.

In this way, internet discourse self-selects for the most extreme viewpoints. And unfortunately, only being presented with the extreme viewpoints in any situation causes our views to diverge even further. The debate becomes defined by the extreme minorities at both polls while the silent majority in the middle either checks out entirely or gets sucked into one extreme viewpoint or the other.

Of course I am bias.  But when I look at reading our forum from the viewpoints of a new member, a member that never posts, a regular reader that reads but never gets involved in discussions or sharing their viewpoints, etc., etc., etc., I think I am understanding more about the discourse of self-selects and the values that can be so easily shared and learned by the masses.

It sure would be great (beyond great really) if many other people would become involved within the forum with their thoughts, experiences, research, results and knowledge.  Seriously. 

I'm glad a real expert on this subject as KFB agreed on this point!

Of course I'm not advertising random.org site, just taking it as the best probable source to get real random card successions worthwhile to be compared with what you're facing in the real world.

When deep money is involved we've learnt not to trust anyone or anything even though it's very likely that most people on the "other side" are unaware of the randomness topic (let alone the players...), so relying on formulas and/or math laws, etc.

In our opinion collecting large samples of real random successions is the best way to get an idea about how things develop in the terms depicted above.
It's, again, quite probable that unless a software instructs the cards to be distributed by a perfect random source, what we played so far in a way or another are just unrandom shoes where Alrelax posted many valuable thoughts for them.

In any instance, we keep thinking that random production or not, different patterns move around more likely ranges where a large part of situations are completely worthless to be wagered, remember that at baccarat we're constantly going uphill for the HE.

Setting up a strategy about 'ranges' means to approximate at best of our human possibilities the various patterns apparition and lenght with the old rule of thumb that what happened so far could be easily considered as not existent (especially at unrandom shuffled shoes), yet many valuable and relatively more frequent spots will incorporate a higher edge as 416 cards tend to be distributed by quite detectable levels of clumping.

More later

as.

Link below.

I remember a few years ago when we first saw 000 roulette. I joked with some roulette folks: "what's next: Quattro roulette". Why stop there lets see if the market will tolerate Cinco-Rouletto.

Im not a veteran on roulette/ seldom play. So maybe Im missing something. Maybe some type of bonus-wager is offered on the latter versions that players can exploit. ?

The following link provided by one of my favorite gaming writers:  John Mehaffey w vegas advantage
 

https://vegasadvantage.com/quadruple-zero-roulette-debuts-on-the-las-vegas-strip/

From AsymBacGuy post #1387

"...By comparing random.org successions with real card distributions happening at your table (same table, same conditions) you'll get a better idea about how real randomness is supposed to act or not.
So when in doubt do not bet anything or bet what's happening whenever b and c situations have surpassed their cutoff values...."


I think this is very important.

Ten-Day Tri-State Bac Run

The recent forum changes look nice/hope all are winning bigly.
I just returned from a multi-state Bac run with a group of nine players (Mostly Bacers with a few tablemates that also play Poker/ Craps line bets.  A couple comrades also play Roulette some. The group played in Wichita, L Vegas, Cripple Creek/Black Hawk Colorado. Three departed Wichita and headed to LV. I will touch on a few highlights/add more later.

*Banker-Run Shoe w multiple B runs incl an 11-B streak. B was +26 at one point.

     This shoe was my best single shoe by far on this trip. I typically put a longer W streak together by setting aside a pressed up wager/reentering in other shoes or session. This was one of the "weird" shoes that I've learned to just go with it. In other words don't overthink it or don't over mathematize it. Sometimes I have to make myself get out of Math Mode and ride the Variance(even if it's a contrarian run that shouldn't happen too often).
I will try to post the PB results from this shoe in the next day or so.

Biggest drawdown for trip prior to recovery: -13.8 Base Units

**Dragon-7 bonus wagers

     I seldom wager for Dragon7(3c7) with 40:1 payout. Occasionally I will add  $600 to my Buy In and wager <=24 tries per shoe. Often maybe only 7-14 tries per shoe. Most days and most shoes zero attempts. I generally start at $25 per attempt and if I lose 43 attempts without a W will raise my next 24 tries to $30 per. If I win within the first 43 tries I will lower to $20 Per,...etc. Im an advocate for not hedging wagers. So often I try to wager a Dragon7 on another players wager when I do not have a base bet(P or B).

