Recent content by GBV

That won't work. You need the deck structure to be almost completely composed of odd or even cards to get an edge. A smaller excess of odd or even cards makes almost no difference. As a practical matter you would never see an edge on this bet with that pen.

There are NO baccarat games that are deliberately dealt down to the last six cards. If this were true, then you would be able to frequently obtain advantages of up to 15%, just by looking in the back of the shoe & knowing the last card in the shoe. Imagine that. That "up to 15%" edge on the...

Even without any formal analysis 60% is clearly way too little. Those bets are clearly pretty symmetrical when it comes to effects of removal. You can construct hypothetical examples which would create an advantage, but these would only occur at deep penetration.

Calculating the frequency of a given end-deck subset can be done by calculating the chance of those cards appearing from a full deck, eg for all-tens there are 128 ten-valued cards in an eight-deck pack, so 128/416*127*415... The problem is that while favorable subsets are rare are very large...

No flaw, but you can find much better than 25-card penetration. Ironically Michael Hall was the first guy I ever discussed the possibility of beating baccarat with, he was a very talented and successful advantage gambler. I'm breaking a confidence here but this was fifteen years ago and so...

Thorp has never published anything concerned with nonlinear counting, that quote concerns a linear system.

There are a few counting systems in the book, but they are derived from or come from other people. They are linear systems designed to limit losses rather than actually win money. I made a few observations about certain card subsets which have large advantages eg all-evens subsets have a 60%...

This book portends to advance a counting scheme to the game... ... but I beleive the system was denounced by Thorp (I think) Thorp doesn't "denounce" stuff, that really isn't his style. We had the benefit of a protracted correspondence on baccarat and his only comments on "Baccarat for the...

Rebates do not change the rules of the game, all they can do is generate a potentially positive EV situation with the rebate. Rebates alter the game by effectively changing the payout. If you are getting a 10% rebate on the tie then, for one hand (or in this case, one very large bet), your...

Rebates have everything to do with counting. Any time the rules change, for whatever reasons, the effects of removing a given card change on expectation and variance also, over and above effects pertaining to the house edge. The two things are not independent. That said, it is possible to make...

Thorp's (not Thorpe) primary research into baccarat was conducted in the sixties (A favorable side bet in Nevada baccarat EO Thorp, WE Walden - Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1966), and involved analysis of no more than six card subsets using valve-era computer technology. It...