So why didn't the people elect Slick Willie's wife and put her into office so she could further rape the country?  Maybe she could have molested a young male intern?

Can anyone answer?

The basics of the draw-down is a huge factor in what will determine if your Buy-In and your Bank-Roll is sufficient.  Second will be your Playtime.  And third will be your Money Management Method.  All 3 are tailored to you personally and you must have them correct and you must understand them and be conscious of them 100% while playing. 

Believe what you want;
Live how you want;
Be a typical loser without knowledge and experience, OR belive you have enough and wager with fallacy instead of proper thought;
Think you are not subject to the Bac fallacy downsides.

Do not believe what so many write about (with no proof, win-loss statements, etc.) especially with those statements along the lines of, "I always win, even when I lose I always come out ahead in the end", etc., etc., etc., and so on.

Buy-In.  Your Buy-In must be a small part of your actual Bank Roll.  If you lost your Buy-In without winning any decent amount and locking it up, you must stop your session.  No further buy-ins.  And I am not talking about taking a break or eating and calling a new session 20 minutes later. 

Bank-Roll.  Your Bank-Roll should be at least 20 times your regular Buy-In amount.  (If you are on an extended out of state gaming journey, nothing wrong with taking your entire Bank-Roll as long as each session is only a percentage of what your Bank-Roll is).  You Bank-Roll must be replenished with your win money when you win.  Do not continually build up and go with larger and larger Bank-Rolls, you are then invading and contradicting your own Level & Plateau you must remain in.  Higher Levels and larger Plateaus will only kill your Bank-Roll. 

You must view your Bank Roll and your Buy-In separately.  You must not run your session together, all day long, etc.  Just because you lose or win, cash out and take a 30 minute or 1 hour break, does not mean you should be convinced you are on a new session, etc. 

Playtime.  The largest and most frequent mistake that is detrimental to the player is his preset playtime.  How long you are convinced you should or will play and continue the draw-down or chasing or winning, etc.  The playtime is by far and large, the number one thing that will hurt you. 

Frame-of-Mind.  You cannot chase, must get back, you know you can, etc., etc., type of thinking when you are losing.  Those will kill you almost every time!  The few times you do recoup, will only add huge amounts of false-positives to your playing agenda.  Most all players do not understand this, think about those things or even want to know about them. 

No matter what people write on the internet, such as: "Oh I played and was losing and I kept playing because I always win my sessions", etc., etc., etc., all rubbish my friends! 

When you win you win.
When you lose you lose.

Money Management Method. You must research your own positive holding procedure for being able to hold your winnings and only give back a certain smaller amount for a continued effort to allow your win to continue.  Period. 

You must have multiple avenues to be successful at Bac.  Simply sitting down and wagering on one side for a certain event to happen, will never ever allow you to capitalize and grab the numerous opportunities that do exist, will present themselves and repetitively occur at the Bac tables.  Your losses will never equal out with what you are able to win. 

You must know your Level & Plateau you can function at and you gamble according to.  You must stay within that Level & Plateau but if you are winning, you can allow yourself to go outside of it, but when you begin to lose (which you will) you must immediately return to that very same regular Level & Plateau.  If you do not, you will only harm your Buy-In and Bank Roll, each and every time.

You must use Positive Progressions to capitalize and win amounts that will reward yourself for the risk of your capital. 

You must employ something similar to my 1/3rd, 1/3rd 1/3rd Side Parlay Wagering if you want to realize the potential of your knowledge and experience and have something work for you that will pay-off. 

Baccarat is no different than business or war or anything else that is about money, competition and challenge.  With that  said:

Someone at a Bac event this past weekend summed it all up after he hit it hard and took half the dealer's rack and cashed out.

"You do not attack the game with one piece, you line up your forces.  The same as a good chess player does when he engages".

I like what he said.  Good analogy. 

So many people, I think I can safely say the highest majority of all players, still believe there are magical scheduled grind it out or wait for an opportunity to make a few units, type of play that will lead them to their Bac riches. 

Quote from: Fran7738 on February 28, 2020, 07:25:21 PM
[/fontImo and according to a couple of serious players the best situation to aim for is to win just one unit per shoe. Say per every playable shoe.

If your unit size is 5000$ and you get that win 4 times a week x 50 weeks ...  I would be more than happy and then forget about gambling .

You would need a huge bankroll and I would estimate between $300,000 to $400,000 of disposable income that you can draw down on because you would have periods of 20 to 30 attempts or presentments that will fail.

Anything is possible in the game of Baccarat but if you're going to consecutively wager and have a stop loss of three, four or five units you are going to have a drawdown at least 30 units before you start to even make anything back.

Absolutely adore looking back on some of these threads where people come on with one or two posts, say how good they are doing,  they are switching careers and then they are looking for consistent doubles or streaks and where those Bac type shoes are consistently happening.

Absolute striking motivation to continue a real forum!!

Where are all these people at? (A)--They either made millions and millions of dollars and retired to the Caribbean, or (B)-- They gave up gambling. 

I don't believe it's anything in between. Got to love it, got to love the people that post one, two, three or four messages and then they never come back on!

Gambling, Macau and Misc., overflowing into the USA:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2005-08-23-0508230020-story.html

The United States Federal Court Indictment Document:

https://docplayer.net/120459319-United-states-district-court-district-of-new-jersey-united-states-of-america-criminal-no-05-v-hon.html

Part of the aftermath of the legal proceedings and welcoming to Club Fed:

https://www.inquirer.com/philly/hp/news_update/20070801_Smuggler_in_global_ring_gets_11_years.html

An absolute great read!  Not one doubt about it.  Alrelax.

"Reprinted with permission from the New Yorker Magazine"

THE GOD OF GAMBLERS
Las Vegas and Macau.

In the late summer of 2007, a fifty-year-old former barber named Siu Yun Ping began making regular visits from his village, in Hong Kong, to the city of Macau, the only Chinese territory where it is legal to gamble in a casino. Macau sits on a horn of rocky coastline, where the Pearl River washes into the South China Sea. It's about a third the size of Manhattan, covering a tropical peninsula and a pair of islands that look, on a map, like crumbs flaking off the mainland. Chairman Mao banned gambling in China long ago, but it endures in Macau because of a wrinkle of history: the city was a Portuguese colony for nearly five hundred years, and when it returned to Chinese control, in 1999, it was entitled to retain some of the flamboyantly libertine traditions that led W. H. Auden to christen it "a weed from Catholic Europe." The infusion of China's new riches triggered an unprecedented surge of construction, and by 2006 Macau's casino revenues had surpassed those of Las Vegas, until then the world's largest gambling town. Today, the quantity of money passing through Macau exceeds that of Las Vegas five times over.

Siu Yun Ping or Brother Ping, as friends called him, had known little good fortune. He grew up in the tin-roofed hut of a squatters, settlement on the mudflats of rural Hong Kong. The year he was born, a fatal flood swept through the neighborhood; subsequent years brought drought, then typhoons. "It was as though the gods wished to destroy us by driving us mad," a local official recalled in his memoirs. Siu had five siblings, and his education ended in primary school. When he wasn't cutting hair, he found employment as a tailor and a construction worker. Gambling was technically illegal in Hong Kong, but, as in many Chinese communities, it was a low-key fixture of life, and, by the age of nine, he was pushing his way into the crowd to watch local card games. At thirteen, he was playing for small stakes, and an underground gambling den hired him to hang around and keep an eye on the players hands.  "I'm good at observing people's movements," he told me recently. "Whenever I saw someone cheating, I told the boss."

As an adult, he continued to play cards, though with little success. He was an unglamorous presence, trim and wiry, with plump cheeks, bushy hair, and the fast, watchful eyes of a man accustomed to looking out for himself. He married at nineteen, had three children, divorced, and married again. Around his home village, Fuk Hing, which means Celebrating Fortune, he was also known by a nickname that he did not much care for: Lang Tou Ping, or Inveterate Gambler Ping.

