Baccarat

Publisher Lyle Stuart (a VERY serious bettor, with a "normal" bet of $2000) wrote a similar description of his experiences with baccarat, and in one of his books, with blackjack. He considered his mood and mental state of more significance than the probabilities involved.

Specifically, he studied what and how he thought/felt/behaved during sessions in which he won, and in sessions in which he lost. By identifying the difference, he was able to "predict" when his playing sessions would be very positive, average, or negative. By avoiding the "negative sessions" (his mood, not count), and leaning into the "positive sessions" he ran a quarter mil in the black over a couple of trips to Vegas. And wrote a fascinating book about it.

All bull, right? Not so fast in the judgement call. Consider, if you are counting, and you find a particularly advantageous situation, is there a change in your mood? Conversely, when the count goes sour, is there a corresponding change in your mood? The question becomes, which comes first?

In short, is it possible that Stuart "knew," from watching the shuffle, that he was more likely to win the next few hands, increased his bets, and won? Perhaps not consciously, but sufficiently "conscious" to feel a touch of elation, and one of those "I am unbeatable" moments that come all to rarely?

I have seen some uncanny events in time dilation experiments in psych research, in which the subject believes that "time" is slowed down. If you are interested, you might look for the time dilation references in Charles Tart's "Altered States of Consciousness" that involved Aldous Huxley and Milton Erickson. If such things can be done in time dilation experiments, it is obviously a capability of normal human function that can be applied to other situations.

Was Stuart "psychic"? Not at all. He just discovered that in particular states--relaxed, confident, and focused--he was "luckier." While some counters may feel threatened at the notion, I think it is more threatening to ignore a possible advantage that can be fairly easily gained with a little introspection.

Of course, all this can be blown off in a flash by recalling those situations in which you felt poorly, broke, busted, never-gonna-win-another-hand, and had an incredible run of cards that was better than anything you have experienced in a "positive" state, and finished the session 50 units up.

I think for most bettors, there is a very strong correlation between self-confidence, mood, and winning. Whether it is an uptick in mood because you realize the count strongly favors you, which in turn increases your confidence that you will win, or some other scenario, the bottom line is that emotional states and winning are often correlated. Perhaps not cause-and-effect, but definitely correlated.

Good Luck

As thoroughly explained in Mathematics of Gambling by Thorp, Baccarat is not a beatable game through any regular advantage play methods. The probablility of an advantageous round for the player is almost nil, and the biggest edge comes only at the end of a shoe and if it only it meets certain criteria. It is therefore not beatable, but of course it is still one of the best games in the casino for the average player, especially if you can find 4% Banker commision games.

Even John May and other experts confess that Baccarat is unbeatable.... However, Tournament Baccarat is a totally different story. If you study a book like Casino Tournament Strategy, you will be playing with a significant edge using betting and position play while the ploppies around you will be use all their energy trying to predict if Banker or Player will win due to streaks :cow:

Its not hard to access if a game can be beat. You just look at all possible shufffles of the deck and count how many are advantagous to the player, then you come up with a count system so you can tel when you are in an advatagous shuffle.

Bacarratt has advantagous shuffles so rarely (1 in millions) that it can't be beaten. I found the same thing when trying to beat perfect pairs blackjack.

As a number of people earning very large incomes have observed, the results of a billion hands are particularly useful if you play a billion hands. The issue of believing that small samples (500-1000) will uniformly replicate the general population from which the sample is drawn has been explained in detail by Tversky and Kahneman as the "Law of Small Numbers" fallacy. Not theory, fallacy.

Good Luck

I doubt there's a system to beat bacarat.. but the odds are better if you go all player since there is no commission.

The results of a billion hands IS important to someone who only plans to play a small number of hands. You want to know what will happen in the longrun no matter how many hands you will play.

Like, let's say you plan on playing 1000 hands. So you run a 1000 hand simulation and find that that it resulted in -200 units. You're not going to conclude you shouldn't play because of that. You don't just simulate the number of hands you're going to play. It is important to know the longrun result, regardless if you will ever play that many hands or not.