     This trip across 10days/ 4-7 shoes per day as some shoes I wagered zero tries and some shoes maybe upward to 24 attempts:

10L then a W at $25, & then reduced to $20. Then 38L and a W @ $20.  Then 5L and another W @20. Then 3L and a W @$20. I did not make any additional attempts. This is by far the most successful string of wins on the 3c7. One of the reasons Im not an advocate for wagering B-3c7 is when Im considering the 3c7 I track several addendum events / I find it cumbersome. It also will sometimes conflict with my Base Bet and my dislike for hedging comes into play.  Just me personally. Based on the above maybe I should rethink my logic, lol


***Friend hit a slot win for ~$13k on a $100 Free Play.

     Several Bac comrades split off from our group after a few days in Wichita and made the trek to Vegas. One hit a $5 Lucky Duck machine for $13.3K net W on an initial $100 Free Play. He always plays Lucky Duck machines with his free play.

****Sports Betting

     I seldom wager Sports Betting (in part because I don't have access to S.B. in my residential state). Most years I will place seven futures bets on NFL teams a couple weeks prior to the seasons' first week. My main approach is to watch the media and especially groups such as ESPN and pay attention to who they are pumping. Then research the opposite and will eliminate potential bets down to a select few. I then run my potential wagers across the thoughts of a couple friends that do SpBetting full time. I then do a line-shopping across  >= six sports books and select the most favorable (I think this last part is very important). Of course, I also must be in a larger market that offers in-person multiple sports books.

During this trip, the majority of my wagers were placed on the US Open. I don't play tennis nor do I watch or study it much(unless considering a bet).
 I started with an initial wager of $300. I mostly took early round favs(thus low payout) on Iga Swiatek and Novak Djokavic. I also took an additional USopen wager on Ms Townsends opponent as I thought she had advanced further than expected for her skill set(+ sports media was hyping her), which is also a trigger for me to look at the other side of the coin flip.
     *My $300 wager plus almost 100% of first several wins were parlayed to $800. Some wins were 100% parlayed. I had only collected $100, 50, and 20 until it hit at $800(1270 payout). I then collected for $800 and wagered the residual $570 on Iga Swiatek in the semis. Anisimova won in a slight upset. My run was over. Net+$970 on a $300 risk. I was satisfied as I will be the first to acknowledge my SB wagering skills are not polished(yet). I looked at the remaining US Open matches but didn't find any value bets. "IF" I had wagered on the mens finally my choice was likely going to be on Jannik Sinner. However, the line never became EV+ in my opinion. I noticed later that Sinner lost to Alcarez.
I welcome thoughts and tips.

NFL Wagers:
     I wagered seven futures bets on the NFL. Most were on Conference or Division champion.  One Prop wager I like is NYG(105) to win >5.5 games this season.


Thanks for reading.

More later,

Consider baccarat as a world formed by three different pattern models:

a) Homogeneous patterns (e.g. long 1-2 sequences, long chopping lines, long consecutive streaks, etc)

b) Heterogeneous patterns (patterns that continuously change their shape by a very high frequency)

c) Patterns not belonging to a) or b) categories.

At the vast majority of shoes dealt c>a+b as patterns are more likely to get levels of probability roaming around "intermediate" levels different than 0 or 1 (case b) or getting huge values (4, 5, 6 or more, case a).

Most players like to bet towards the a) class, other players prefer to chase the b) scenario (patterns standing for short sequences); almost nobody but the very rare serious bettors have learnt to set up their plan upon the c) category.

Notice that we're not criticizing to ride the occasional a) successions where we could only lose one bet but collecting several wins, yet for sure the b) situation (unless the player is particularly super skilled) is the worst to set up a strategy upon.


Let's take a look a bit further by a "consecutiveness" point of view.

- a+a situation could happen, a+a+a situation is very very unlikely to happen.