While working as a barber, he befriended a skinny local teen-ager named Wong Kam-ming. Wong had grown up in the same district, one of the poorest in Hong Kong, and had also dropped out of school to find work. They occasionally met for supper at a cafe where Wong worked for his mother. Siu was trying to become a small-town developer, building and selling houses among the paddy fields near his village, and Wong opened his own restaurant. They didn't see each other often, but Siu said that they were "like brothers." They became especially close in recent years, when Wong began working on the side in Macau, as a 'junket agent,' recruiting gamblers, giving them lines of credit, and earning commissions on how much they bet. One of the people he recruited was Siu.

Once or twice a week, Siu boarded the public ferry for an hour-long trip across the rolling gray waters of the Pearl River estuary. Seventy thousand people turned up each day to try their luck, more than half of them from mainland China. He had no illusions about whether his habit was in his favor. "Out of every ten people who gamble, maybe three will win," Siu said. "And when those three keep on gambling only one will win." He played baccarat, the Chinese gamblers favorite. (It offers slightly better odds than the alternatives, and is easy to master.) The punto banco style, favored in Macau, involves no skill; the result is determined as soon as the cards are dealt.

In August of 2007, within weeks of beginning his regular trips, Siu hit a hot streak. Some days, he won thousands of dollars. Others, he took home hundreds of thousands. With Wong's recommendation, he was invited into opulent V.I.P. rooms, which are open only to the biggest bettors, and he became a regular on the high rollers, helicopter trips across the water. The more he played, the more Wong earned in commissions and tips. As winter approached, Siu's success set in motion a chain of events that eventually reached Las Vegas and showed why Macau is a place where it's easy to get in over your head, whether you're a former barber in Hong Kong or one of the richest men in America.

Gambling towns are shrines to self-invention. In the eighteen-sixties, Monaco was a tiny backwater in financial distress after losing most of its land to France; then it built a casino, and became one of the world's wealthiest places. Las Vegas was a desert outpost battered by sandstorms and flash floods, a land that the "Lord had forgotten," in the view of nineteenth-century Mormon missionaries, who abandoned it, before it grew into the city that now attracts more people each year than Mecca. Hal Rothman, the late historian of the American West, wrote that Las Vegas posed the same question to every visitor: "What do you want to be, and what will you pay to be it?"

The ferry to Macau is greeted by a crowd of touts. When I arrived not long ago, I encountered a figure in a rotund cartoon-dog suit, waving strenuously in the heat. He was a mascot from Macau's Venetian resort, a cousin of the Las Vegas resort of the same name and the dog suit was adorned with the striped shirt and straw hat of a gondolier. Beyond, the city rose in layers of steep hillsides jammed with high-rise apartment blocks, the remnants of a Portuguese fort, and lush groves of Chinese banyan trees. In the crowd, a young woman handed out a Chinese advertisement for 'USA Direct,' which offers a toll-free number for Mandarin speakers to buy American real estate at cut-rate prices.

Macau, whose population is half a million, feels like China amplified and miniaturized. It is animated by the same formula of ambition and speed and risk, but the sheer volume of money and people passing through has distilled the mixture into an extract so potent that it can seem to be either the city's greatest strength or its greatest liability. A generation ago, Macau made fireworks, toys, and plastic flowers. Today, the factories are gone, the average citizen earns more than the average European, and the gap between the rich and the poor is vast and widening. Construction is ceaseless, and at night welders torches flare from scaffolding overhead. Underfoot, the sidewalks are littered with faces on discarded handbills that promise the companionship of "girls from every continent."

American casino companies have raced to move in. In 2006, Steve Wynn, who led a revival of Las Vegas in the nineteen-nineties, opened a casino in Macau; he makes more than two-thirds of his global profits there. He is learning to speak Chinese, and he talks about moving his corporate headquarters to Macau. "We're really a Chinese company now, not an American company," he has said. Macau has become especially attractive to American corporations in the last few years. In Nevada, after tourism sank in 2008, gaming revenue plunged by nearly twenty per cent in two years, the largest decline in the state's history. It later improved, but Nevada still has the highest unemployment and foreclosure rates in the country. Gary Loveman, the chairman of Caesars Entertainment, was one of the few casino bosses who passed up a chance to build in Macau. "Big mistake," he said later. "I was wrong, I was really wrong." Even by China's standards, the speed of Macau's growth is breathtaking; for a decade, the economy has ballooned, on average, nineteen per cent a year, nearly twice as fast as mainland China's. In 2010, high rollers in Macau wagered about six hundred billion dollars, roughly the amount of cash withdrawn from all the A.T.M.s in America in a year.

The United States government has come to believe that the cash changing hands on the tables in Macau is only a small part of the picture. "The growth of gambling in Macau, fueled by money from mainland Chinese gamblers and the growth of U.S.-owned casinos, has been accompanied by widespread corruption, organized crime, and money laundering," according to the 2011 annual report by the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China. The place has emerged as the 'Macau Laundry Service,' as U.S. diplomats put it in an internal cable in 2009. Juan Zarate was a senior counter terrorism official in the Bush Administration who worked on sanctioning a private bank in Macau that allegedly facilitated, among other things, the financing of nuclear proliferation by North Korea. "Anyone who knows anything about anti-money laundering understands both the inherent and the real risks in Macau," Zarate said. "You have an admixture of commercial-financial activity, a way station for people and goods, a casino sector, all in a potentially volatile regional environment.? David Asher, who was a State Department senior adviser for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Bush Administration, calls Macau 'a cesspool' of financial crimes. "It's gone from being out of a James Bond movie to being out of  "The Bourne Identity,"  he said.

Intrigue, of one kind or another, has clung to Macau's history since the city's founding myths, which described an act of elegant deception: In 1564, local Chinese fishermen sought the help of a visiting Portuguese fleet for a battle against pirates; the Portuguese disguised their cannon inside Chinese boats and waylaid the bandits at sea. In gratitude, the Chinese granted permission to the Portuguese to stay on the peninsula. Macau became a vital stop between India and Japan, but, eventually, nearby Hong Kong built a better port and Macau found alternative specialties: opium, prostitution, and gambling. When the Dutch-born writer Hendrik de Leeuw visited, in the nineteen-thirties, for his book "Cities of Sin," he included it as home to 'all the riffraff of the world, the drunken ship masters; the flotsam of the sea, the derelicts, and more shameless, beautiful, savage women than any port in the world. It is a hell.'

Until recently, Macau looked as much Mediterranean as Chinese, with baroque Catholic churches and rows of cafes shaded by drooping palms, where old 'migr's sipped cafe da manh' over the Journal Tribuna. These days, the city also evokes a touch of the Persian Gulf. Government tax revenue is often more than double the budget, and, like Kuwait, Macau distributes occasional checks to its residents under a program named the Wealth Partaking Scheme. (Last year: eight hundred and seventy-five dollars per person.) Unemployment is below three per cent. "What Las Vegas did in seventy-five years, we are doing in fifteen," Paulo Azevedo, the publisher of Macau Business and other local magazines, told me. The rush has left the city short of many things" taxis, roads, housing, medical services. "For dental, I have to go to Thailand," Azevedo said. One month, Macau came close to running out of coins. The casinos have reordered the rhythms of life and work, in ways that are not universally celebrated. Au Kam San, a member of Macau's Legislative Assembly, who works as a high-school teacher, told me, "My students have said, I can go get a job in a casino right now and earn more than my teacher."?

A short drive from the ferry, Steve Wynn has a complex with two hotels, where the Louis Vuitton outlet is said to generate more sales per square foot than any other Louis Vuitton outlet worldwide. Walking past a tank of luminescent jellyfish, which require a specially designed curtain to sleep at night, the casino official who was showing me the place told me that Chinese clientele demand a heightened level of luxury, because "everyone is a president or a chairman." We stopped into the complex's newest Michelin-starred restaurant, which has an in-house poet who writes a personal verse for every V.I.P. I asked about a tiny white leather stool beside each table, and a staff member explained, "That's for your handbag."

