I guess laying the groundwork for the new PB (Pattern Betting) channel on YouTube has prompted me to take a closer look at useful tools for betting strategy analysis, and for a while I thought the Wiz's blackjack sim was un-toppable (blackjack is my go-to game, after all).
Wrong!
Regular readers will know that I'm not much of a fan of baccarat--I have played it quite a bit in Nevada casinos and made steady but never spectacular money at it (especially after one casino banned me from its 21 tables) but I have always felt uninvolved in the process
It's true that the most popular casino games are essentially a coin-toss, especially blackjack, baccarat and craps, which all have a notional house edge below 1.5%, and the frills are there to make them more alluring.
I mean, who'd want to watch a dealer spinning a silver dollar hour after hour, calling out heads or tails!
The point I have been making for donkey's years, here and elsewhere, is that in the end, all that matters is how you BET.
How you PLAY is only an issue with blackjack--and crapsters, please don't tell me you know a way to toss the dice to make them roll the way you want them to.
So, to once (to me) dull and boring old baccarat, offered either at tables where you never get to touch the cards, or at fancy layouts where the dealers all look like posh waiters, the action takes forever, and some players behave as if the main objective is to destroy the shiny bits of coloured paper pushed their way.
Then I found https://baccaratwinpro.com/en/.
This is not a sales pitch, but I have noticed a sudden uptick in blog hits from the far east, especially Singapore and Thailand, and I'm guessing that the clicks are not coming from aficionados of 21 and dice
Firstly, the welcome page...too much like a casino come-on, in my opinion, but it is well worth hanging in there for what lies beneath.
The "table" layout is impressive, but there is a little work to be done after selecting the New Shoe option.
You will be asked if you want to create a 'session' so that all the shoes you play in a chosen timeframe will be summarised together, and I suggest that is a good idea.
Click on 'manage sessions' below the empty session name box, and away you go:
Job done, go to top right of the table display screen and select 'Fast' unless you fancy playing at the glacial speed of what I only just learned are called 'squeeze' tables, in reference to the brutal treatment of cards by superstitious players who believe that bending and squashing them can make them winners.
Those big blank areas at the bottom will start to fill up as you play, and that's where the miracles are revealed.
I don't mean to sound dramatic or gushy, but to me the work that has gone into this resource is nothing short of gob-smacking.
The big mystery is who it's for and where the market might be, but having tripped over the thing, I am making the most of it.
You will have to click on the chip value you want, then click again in Player, Banker or Tie, and then win or lose, your bet will vanish--added to or deducted from the totals to the right--and you will have to start over next round.
Long-time readers will know that I never, ever back anything other than Player, but more about that later.
The fun begins after the first few bets:
There's useful information all over the place, but your main job is to bet in such a way that you win more when you win than you lose when you lose, impossible unless you bet progressively following a strategy that will protect you against prolonged downturns.
Already, you can see from the screenshot above that we won two bets averaging £250 (I'm back in the UK now, remember!) and lost three bets averaging £125--a good start.
Fifteen bets in and we're ahead of Banker, which is nice but not normal. As with a real game, sometimes you will have to fight for your life, and then you will be reminded that it makes no sense to tackle this game without a big fat bankroll and even bigger umm, courage, to go with it.
Random betting and 'bankroll protection' will not help you win, and poker king Phil Ivey put a stop to any funny business exploiting factory-marked cards!
As a sidebar to that, the casino security expert who educated me about 'squeeze' baccarat games insists that Mr. Ivey was not cheating, whatever a bunch of lawyers and judges may have decided. He simply spotted an opportunity that the casinos themselves created through their own carelessness, and went after it like the ruthless poker player he is.
Since Mr. Ivey remains a free man, still at the top of the pro poker league, that seems like a fair conclusion, and I'd say Crockfords in the UK and Bogata in the USA still owe him and his baccarat partner a tidy sum.
But back to the topic of the day...
Click on Results and By Played Shoes at top left and a different level of fun begins:
You will be met with a list of past shoes, and a click on the '+' to the right will give you more information than you ever knew you needed.
Overkill? To some people, maybe, but to a certifiable numbers nut like me, this is frickin' paradise.
I think that's enough for now, other than three little words--NEVER PAY COMMISSION!!!--and a brief explanation.
Imagine that you just won £9,150 after 35 wins averaging £538 and 33 losses at £293 each, and owe '5%' commission on combined wins of £18,825. That's a rake of £941 from your winnings, not 5% but 10.3%...and the screenshot above is a pretty friendly example, compared with shoes in which you lost thousands but still owe commission on winnings that in the end were not enough to offset your losses.
'Experts' tell us that Banker is the best bet because it wins more often and sees longer streaks and 5% is a reasonable price to pay.
I have just one word in response to that, but probably should not utter it here, so I'll go for a polite substitute: POPPYCOCK!
One last little thing. I finished the shoe I started with you, and after the last cards were dealt, it looked like this:
The final win was £2,650 in spite of fewer Player wins (by one) and a rollover to the next shoe of £900 Down and £800 Out. Our 31 wins averaged £224 and our 32 losses averaged £134 per the summary to the right above, so Target/Turnaround and PB got the job done yet again.
Remember, it's all about winning more when you win than you lose when you lose--there is no other way to build your bankroll.
Keep winning, everyone (except the house, of course).
UPDATE: OK, so I have painted myself into a corner here! I decided to deal with the rollover from the trial shoe above, and had to pull the trigger on the next shoe, per the PB/TT rules (it's starting to sound like a government department, or perhaps a disease suffered by farm animals).
So, here we go:
Quickly sorted!
And next came:
That would have been fine, except that the shoe ended D £800, O £300 and I really don't want to be posting new battles forever.
Trolls and other 'experts' will no doubt conclude that I have been taking lessons from Phil Ivery and have found a way to manipulate the BWP sim. Nonsense, of course, but nonsense is what they do.
Here's the top of my sessions summary...
...cutting a very long story short! A month ago, I would have scoffed at any suggestion that I would be playing baccarat again hour after hour, especially without real money to be made.
But this makes sense for me and, hopefully, for at least some of my regulars.
It illustrates perfectly the efficacy of winning more when you win than you lose when you lose, the alternative being losing more dosh than you win over and over again. Horrors!
Crunch the numbers above from the top line down, and you get +£455/-£344, +£145/-£114, +£662/-£520 and +£386/-£330.
Point made, I hope you will agree.
Obviously, this is not a strategy that will protect a shoe-string budget, but then I'm not in the miracle business--I'd be playing poker alongside Phil Ivery and reading minds if I was!
I'm just saying (as I have been since my first internet post in 1996) that discipline, consistency, sobriety and confidence can beat the house time and again, keeping in mind that 999 out of a thousand 'recreational gamblers' hit the tables for fun, can't be bothered to learn a better way to bet, and actually believe that those cocktails that keep on coming are free.
To me, winning is much more fun than losing.
But everyone in the casino business will tell you it is an impossible dream, and will often retaliate swiftly and cruelly if you dare to step out of line and prove them wrong.
Good luck everybody!
Uh-oh. I had to go for a last shot at ending a shoe without a rollover. Came close (D2,O3 x £100) and I'm determined to call it a day:
Not too shabby?
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. One more piece of friendly advice: If you are inclined to use target betting with real money against online "casinos" (clip joints, mostly), spend a few minutes and save a lot of money by reading this.
