SleightOfHand,
Ultimately each and every game is beatable, at least for a while, until the other side catches up. Unfortunately, or fortunately (however one looks at it,) baccarat presents few fingerholds for the analysts but a host of pitfalls for the superstitious by way of the "patterns" of outcomes of the player or banker "choices". Such challenges are met by ever-more resourceful means, making the due rewards that much more greater, mentally and pyschologically, and perhaps finacially.
Before game theory, itself, most aspects of most of the more-technical games were largely debatable. Afterwards, we realized a lot of the older "seems to work" strategies were in fact good. But at the time, superstition, fallacy, lack of proof (in an uncertain physical universe), and other forces were enough resistance. (Even "everyone else playing nonsense strategies" often made the truly-optimal strategies ineffective for the few who got it right. Superstition eventually gives way to science, and then to truer forms of religion for all.)
Sometimes we are the pioneers working toward the new science(s). And alongside the scammers/and their deluded prey, until we can provide real competition/options. When
bj card-counting began, even the casinos (and other players) doubted it. But science won out. And will again over the renewed echos there is no longer a player advantage there. (Except for the non-counter casino-taboo majority who still resist the counters sitting at tables today.) Richard Marcus has just released a new card-counting system for baccarat. Now there are more PROOFS against such ever being possible than there have been such presented in baccarat; and his claims grew less and less dramatic up to its release, (and in the manner in which most scammers search for the right affordable "hook" after first testing the waters,) but that by no means precludes true paradigm-shifts to eg, asking what happens when the count is neutral, if no other count is of use. Beyond that, asking can theory quantitatively get beneath the physical actually-occurring patterns there. Or as you alluded to, calculating
RoR wrt any of the possible options and strategies in baccarat to develop utility (-theory) applications to win smaller amounts over longer periods of play more safely than in other games.
Now i'm being long-winded here, but whether we want to admit it or not, the future is coming, to unravel even the "paradoxes" of the (rules of the) game of baccarat, itself. Physicists certainly know we can't change the past but leave open being able to decide it right up till and including the very moment it happens, approaching the processes which govern HOW the quantum-fields collapse (choosing one outcome over another in a given time and place now.) Devices, like re-inventions of our computers, and programs to operate those, are already on their drawing boards. But maybe we can do more now with what we already have at hand. But thank you for not painting all of us with the "voodoo" colors.
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