In catering to his clients, Wynn has embraced Chinese notions of luck and fortune with the passion of a convert. When the hotel discovered that the number of private rooms in its spa was four, an unfortunate number, because it sounds, in Chinese, like 'death' designers added a line of fake doors across the hall, to suggest a total of eight, which is closer to "get rich." In Las Vegas, Wynn made his name pushing luxury over camp, Picasso, say, over Wayne Newton, but his hotel in Macau still has a place for what casino designers call the 'wow feature.' Once an hour, tourists gather in the lobby to watch a hole open in the floor. A giant animatronic dragon climbs out, coiling into the air, red eyes blazing, smoke pouring from its nostrils.

Games of chance have been a part of Chinese history since the Xia dynasty (2000-1500 B.C.). The government often imposed rules against them, and yet officials themselves were the ones who gambled the most, Desmond Lam, a marketing professor at the University of Macau, told me. "They would get stripped of their titles, caned, jailed, exiled, but we still see the trend across the dynasties." Parsing Chinese appetites for risk is a modest academic niche, with applications beyond the world of casinos. "When I was growing up," Lam said, "my family always gambled at holidays, funerals, that's just what we did" so I wanted to know: Why do Chinese communities gamble?  Lam and I were taking a walking tour of the City of Dreams, a casino complex that uses the promotional tagline "Sign Up, Play, Change Your Life." After six years of studies and surveys, Lam views each gambling table as a 'microscopic battle,' a standoff between science and faith. On one side is the casino, which can reliably calculate its advantage to two decimal points. On the other is a collection of Chinese beliefs about fate and superstition, which, Lam says, "people know are irrational but are part of the culture." He ticked off some received wisdom: To improve the odds, wear red underwear and switch on all the lights before leaving home. To prevent a losing streak, avoid the sight of nuns and monks when travelling to the casino. Never use the main entrance. Always find a side door.

The City of Dreams smells of perfume, cigarettes, and rug shampoo. Chinese gamblers rarely drink when money is on the line, and the low, festive hum is broken now and then by the sound of someone pounding the table in delight or anguish, or exhorting the cards to obey. One night, I settled into the scrum around a baccarat game in which a slim man with heavy eyebrows and a red face shining with sweat was performing 'the squeeze' slowly peeling up the edge of his card, while the man beside him shouted "Blow! Blow!" to wish away a high number. When the slim man had peeled enough to see the digit, his face twisted in disgust and he tossed the card across the table.

"Americans tend to see themselves in control of their fate, while Chinese see fate as something external," Lam said. "To alter fate, the Chinese feel they need to do things to acquire more luck." In surveys, Chinese casino gamblers tend to view bets as investments and investments as bets. The stock market and real estate, in the Chinese view, are scarcely different from a casino. The behavioral scientists Elke Weber and Christopher Hsee have compared Chinese and American approaches to financial risk. In a series of experiments, they found that Chinese investors overwhelmingly described themselves as more cautious than Americans. But when they were tested the stereotype proved to be a fallacy, and the Chinese took consistently larger risks than Westerners of comparable wealth. (The gap applies only to investing; asked about decisions in health care and education, the groups were indistinguishable.)

Living in China, I've come to expect that Chinese friends make financial decisions that I find uncomfortably risky: launching businesses with their savings, moving across the country without the assurance of a job. One explanation, which Weber and Hsee call "the cushion hypothesis," is that traditionally large Chinese family networks afford people confidence that they can turn to others for help if a risk does not succeed. Another theory is more specific to the boom years. "The economic reforms undertaken by Deng Xiaoping were a gamble in themselves," Ricardo Siu, a business professor at the University of Macau, told me. "So people got the idea that taking a risk is not just O.K., it has utility." For those who have come from poverty to the middle class, he added, "the thinking may be, If I lose half my money, well, I've lived through that. I won't be poor again. And in several years I can earn it back. But if I win, I'm a millionaire!"

In the case of Inveterate Gambler Ping, success drew attention. About four months into Siu's streak, a gossip column in the Apple Daily, a popular Hong Kong paper, took note of a mysterious figure making the rounds in Macau, said to be amassing a fortune as large as a hundred and fifty million dollars. "Is he extremely lucky or does he have the real magic touch"? the paper asked in January, 2008. The next day, a member of Hong Kong?s legislature, Chim Pui Chung a devoted gambler himself "told the paper that he had heard people hailing the new high roller as the 'God of Gamblers,' borrowed from the title of a Hong Kong movie starring Chow Yun-fat."

A streak of that scale was also likely to attract suspicion. Macau garners its share of creative casino cheats; last summer, local police arrested members of a gang accused of embedding miniature cameras into card-shuffling machines. Too much success can be cause for distrust. A casino's advantage in baccarat "about 1.15 per cent", ordains that the chances of winning all but evaporate for a gambler after thirty thousand hands. A dedicated player can draw a thousand hands in a weekend and come out ahead, but after seven months almost nobody should go home a winner.

Not long after the article appeared dubbing Siu the God of Gamblers, his twenty-year-old son received a series of anonymous threatening phone calls. Then one night someone slipped into Celebrating Fortune village and tried to set the family house on fire. Finally, Siu's friend Wong Kam-ming, who had introduced him to several V.I.P. rooms, received an angry call. The man on the other end demanded a meeting to discuss the question of Inveterate Gambler Ping's having cheated.

Nobody embodies Macau's reputation for self-invention more thoroughly than Stanley Ho, a tall, elegant ninety-year-old tycoon who once dated starlets and dancers, excelled at the tango, and was chauffeured around Hong Kong in a Rolls-Royce with the license plate "HK-1."  After his father lost the family fortune in the stock market, Ho got his start during the Second World War with a trading company in Macau. "By the end of the war, I'd earned over a million dollars having started with just ten", he said later. He expanded into airlines, real estate, and shipping, and in 1962 he and associates took over Macau's casinos, gaining a monopoly that lasted forty years and made him one of Asia's richest men. In his choice of business partners, he was non-judgmental; he ran horse racing under the Shah of Iran, a gaming boat under Ferdinand Marcos, and an island casino under Kim Jong Il. Intelligence agents were desperate to cultivate Ho for his connections, but the late Dan Grove, a retired F.B.I. agent who served in Hong Kong, told me, "Nobody ever got past first base."

For years, foreign governments have suspected Ho of being too cozy with Chinese organized crime. Regulators have thwarted his family's efforts to run casinos in the U.S. and Australia. In 2009, New Jersey regulators decided that a joint venture between MGM Resorts International and Ho's daughter Pansy failed the state's requirement that casinos avoid business with "notorious or unsavory persons." Far more surprising is what happened afterward, when New Jersey gave MGM an ultimatum: cut ties with the Ho family or lose a stake in Atlantic City's highest-grossing casino. MGM chose Macau, and it is now selling its stake in Atlantic City.

Stanley Ho's monopoly expired in 2002, three years after China took control, and foreign competitors surged in to obtain licenses. The first new casino to open was the Sands Macao, backed by Sheldon Adelson, of Las Vegas, whom Forbes ranks as the seventh-richest person in the United States. Adelson is Stanley Ho's physical opposite, small and heavy, with pale-red hair. Where Ho avoided overt declarations of power, Adelson has described himself as the "largest investor of any kind in the history of China." The son of a cabdriver from Lithuania, Adelson grew up in the Boston suburb of Dorchester, and ran a spate of businesses with erratic success, packaging toiletries for hotels, selling a chemical spray to clear ice from windshields, before his break, in 1979, when he launched Comdex, a computer trade show. He later bought the old Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, created America's largest privately owned convention center, and enriched himself with a signature strategy of pairing casinos with exhibition centers.

More than a decade ago, he coveted Macau as a gateway to 1.3 billion Chinese nationals, and he successfully courted Chinese leaders in Beijing by emphasizing his influence in Republican politics. (He is a frequent donor to right-wing causes in the United States and Israel. He and his relatives drew attention in the Republican Presidential contest this year by giving $16.5 million to a Super PAC that supported Newt Gingrich, representing all but five per cent of the money that the group raised.) He told people that Macau would someday help him overtake Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in wealth. A crowd of thousands turned up on the Sands opening day, in May, 2004, lured in part by false newspaper reports of free gambling chips for the first bettors. Tom Smock, the casino?s general counsel at the time, watched as the building?s tall metal front doors began to give way from the pressure of the crowd. "Every time a hinge broke, the crowd roared with approval," Smock said. "They ripped every door off the hinges at that front entrance. That's how the casino opened, and they poured in."