- (b) situation is a kind of consecutive situation by definition, so it's way more probable to get it mixed by (a) situation or, more likely, interspersed by a (c) situation.

- (c) situation, the strongest on average, tends to constitute the "norm", so itlr c-c>c-a, c-c>c-b.
Once c-c happened, the c-c-c sequence starts to get more volatile values belonging to the classic gambling world (no edge).

We see that in a way or another we had to empirically set up a limit to those a, b and c scenarios transformed into numbers. All unsound math considerations that any math or stats expert could dispute and, frankly, that we couldn't care less about.
After all we are just approximating probabilities at our advantage with the aim of winning money and not disturbing the casinos' knowledge about the baccarat invulnerability.

Anyway there's a decisive factor to be ascertained, that is the real randomness of the card distributions we'll have to face in the real world.
On that important subject we think that it's an intricated task for us to assess whether a shoe is really randomly shuffled or not, fundamentally as real random sources cannot be implemented so easily in any card distribution.

Try to run a 416 finite card distribution at random.org site (considered the best), register the outcomes by baccarat rules and take care of the a, b and c situations happening by a consecutiveness and average levels of presentation point of view.

Probably random.org site is the best source to get an idea about how things will distribute by a perfect (or at least, nearly to perfect) random factor.

By comparing random.org successions with real card distributions happening at your table (same table, same conditions) you'll get a better idea about how real randomness is supposed to act or not.
So when in doubt do not bet anything or bet what's happening whenever b and c situations have surpassed their cutoff values.

as.

Basically at a game where is so easy to win in short terms and practically impossible in the long run, the most important skills come from experience, that is learning from the mistakes we continuosly make in our sessions and in our tests.

HE impact interferes very little with our plan once we properly run infinite times similar betting situations, where of course everything will tend to be equal or almost equal.

For example, one of the worst mistakes to make at baccarat is quitting the session after having collected more wins than losses, a thing particularly frequent and made by players who like to hugely modify the betting amounts, so not taking with the proper consideration the inevitable WL permutation issue.

More later (hoping no site maintenance work will go on)

as. 

Here is one for you.  You know, the ability to think and rationale when you totally lose your mind, seems to be the protocol in today's world. 

Of course the Star Casino executives exploited his self imposing and total addiction as well as his inability to read English while he blew through tens of millions at the baccarat tables. 

Wait a second, let's play devil's advocate here.  You come into a large amount of money.  You go into a high line jewelry store in New York City and start picking out tens of millions of dollars worth of precious watches and jewelry.  Do they stop you and say; "Sorry, no can do.  We have to check your English proficiency and analyze your state of mind before we take your money", etc., etc.? 

https://www.casino.org/news/property-billionaire-phillip-dong-fang-lee-sues-star-casino-for-57m-losses/

The USA has the most casinos out of any country in the world these days.  I am very much acquainted with Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, both world class acts to say the very least!

What happens in Vegas doesn't always have to stay there.  Vegas laid the ground work and it was copied and profited upon hundreds and hundreds of times over.  Not by building complete cities geared towards gaming, but property by property with numerous smaller Vegas style jurisdictions. 

Instead, consider a night of gambling fun at two New England casinos, which were recently named as being among the best casinos outside Las Vegas, according to a USA Today poll.

"The United States is home to more than 1,000 casinos — more than any other country in the world," USA Today wrote. "From coast to coast, gamers have a huge range of options for where to place their bets, and not just in Las Vegas."

An expert panel narrowed down the USA Today list to 20 casinos, including Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods Resort Casino, both in Connecticut. Then the public was able to vote on their favorites.

Mohegan Sun placed second, while Foxwoods Resort Casino placed third. First place went to Yaamava' Resort & Casino at San Manuel in California.

Mohegan Sun has nearly 4,000 slot machines, over 300 table games, more than 30 poker tables, a race book and "an area fashioned after an Asian market that offers traditional Asian table games like sic bo, pai gow, and mini baccarat," the news outlet wrote.

Foxwoods has more than 3,500 slot machines, as well as 250-plus table games, high-stakes bingo, a sportsbook with 50-foot LED screens and the largest poker room on the East Coast, according to USA Today.