Strange to wake up in the morning and find your brain has been working on a problem while you slept!

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Don't worry, this is not going to be a post about how dead people can help you win at baccarat (see the first blog entry, archived at left!).

But it is something of an experiment as I adjust to the process of allowing target betting to evolve day by day under public scrutiny.

As I have said many times, baccarat has always seemed to me about as exciting as watching grass grow next to blackjack, but now and then I feel obligated to revisit the game because of its huge international status.

As I drifted off to sleep last night, I was noodling the notion that since Banker always wins more hands than Player over the long run, target betting should be able to exploit that advantage by compensating for "The Gouge."

The gouge, of course, is the so-called 5% commission that, in my test, trimmed a $3.3 million funny-money win all the way down to barely $500,000.

My baccarat partner's long-ago suggestion that chips gobbled up by the gouge could be recovered with a post-EOS bet before NB reverts to the minimum did not at the time strike me as workable, and I still have my doubts.

But what if the potential EOS bet itself incorporated commission paid out during the current series, so that the NB equation would be something like NB=1.05*(LTD+Tgt+Comm)?

The effect might be disastrous, pushing bet values and overall action into the stratosphere and risk along with them.

But because Banker always has a solid edge over Player, it might just work.

The experimental aspect here is that I have never before speculated on the effectiveness of a modification ahead of actually applying it.

Given that I have 315,000 verifiable baccarat outcomes to work with, courtesy of Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Jones, I think it's worth the effort to give it a try.

Once again, the spreadsheet platform rules! Running the test will be straightforward enough, and of course I will post the results here as soon as I am done.

The hard part will be figuring out the conditional formula to make the test accurate and effective!

Watch this space...

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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