Within a year, the Sands Macao had recouped its construction costs, of two hundred and sixty-five million dollars, and Adelson embarked on an idea that he described as coming to him in a dream: to replicate the Las Vegas Strip on a stretch of open sea between two islands in Macau. His company constructed a landfill out of three million cubic metres of sand, he named it the Cotai Strip, for Coloane and Taipa, the islands that it fused together and he opened the $2.4-billion Venetian Macao, a supersized replica of the Las Vegas Venetian, with the largest casino floor in the world.

Unlike Las Vegas, where most of the profits come from coins fed into slot machines, three-quarters of the revenue in Macau is derived from the enormous bets made in the V.I.P. rooms, where high rollers play around the clock. Casinos rely on outside companies, known as 'junkets,' to solve some of the practical problems inherent in running a casino in Macau. It is illegal to advertise gambling in mainland China, and Chinese citizens are barred from carrying more than the equivalent of about three thousand dollars on any single trip to Macau. Most troubling, from the casinos perspective, is that it's illegal to try to collect a gambling debt in the People's Republic. Working through junket operators is a legal bypass around those problems, because the operators will recruit rich customers from across China, issue them credit, and then handle the complicated business of collection. The system is an attractive arrangement for customers who need to secrete large quantities of cash out of China. If a corrupt official or executive wants to hide the proceeds, a junket is a way to hand over cash on one side of the border and recover it on the other, in chips that can then be played and cashed out in clean foreign currency. (Another option is to smuggle it by hand across Macau?s relaxed borders, a practice known in laundering circles as 'smurfing,' for the army of small-time couriers involved.)

While the junket industry has many law-abiding members, it has, for decades, been susceptible to the involvement of organized crime. Triads, which grew out of nineteenth-century Chinese political societies, had always been involved in loan-sharking and prostitution, and had made their presence felt on the edges of Macau's casinos, but in recent years triads had become more business-oriented. Triad violence in Macau and Hong Kong has declined over the past decade, because triads have increasingly set aside squabbles over drugs and petty crime in order to pursue the range of new criminal opportunities associated with a more prosperous China, including money laundering, financial fraud, and gambling. Gangsters are becoming "gray entrepreneurs," as criminologists put it, and it was more difficult to distinguish between triads that had gone into business and businesses that were acting like triads. Some mob bosses still adhere to the old ranks of gangsterdom, 'dragon heads,' at the top; 'red poles,' overseeing operations, but many follow the ancient rituals only perfunctorily: the thirty-six oaths, the cocktail of blood and rice liquor. Some younger gang members resort to cribbing from the rituals in gangster movies.

Steve Vickers is a former commander of the Royal Hong Kong police's Criminal Intelligence Bureau. "I know of no Chinese junket operator that doesn't have some association with triads," he told me. A thirty-nine-year-old junket agent said that when he entered the business, in his mid-twenties, triad membership was effectively a job requirement, but in the past decade it has broadened to include anyone who "can bring in money and customers." To find clients in a country that is minting more millionaires each year than any other, some of his peers scour the business press looking for new tycoons. "Nowadays, in Macau, if a person doesn't gamble at least a few hundred thousand dollars, then he isn't even a real customer," he said. What happens if a customer doesn't pay up? "We go to the city where he is and call him up. Then, if necessary, we wait there for a couple of days. Just to put some pressure on him."

In recent years, U.S. federal agencies, including the F.B.I., the Secret Service, and the Internal Revenue Service, have become increasingly familiar with Macau. In an elaborate smuggling investigation that ended in 2005, undercover F.B.I. agents infiltrated a ring that included a Macau citizen named Jyimin Horng, who was accused of importing into the U.S. millions of dollars, worth of counterfeit cigarettes, methamphetamines, and high-quality fake currency known as "supernotes," believed to originate in North Korea. Undercover agents wired Horng payments in Macau in exchange for fake bills at a rate of thirty cents for each phony dollar, smuggled in large bolts of fabric and boxes of toys.

When an F.B.I. agent named Jack Garcia posed as a representative of Colombian FARC guerrillas and asked for weapons, Horng sent him a catalogue, and Garcia ordered anti-tank missiles, grenade launchers, submachine guns, and AK-47s. To lure Horng and others to the United States for arrest, the agency staged a mock wedding for a male and a female agent involved in the sting. Horng and other guests received elegant invitations to a celebration aboard a yacht moored off Cape May, New Jersey.

"I was the best man," Garcia, who is now retired, told me. "We picked them up for the bachelor party and drove them straight to the F.B.I. office." Fifty-nine people were arrested. (Horng pleaded guilty and is serving three and a half to four years.) Based on that case and on other information, the Treasury Department blacklisted Banco Delta Asia, in Macau, for participating in money laundering. The bank denied the claim, but it has been barred from access to the U.S. financial system.

Eight years ago, when American-run casinos arrived in Macau, observers predicted that the scrutiny of Wall Street and state regulators would drive organized crime out of Macau's gambling industry. But the junket industry has not shed its links to triads, and junkets operate in every U.S.-owned casino in Macau, largely because they are able to collect debts in China. American casinos insist that they strictly adhere to laws in Macau and the United States to prevent money laundering and the involvement of organized crime. But even those standards have left the casinos at risk. Macau law, for instance, requires identification for any casino transaction above the equivalent of sixty-one thousand dollars, a threshold that is six times higher than that for casinos in the United States.

Grove, the former F.B.I. agent, headed security for the Sands Macao in its early years. He said that American casinos instituted background checks, international accounting standards, and other good-faith efforts to prevent the encroachment of organized crime, but triads found inventive solutions. "They'd even try and get in through the meat contracts at the steak house," he said. With Las Vegas ailing, casinos can't afford to sever contracts with the most profitable junkets and lose access to the clients they deliver. As a result, Steve Vickers told me, unless a company has the will and the strategy to get rid of the triads, "you're constantly on the back foot, constantly worried what these guys are going to do next."

A few weeks after Siu Yun Ping's house was set on fire, a group of men were summoned to a meeting in a parking lot on the outskirts of Hong Kong. The meeting had been called by See Wah-lun, a thickset, thirty-year-old mid-level member of one of China's most famous triads, the Wo Hop To.

See Wah-lun told his men about a plan to extort Siu. As one of them later described it in court, "A boss wanted a man to return some money." The boss was Cheung Chi-tai, a gang leader who was well known to Hong Kong police and U.S. authorities. In the words of a Hong Kong judge, Verina Bokhary, Cheung could 'have a say in things' in a V.I.P. room at the Sands Macao, one of the places where Siu had made his baccarat fortune.

See Wah-lun unveiled a straightforward plot: they would send Siu a message by ambushing his friend Wong, pinning his car between two others and then hustling him over to a nearby village, where a secluded, run-down building would be prepared with gloves, hoods, knives, and extendable police batons. The plan was to break Wong's legs and hands, but then See called his guys back and told them that it was being upgraded to murder, so Siu would know they were serious and hand over his winnings.

The gang balked. One of the recruits asked, "Do we have to be that serious"?

See was taken aback. "The boss tells you to do it, are you not going to do it"? he said.

Another of the chosen assassins complained that he was supposed to be a guest at a wedding that evening. A third, Lau Ming-yee, had a pregnant girlfriend and financial troubles, and yet he was being asked to do the job gratis. "If you are not going to pay someone, then how would that someone help you"? he said later.

It didn't help that Lau happened to know the intended victim from years before, when he worked as a delivery boy and dropped off food at Wong's village. "Everyone was shocked by the idea of killing anybody, never mind somebody some of us knew," Lau said.

When See asked him to take part in the murder, Lau hesitated. The boss was incensed. "What the tock you have to think about"? he said.

Lau seemed to relent, and agreed to help with the murder. In reality, he had become an informer for the police. In the predawn hours before the attack, he called his police handler, met him near the Temple Under a Big Tree, and told him about the murder plot and about Siu. In his statement to the police, Lau said, "I am the father of a child and I want to be a responsible man."

The police arrested five gangsters, and in a trial that fall Lau, who had been placed in protective custody, testified against them. They maintained their innocence, but all were convicted of conspiracy to commit grievous bodily harm and acting as members of a triad. See, the ringleader, was sentenced on additional charges of conspiring to commit murder and recruiting others to carry it out. The five men are now serving between eight and a half and fourteen years. At one point, Siu himself was arrested, on suspicion of involvement in the plot to kill his friend Wong. But he was 'released unconditionally,' the judge said, after police concluded that "he was not involved in any such plot." During the investigation, police also detained Cheung Chi-tai, the triad leader, but he did not spend long in custody. According to John Haynes, See's defense attorney, Cheung, called his lawyer and refused to answer any questions, and as a result he escaped being charged with anything.  At sentencing, Haynes lamented that the "small potatoes" were going to jail while the 'big boss . . . now sits comfortably, free from any charges, in Macau.'

Siu and Wong testified at the trial, and they were asked to estimate how much Siu had amassed during his five-month winning streak. It was a complicated question, because high rollers in Macau often make side bets that are many times larger than the chips on the table. (In a side bet, a player and a junket agent secretly agree that every hundred-dollar chip, say, is worth a thousand or ten thousand, and then they settle wins and losses in private.) In total, he estimated that he had won the equivalent of thirteen million U.S. dollars. Wong put the figure at seventy-seven million.

The notion that a former barber had won as much as seventy-seven million dollars and outlasted the mobsters charged with getting it back, attracted the attention of members of the Hong Kong press, and they pursued the God of Gamblers as a minor curiosity, though he declined interviews. A year after the trial, the Hong Kong magazine Next published an article alleging that Siu had cheated, by finding a way to manipulate the side-betting system. The article claimed that he had paid off an underling who recorded players, ups and downs, in order to boost his wins and minimize his losses. The casino hadn't detected the fraud, the magazine surmised, because side bets were off the books, and the junkets hadn't anticipated that a gambler might risk trying to buy off a staff member. Siu never responded to the article. In any case, local reporters discovered, he had disappeared.

The God of Gamblers case had all but vanished from the Hong Kong crime pages when, in March, 2010, a Reuters investigation, published in collaboration with Matt Isaacs, of the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, re-examined the trial and seized on a crucial detail: If the triad boss Cheung Chi-tai had "a say in things" in a V.I.P. room at the Sands Macao, as Judge Bokhary had put it, and potentially other links to the industry, then the relationship appeared to be "one of the first documented examples" of mob involvement in a U.S.-backed casino in Macau, Reuters wrote. That link could put Sands at risk of violating Nevada laws barring casino companies from associating with figures who "discredit" the industry, not only on Nevada soil but anywhere.

The Las Vegas Sands was quick to issue a statement that Cheung was "not listed as a director or shareholder" in any of its V.I.P. rooms, but, after it conducted an internal investigation, its lawyers stated that Cheung had indeed been found to be operating as a 'guarantor' of V.I.P. rooms at one of the company's casinos. (A guarantor, who puts up money to lend to players, was not routinely subject to the background checks applied to directors and shareholders, according to a former Sands executive.)

Sands's trouble with Macau got more complicated that fall, when a former executive, Steve Jacobs, filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit that made a range of accusations against Sheldon Adelson. Jacobs said that he and Adelson had discussed the God of Gamblers case, and the allegation that triads were involved with Sands's casinos; over Jacobs's objections, he said, Adelson sought to "aggressively grow the junket business" anyway. Jacobs's suit also accused Sands of hiring a Macau legislator in a way that could put it at risk of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. In its responses, Sands denied all the accusations and said that Jacobs was the one who had failed to distance the company from Cheung, the triad boss.

In March, 2011, Sands disclosed that it was being investigated by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission for potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Adelson vehemently denied any wrongdoing. "When the smoke clears, I am absolutely. not one hundred per cent but one thousand per cent, positive that there won't be any fire below it," he said. "They want to get all my e-mails. I don't have a computer. And I don't use e-mails. I'm not an e-mail type of person." (He declined to comment for this account.)

For Adelson and his peers, doing business in Macau is turning out to be opaque and intricate in ways outside their control. They expected to take the strategies that had brought them success in the United States and apply them to Macau. Instead, their corporate fortunes now hinge in part on the decisions of the Communist Party and corrupt officials and Chinese triads. But U.S. casino operators are not about to quit Macau. "The bottom line is this," Vickers, who is now the head of Steve Vickers & Associates, a risk-consultancy firm, said. "Is the conduct of a United States-listed company compatible with doing business with junket operators in Macau?  And the answer might simply be not to list in America."

Even if Macau can pass muster with Wall Street and U.S. regulators, the bigger question may be what it portends for China, whether its roguish success rides on the kinds of epic corruption that the Party recognizes as one of its most urgent threats.

China could bring Macau's boom to an end by fiat; citizens need a special permit to go to Macau, and China opens and closes the flow of visitors at will. When, in 2008, it reduced the number of visas, revenue dropped sharply during the financial crisis; Sands stock lost ninety-nine per cent of its value, wiping out more than twenty billion dollars of Adelson's family fortune. (The value later recovered.)

But cracking down on Macau poses political problems. Some officials in Beijing are keen to maintain the enclave's economic success, because it shows the breakaway island of Taiwan the potential benefits of a return to the motherland. Moreover, Macau is a place where China's new millionaires can indulge in the gains of their prosperity, which is one of the rewards guaranteed by the unwritten bargain between Chinese leaders and their people for a generation: Don't concern yourself with the state's inner workings, and the state will not overly concern itself with yours. On a return flight from Macau to Beijing, I sat beside a former military officer, who now owns real estate and a string of factories. He visits Macau once a month ('to let off steam'), and he spent much of the flight scrutinizing his latest acquisition: a twelve-thousand-dollar cell phone, encased in alligator skin and equipped with a button that connects him to a full-time concierge, to make dinner and handle travel arrangements.

Macau is poised for another dramatic expansion. A high-speed train line is under construction that will link it with cities as far north as Beijing, and the world's longest sea bridge, connecting Macau to Hong Kong, is set to open in three or four years, reducing the ferry crossing to a half-hour drive by car. Even as the federal investigations continue, few people in Macau have both the interest and the capacity to impose greater control over the system. Manuel Joaquim das Neves, Macau's top casino regulator, told me that foreign criticism will not alter the way of doing things in Macau. "Macau is not Las Vegas, Singapore, or, indeed, any other jurisdiction," he said, adding, "Macau has attracted more than twenty billion dollars in foreign investment in the casino industry alone. In short, the public interest has been well served." Jos Maria Pereira Coutinho, a liberal member of the Legislative Assembly, is less impressed with the industry. "The government is incompetent," he said. More than eight out of every ten dollars of government revenue comes from casinos, and Coutinho says that the annual payments to citizens are a 'drug,' to 'keep their mouths shut.' I asked whether lawmakers will push for more urgent changes. He laughed, and said, "In the Legislative Assembly, a nuclear bomb could pass through and everything would go slowly and calmly."

The files of the God of Gamblers case can be read as a string of accidents, good and bad: Siu's run at the baccarat table; Wong's luck to be assigned an assassin with a conscience; Adelson's misfortune that reporters noticed an obscure murder plot involving his casino. But the tale, viewed another way, depends as little on luck as a casino does. It is, rather, about the fierce collision of self-interests. If Las Vegas is a burlesque of America, the ethos of our time run amok, as Hal Rothman, the historian, put it, then Macau is a caricature of China's boom, its opportunities and rackets, its erratic sorting of winners and losers.

Four years after Siu hit his hot streak, I got word through a friend in Hong Kong that he might be back in his old neighborhood, not far from the dismantled squatters camps where he grew up. He was said to have worked out a deal for protection from another triad, the Wo Shing Wo. I took the train to see him. His neighborhood lies in a lush river delta framed by green hills on the horizon. The summer heat had broken and construction seemed to be under way everywhere, as old villages were being converted into enclaves of villas and cul-de-sacs with names like the Prestige and Sky Blue and Full Silver Garden.

I met Siu at a construction site near a scrap-metal yard, surrounded by marshy fields of water chestnuts and lilies, crosshatched by footpaths. He was building fourteen houses whose modern design, heavy on stainless steel and black granite, would have looked at home in Sacramento or Atlanta. The complex will be called the Pinnacle. Siu was wearing a droopy yellow golf shirt, jeans, and muddy sneakers. He seemed subdued, and his voice was raspy. He was barely distinguishable from his crew, tanned, bony, middle-aged men from across the Chinese countryside. When I arrived, it was quitting time, and one of them was naked, giving himself a bird bath from a bucket of soapy water. Siu and I sat on folding chairs beside a line of drying laundry and gazed out over the unfinished houses.

I asked where he had gone into hiding, and he smiled. "All over China," he said. "I drove everywhere by myself. Sometimes I stayed in five-star hotels, sometimes in tiny places. I liked Inner Mongolia the best. Eventually, I went up to the mountains of Jiangxi for eight months. When it began to snow, I nearly froze. I went down from the mountains and came home."

I asked if he had cheated at baccarat. "The reporters just listened to rumors from people who wanted their money back," he said. "Everybody says I was playing tricks at the table. It's not true. I wasn't. When I gambled, there must have been ten people with their eyes on me at any time. How am I supposed to play tricks"?

His denial left open a range of possibilities for manipulating the game, and theories abound. A lawyer for one of the defendants surmises that Siu may have been a minor player in a larger con, pitting one triad against another. But he said that, ultimately, "there is so much cheating going on. How can you know the truth"?

Siu seemed unconcerned about his safety. "I'm in my mid-fifties, and I'll live to be, what, seventy"? he said. "So I've got only another decade or so. What do I have to lose? I'm not afraid." He fell silent for a moment. "If they come for me, I can go for them, too," he added.

He'd stopped going to Macau. The decision was for his kids, he said. "I don't want them to gamble. Two of them have bachelor's degrees, one has a master's. They don't swear. They're good kids." He went on, "You have to be highly sensitive to be a good gambler. I don't recommend it to everybody. Everyone called me Inveterate Gambler Ping. But I never liked that, because I was never addicted. I gambled because I knew I could win."

Night was falling, and Siu offered me a lift back to the station in his black Lexus S.U.V., parked in the dirt beside us. "There used to be a helicopter taking me to the Venetian anytime I wanted to go," he said. "Now I'm getting my feet dirty. Real estate is even more lucrative. It's better than gambling or drugs or anything." He pointed out the new houses in progress. "It costs a few million to build one of these, and then I can sell it for ten million."

That is the way they generally play at The Palace Station as well as the Gold Coast Casino.  Those two that is the Asian's normal way they play 24/7.  Other places have people that do the same as you described, but those two come to mind more than anywhere else in Vegas.

Comes to mind a few guys from one of the casinos I have been going to the past several months.  I think they appeared with the beginning of the 2019-2020 college school year.  So put it back around Sept/October.  3 Korean kids in college, foreign exchange students in some professional course at a grad school, either for medical/doctor or legal/law.  Their parents/family have money no doubt.  One can tell just by their clothes, super nice designer clothes.  Their buy-in can always be a round up of cash from their peers, the way it was always done on the east coast with the Asian, particular the Chinese in the larger restaurants with 75 to 300 employees or so, pooling their cash together and designating one or two people to head to Atlantic City to play it out.  But these 3 Koreans are not doing that, because no one is ever watching them. 

Anyway, they only play the CUT or 1 or 2 repeats, that is it.  Consistently, always.  They been here for about 4 months now, playing about 4 or 5 times a week.  They win, they lose of course.  They are close to table max bettors more than 50% of the time they are wagering.  They do not wager every hand and they play a few shoes at most.  However, what does stick out is their remarks, their reactions and their physically gestures. 

You know they read about the game on the internet and/or YouTube.  Probably they also were told about it from other peers of theirs.  Combine the two and their inexperience and gullibility, and that leads to, lets experiment with mom and dads cash, at least that is my summation anyway. 

Say they are on the Bank with a two card 6 and the Players side has a 1 or 2 or a 3.  You can see their facial gestures and smiles if you look at them without that 3rd card coming out for the Players side.  9 times out of 10, they are raising their hands and pausing to high five each other, counting on a monkey or a card coming out to allow them to win of course.  Then the card comes out that brings the Players side up to a 7 or 8 or a 9 and if you just glance at their faces, you would observe a smile immediately turning to a frown or their lips silently saying, "F**k that S**t", etc., etc. Repeatedly.

Or say they were on the Players side and the player had a 2 card 7 and the Bankers side had two monkeys or a total of 0.  Then the 3rd card for the Bankers side comes out and it is an 8 or a 9.  Yes, this does not happen every time, but when it is happening and continues to happen, an experienced bac player knows to back off and not to martingale or employ anything of the likes.

The other night repeatedly, the Players side would have a 2 card 0 or a total of 1 or 2 and the Bankers side would have a two card total of 0.  If they were on the Players side they would pull something to reduce them to 0 or stay at the two card total of 1 maybe.  Then the Bankers side would pull a real low card, every time, but just enough to beat the Players by say one or two.  Then they switch to the Bankers side and then exact same thing began to happen.  Once again, their faces and their gestures are comical.  Maybe one day they will learn, it is not over until it is over.  They can not be over 21 or 22, so maybe they have a total of a year experience or so? 

Another night they did pretty well.  This is not a high dollar casino, just a $5,000.00 or so table max.  But they were up probably $40,000 to $50,000 or so.  Then they ran into a section of 15-20 hands where almost every hand is only a 2 card draw.  Each side having 6 or better.  Like I said, this went on for like a solid 15-20 hands, which in our B&M casinos, means a solid 30-45 minuets of time.  Whenever they had a 7, the other side had a Natural 8.  If they had a Natural 8 the other side had the same or even a Natural 9. 

Watching their faces and their super obvious frustration, produced their extremely noticeable unbelievability.  IMO, one knows they obtained their gaming instructions and references from some system or some YouTube $99.00 something another, etc. 


 

Quote from: AsymBacGuy on February 16, 2020, 10:56:34 PM
Imo and according to a couple of serious players the best situation to aim for is to win just one unit per shoe. Say per every playable shoe.
Hence there are no "good" or "bad" shoes, just shoes that may or not offer enough "room" to get the searched situations.
"Room" doesn't necessarily means the number of hands dealt so far. There are many of additional factors involved I don't want to discuss here.

Actually in some cardrooms shoes are still shuffled manually, say quickly and badly shuffled thus we could think to get multiple wins per each shoe, but I do not suggest to apply this strategy as bac remains a game full of traps (unless a huge betting spread is utilized after the profit was secured).

I know it's not that appealing to set up a mere +1 profit per shoe (especially knowing that not every shoe is eligible to be played), but think that we join bac tables just to win getting an astounding high probability of success and not to gamble.
Moreover we see that the "luck" factor will be placed in the remotest corner; after having assessed that a given shoe is playable, we do know that a certain event must happen at least once.
A thing confirmed by the fact that itlr profitable spots will produce points mathematically favorite at the start, meaning that no matter which side we've got to bet, itlr the side we wagered got the highest two-card value by values very different to a random environment.

Again you can measure the validity of your system/method/approach by simply controlling the percentages of the two-card highest point happening on the wagered side.
If itlr such values tend to be equal, alas the method can't work. It's just a mere kind of taxed unbeatable coin flip proposition.


as.

You write so many things that are spot on.  To those people that play mostly 'on-line' I would say they will tend to be less agreeable.  And, like yourself, I rather not get into discussions as to the technicality of the on-line gambler versus the brick and motor live casino gambler.  Two different sets of everything, IMO!

Things will work and the same things will not work, in the same shoe or the following shoe or 3 or 5 shoes later or switching tables, etc. 

As I have been attempting to express, define and bring out the type of play I am involved in at B&M casinos, it is not always easy to write about.  Yes, some things are left out and other things I write about are drug out.  I do not know anyway to make all happy any longer here.

A great example was the other night at the casino.  The shoe was a classic gold mine waiting to be picked.  IMO, years ago the casino would have got smacked and I mean big time, like hundreds of thousands of dollars would have went flying out of the dealers rack.  But today the highest majority of the people do not play the way they used to, like pre-2005'ish lets say.  Rarely these days is the casino hurt.  Almost every hand it is pick up $3,000 or $4,000 and pay out $800 or $1,500.  Or pick up $8,000 and pay out $3,000 or pick up $1,000 and pay out $150.  You get the drift. 

Playing for the CUT, meaning the opposite or playing for something to happen, will almost with the highest majority of the times, grind the player right down with his buy in.  If you are playing for a one unit win and that is it, that is very easily done with time, willpower and nothing else to do.  (I will repeat myself, I have a full time business, I have other things I do, I have family, I do not go to a casino-hang all day or all night and spend countless hours each and every day on the gaming floors).  Nothing wrong, I just do not do that.  With that said, I was at the casino the other night.  The shoe was a few ones and twos the way it started, then 2 rows of Players side wins the first one 8 Players repeating than one Banker then one Player then one Banker then another 9 Players repeating themselves once again. 

I watched in amazement how every single person on that table except for one, wagered and kept wagering for the Bankers side to win.  Tens of thousand of dollars were lost to the casino. I am telling you, the newer style of baccarat is in the casinos favor, tailored by the casino and most of its dealers, the set ups and the aura in general. Couple those things with the higher internet know it all, A-Alpha male persona, etc., and the casino is a happy camper as the saying goes. 

Then after the two rows of Players side wins, there was a section of 1s, 2s and 3s.  Then the Bankers side wins almost replicated those Players side repeating wins to a T.  Except they were stronger and with more naturals and a lot of 7s over 6s, and 4s and 5s for the Bankers first two cards and the Players 3rd card killing the Players side each time.  Of course while all that was going on, almost everyone once again refused to follow but rather went on a wagering war siding with the Players side instead of what was being produced and presented, the Bankers side.  It equaled right out.  The balance of the winning hands equaled out and it does more times than not.  Then it just bounced back and forth until the end of the shoe for the following 20 hands or so.   

No matter what the shoe was producing, almost everyone was only wagering for the CUT, if it was repeating they were all convinced the next hand would go to the opposite side.  If it did CUT, they were then convinced the shoe would produce a repeat and it never did, at least 8 or 9 times out of every 10 hands.

I am just amazed at the typical players mentality these days.  And it is not in one market here, it is the same from region to region.  Sure there are some places that occasionally play the way most of us did prior to 2005 or for sure 2000.  But I would have to say it is a complete opposite turn around, more and more in the casinos favor for numerous reasons, some of which I have outlined and wrote about in the past. 

https://www.pokernews.com/news/2020/02/nora-awkwafina-lum-kelly-sun-phil-ivey-movie-36630.htm

https://www.beatthefish.com/awkwafina-to-play-phil-iveys-edge-sorting-partner-in-the-baccarat-machine/

Oh, and by the way, in case you forgot some things about Slick Willie and his wife, Hoovering Hillary: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewater_controversy

Oh yeah, Major crimes that we all had to deal with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Hill


Hill agreed to take a polygraph test. While senators and other authorities noted that polygraph results cannot be relied upon and are inadmissible in courts, Hill's results did support her statements.[19] Thomas did not take a polygraph test. He made a vehement and complete denial, saying that he was being subjected to a "high-tech lynching for uppity blacks" by white liberals who were seeking to block a black conservative from taking a seat on the Supreme Court.[20][21] After extensive debate, the United States Senate confirmed Thomas to the Supreme Court by a vote of 52/48, the narrowest margin since the 19th century.[17][22]


But please, lets not forget about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton_sexual_misconduct_allegations

Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States (1993/2001), has been publicly accused of sexual misconduct by four women: Juanita Broaddrick accused Clinton of raping her in 1978; Leslie Millwee[1] accused Clinton of sexually assaulting her in 1980; Paula Jones accused Clinton of exposing himself to her in 1991 as well as sexually harassing her; and Kathleen Willey accused Clinton of groping her without her consent in 1993. The Jones allegations became public in 1994, during Clinton's first term as president, while Willey's and Broaddrick's accusations became public in 1999, toward the end of Clinton's second term. Millwee did not make her accusations until 2016.

Clinton has adamantly denied all four accusations. Through his representatives, Clinton has responded to the allegations by casting doubt on the credibility of the accusers, noting that (in the case of Broaddrick and Willey) they previously testified under oath that Clinton never made unwanted advances. Several witnesses close to Willey and Jones have stated that the two women described their encounter with Clinton as consensual.[2][3][4]

Of all the allegations made against him, Clinton has only admitted extramarital relationships with Monica Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers, both of which have generally been accepted as consensual. However, some commentators have nonetheless characterized Clinton's affair with Lewinsky, who was at the time a White House intern, as sexual misconduct because of the vast power imbalance between a president and an intern; Lewinsky was 22 at the time and described the relationship as completely consensual.[5] In 2018, Lewinsky herself began to question her long-standing view that her relationship with Clinton had been consensual, characterizing the relationship as a "gross abuse of power" wherein the power differential between the two was so great that "consent might well be rendered moot."[6]

Charges of sexual misconduct on Bill Clinton's part resurfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign of his wife, Hillary Clinton. When a lewd recording of Hillary's opponent Donald Trump discussing the ability to grope women when in power was released during the campaign, Bill Clinton's accusers, Broaddrick, Willey, and Jones, reemerged as critics of Hillary Clinton, accusing her of enabling her husband's alleged sexual assaults on them. They appeared as guests at the second 2016 presidential debate and referenced Bill Clinton in pre-debate statements.

During the 1990s, most Democrats suspended judgment on the three accusations or stated that they believed Clinton's denials. In the wake of the Harve, etc., etc.


And about the title, Slick Willie.  I only copied it, I did not invent it, that was invented many many years ago for Bill 'Slick Willie' Clinton and other Slick Willies, by peers, the Democrats.

RE:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slick_Willie

Let's go a bit deeper into the possible factors that come into play, consciously or subconsciously:

1)  Interpretations/Misinterpretations

2)  Visions/Beliefs

3)  Feelings/Mindset

4)  Bankroll & Related


#1)   Playing with the Shoe
        [It is always best to 'play the shoe'.  At times it is extremely difficult and almost impossible depending on the other factors occurring, but overall it is always best]

        Stats Trying to Change
        [Once the shoe gets underway an experienced player will be able to visually see that almost every shoe cannot match other ones and while many will set their own stats, others will be a replica of previous shoes.  Keep your mind open to what the shoe is doing-do not say it will stop at so-and-so or try to produce XYC, B's and/or P's.  Be 100% neutral, the shoe is doing all the work and producing all the decisions---you are not!]

        Equals Out/Lopsided
        [To me, this is one of the greatest and easiest traits to follow or not to follow.  The highest bulk of shoes will equal out at the end.  Within a few hands of each other.  But, my advise, is to only use that to gauge your wagers and bear in mind that the side you are about to wager on, could do anything.  Sounds unintelligent of course, but to me it is my tap on the should telling me, no guarantee.  Lopsided shoes do come, although not as often as the equaling out ones, but they certainly do.  To me, after 40 to 55% of the shoe is out, the equaling out is prevalent very so often with the, 20-28, 21-28, 22-28, 22-29, 23-29, 24-29, 25-29, 26-29, 26-30, 26-31, 27-31, 28-31, 29-31, 29-32, 30-32, 31-32, 32-32.  Then something along the lines as, 33-32, 33-33, 34-33, 34-34.  Happens so frequently, don't pay attention to those exact numbers, can be identified in the 20's as well]


        Events to Happen
        [Numerous events as we all have discussed on the board.  Some will happen and many will not.  When they do, recognize them and ride what they present.  Don't wait until it is a sure thing in everyone's minds, because only one thing will happen at that point, it will not be a sure thing any longer]

        Events That Happened
        [Events that already happened can repeat themselves, keep an open mind, although when those events are of a longer nature in number of hands, they are less likely to repeat themselves within the shoe]

        Statistical Reliance
        [Kind of related to Stats To Change above, but I am referring more to those players that rely strictly on the numbers as they are presenting themselves in Stats.  Be careful and although I am a fan of wagering within the reliance to produce itself and either 'make-up' or decelerate a certain side, to me this is a good gauge to add to my bag of thoughts]

#2)  Playing for the Cut or the Repeats
       [While it is a strategy of many, be careful as to when you employ this.  I have done well at times with this and it is probably the number thought of 'wager' in this game.  I am referring to wagering for opposite last decision or the repeating win of the B or P once again]

       Chop/Alternating  and  Repeats/Streaks
       [Lots of players lose on the 'chop-chop' wager, meaning-B-P-B-P-B-P-B, etc.  So easy and comes frequently.  Capitalize on it and then stop. Streaks, I am a firm believer of sticking on the streaks or the strong runs until they fall off.  Lost the last wager, it's all good!  I like the strong/streaks, etc., especially after there has been a period of weak sections for quite sometime and then it goes one or two more on the repeat]

       Trends and Patterns
       [Trends and Patterns happen all the time.  Either weak or strong.  There are believers in this and non-believers.  It is easy to say it is all random and no one can tell anything at anytime.  Correct to a certain point, the exact same as you never know where that cop is going to be sitting on the highway with his radar.  Might be there and might not be there.  But we all know, or should know, there is going to be trends and patterns]

       Superstitions
       [Try to avoid them and don't get caught up in them.  Many will announce their own and while some people live by them, they cannot influence the shoe that actually has no part of them]

       Other Players Actions/Wagers
       [There are pros and cons to wagering with or against other players.  I have written about them on this board.  One thing that I am personally a huge fan of is good camaraderie]

       Dealers
      [I have written about Dealers in another thread on this board, there are many different types and almost every regular player will attest to that!  Some will be attributed with helping players and others will be chastised for almost never letting players win.  Some are the proverbial 'cooler' and some are down right 'mean'.  Most know what they are doing and there is usually one or two at most properties that always make mistakes.  The list goes on.  IMO, if you don't get along with the way the dealer projects him/herself, don't play, wait for the next dealer, SERIOUSLY!]

       Bank of '3' Shoes (re: similarity)
       [I am sure this is challenged by many, but I have found in groups of 3 shoes at a casino they are usually, more than 50% of the times, similar in nature.  I did not say exact, I said similar.  For myself, I have profited from this and I use it as a guide, not gospel and not science.  That is why so many thing are misinterpreted on here!  And, BTW--I use most things as a 'guide' not as science-a rule-gospel and mechanical systems, there is a huge difference!]

      Downfall/Upside of Available Chip Stack (smaller 100% available/larger w/stop)
       [To me, I see downfalls and upsides to the various chip stack players use.  Some players will downright grind and win small amounts in order to be able to build up their stacks and then cash out chips all along like they never had them there.  Some will buy back in when they lose their smaller stacks and many will not.  But, like I said, there are obvious advantages to many in their stack sizes.  Some players, will have that boost and play better with a larger stack, not many IMO thou.  I play better with a moderate size stack and I like putting higher domination chips away and cashing them out as if the chip never existed and the cash is not available]

#3)  Clear Minded/Clouded-Obscured
        [I seriously believe this is important and utmost from the beginning.  I don't feel enough players really realize this.  Have a clear mind and you will have the ability to fully concentrate and realize what is happening, which at the baccarat table is not always that easy]

        Gut Feelings
        [If you are an experienced player and you 'have seen it all', you have a great value IMO.  I absolutely believe and value a good 'gut-feeling'.  Not those feelings based upon thinking it all though and reasoning, just that good old 'gut-feeling'.  They are there in many and they are very real]

        Open Minded/Closed Minded
        [Kind of similar to 'Clear Minded/Obscured above but just being 100% Open Minded.  In this game more than any other, that is vitally important.  It will help you for so many reasons and allow you to visually see and feel a quick moving game that changes up and has tons and tons of circumstances that either happen or don't happen in each shoe.  That is why it takes a player to really have an Open Mind to play better.  Having a Closed Mind will just have a negative effect, plain and simple]

        Preconceived Protocols Employed
        [Very dangerous in every way!  Your expected systems cannot and will not prevail in this game.  Not really much sense to discussing it, but you will lose much greater than you win.  A few hands here and there might fuel a player's thirst and quest when he gets lucky using this but he will suffer]
           
#4)  Drawdown
       [Don't get confused with 'Stop Loss'.  This should be the maximum decrease you will allow in your wagering attack.  You can still wager, as I said a Drawdown is not a Stop Loss.  However, a player has to be careful as to the amount of his buy-in he is willing to risk and aggressively go after the point where he will hopefully start winning.  For example, I might have a 10 unit Stop Loss for my initial 40 unit buy in.  I might also employ a 15 unit drawdown for my progressions or plain initial win.  Units can be different value for the Stop Loss and the Drawdown]   [Since to me, this is also a very important area, I copied the following from an article about Drawdown:  However, we should estimate and predict correctly the drawdown in our money management decisions.  The betting amount for these losing bets must always be available.  Obviously, our total capital must be much more than the maximum drawdown, so that we don't go bankrupt.  In addition, after taking the drawdown into account, there should be enough money to continue betting at the same pace according to our betting system, without any decrease in the bet size.  Moreover, enough capital must be available for the next drawdown curve.]

       Stop Loss
       [Some players have them and some do not.  I take a 'Stop Loss' at meaning--what will I stop my play at during a shoe or section.  Others will say a 'Stop Loss' means--how many hands or how much will they accept losing before they walk away.  Locally where I reside, I play considerable smaller at the local casinos than what I do in Vegas, Southern California or Atlantic City.  So, what I bring is my buy-in, not my gaming bankroll.  I am okay with losing my buy-in if I have a bad night, it is not my bankroll and does not mean I am broke, etc.  Set what you are comfortable with for each]

       Win Management/Reserve
      [It is vitally important that you manage your win money and place something into reserves, not only for your bankroll but for other purposes out side of your bankroll.  It is far too personal for me to tell you what and how, but once you figure it out, your conscious should be happier]

       Money Management
       [I have written about this and mine after I win, is a 1/3rd, 1/3rd, 1/3rd money split to manage my winning and remainder of my buy-in.  I have detailed this in other posts and after playing for many years, this is my single greatest factor that has helped me hold win money]

       Progressions
       [There is a heck of a lot of threads mentioning progressions on this board and every other board.  It is a subjective topic.  I have found that 1-3-2-6 and/or 1-3-2-4 has assisted me tremendously with some flat-betting fitted in-between.  IMO it is extremely difficult to hold win money and build up without some type of progressions.  It does not have to be a set progression, I only employ a set progression now because it helps me stick to it and it is kind of programmed inside of me.  Another one of my greatest factors that has helped me be more successful than losing]

On a related note, I know I touch on many subjects and many intricacies of real live brick-and-mortar casino baccarat play.

I do not believe in trying to define card order or the meaning of Randomness and how to literally beat it. I don't believe anyone ever will and I don't believe it's possible to do any type of mechanical or scheduled wagering with successful results with consistent play.

In summation to this quick note, I believe in identifying and recognizing and wagering when something is there that is powerful and presenting itself while capitalizing on it with positive progressions with my money management methods involving win money.

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