Thread: Heya: Ways to Play Advantage Baccarat?

So, after discovering advantages at craps and blackjack...there are ways to play advantage baccarat? Cool! Newbie here...played baccarat a couple times, flipping a chip for my bet. Ended up $100 once. Down $50 the other time! So, looking forward to seeing if there really is advantage play for baccarat too!

Absolutely there is an Advantage! I used to be a serious Blackjack Player waiting sometimes hours for a shoe to be configured in my favor ... forget that noise! Baccarat can produce profits far beyond that of Blackjack, Craps, or Roulette on a consistent basis, believe me, I have given up on Blackjack almost six years ago and play Baccarat ONLY.

My suggestion, read "Baccarat for the Clueless" by John May, read it cover to cover at least twice; then after completing that task go and watch a LIVE Baccarat game (without playing) and compile any questions you may have and come back to this Forum and the membership I am sure will be happy to answer all of them.

To answer your question about whether or not there is a "System" or "Strategy" out there that can assist you in winning consistently, the answer is "YES!" There are issues of patience, discipline, and money management to be contended with, but I can say that there are methods out there to put you on the winning side of the game 80% Plus of the time!

Just be aware of the misprint in John May's book. When the second or fourth card is a 5 the EV for the player should be -0.0022, not +0.0022. And whatever you do - stay away from his blackjack book! It is even worse. His BJ advice has caused him to be ridiculed by the professional playing community.


I’m glad to hear that someone is making good use of the information. I’ve found that the advantage opportunities in my area are very rare and that the techniques can be much more profitable when applied to other games. Hey Grab The Gold, what are some of your favorite techniques? The ones I use don't come up very often.

Hey there SAVANT, I appreciate the feedback on my previous POST; my advice for the MEMBER to read John May's book was merely to get an understanding of the game with a degree of clarity, once that was accomplished then visiting a Casino to get a serious feel on the Baccarat environment itself, how people REACT, PLAY, and how the cards come out, the entire gambit.

To answer your other question on "What methods do I use?" If you look at the FORUM I created a thread looking for folks to test one of the Methods I designed over the last six years! I have had two respondents and one has sent me results for two shoes that he evidently played somewhere. I ran those shoes he provided me with through my program and as I already knew we would, we had great results. We NEVER play TIE hands, NEVER make a play/bet past (65) hands of Baccarat (preferably 60 hands), and never really ever make a bet that is 6x the base bet and even that is quite rare.

THE RESULTS were as follows for the two shoes as PROVIDED BY "TURFMAN" a FORUM Member for testing my METHOD No. 1:

Shoe No. 1

Base Unit Size: $25.00
No. of Hands looked at: 64
No. of hands actually played/bet: 24
Highest Unit Bet: 4x Base Unit or $100.00, made (1) time while playing
Total Dollars Wagered: $775.00
Total Profit Dollars: $461.25
Total Return on Wagers: 59.52%

Shoe No. 2

Base Unit Size: $25.00
No. of Hands looked at: 64
No. of hands actually played/bet: 28
Highest Unit Bet: 6x Base Unit or $150.00, made (1) time while playing
Total Dollars Wagered: $1275.00
Total Profit Dollars: $362.50
Total Return on Wagers: 28.43%

It's a pretty solid method for those who do not wish to play every hand of the shoe!

Originally Posted by Grab The Gold

my advice for the MEMBER to read John May's book was merely to get an understanding of the game with a degree of clarity, once that was accomplished then visiting a Casino to get a serious feel on the Baccarat environment itself, how people REACT, PLAY, and how the cards come out, the entire gambit.

I completely agree with you about that. It is usually much more important to watch how the game is dealt and understand how the game works if you want to learn how to beat it. There are things that you can learn in a casino that you will never learn from reading the majority of the books out there.

Originally Posted by Grab The Gold

If you look at the FORUM I created a thread looking for folks to test one of the Methods I designed over the last six years! I have had two respondents and one has sent me results for two shoes that he evidently played somewhere.

Have you tested your system against the 1,000 shoes in this link? (scroll down to the bottom of the page)

Free Baccarat Shoes (6D and 8D)

That would give you a good start.

Hey there Savant ... yes, I have seen those shoes as provided by the Wizard of Odds, however, those shoes are computer generated and I am interested in seeing actual shoes played in Casinos for further testing. I tested a few shoes from the Wizard of Odds Database and my method was successful against all of them, but again, these are computer generated!

What's wrong with computer generated shoes? There are no decisions to make during the game so why not just let a robotic dealer play the hands instead of a real dealer? It seems like a robotic dealer is much faster and will never make any mistakes.

Here's my thought on this ... shoes which are shuffled in REAL-LIFE are different because of the style of shuffling machine, are the decks combed after the shuffle (lacing), some Casinos set the LAST DEAL plastic card (14) hands back, some (13) hands back and so on. Randomly generated shoes by computers can only be truly random when the initial SEED that begins them is truly random, and there are only a few systems out there that utilize purely randomly generated seeds for the random initialization process. At any rate, I really wanted to have folks contribute (1 - 2) cards to me so I can test further, that's all.

But wouldn’t it be better to use a computer shuffle since the casino shuffle machines use one? As long as they both produce even distributions of each card then they are equally random. It doesn’t matter how you shuffle the cards as long as the results are evenly distributed. Would I get different results if one dealer used the shuffle machine all day long and another dealer threw them in the air and picked them up off the floor randomly? As long as the cards are sufficiently mixed it doesn’t matter what method you use to mix them. Mixed is mixed.

And the seed number has nothing to do with the randomness of the RNG, it only determines what random number the RNG starts with. It’s like throwing a stick in a pool – it doesn’t matter what part of the pool you throw it in, the stick will float the same way. You can start at the deep end of the pool, in the middle or at the shallow end and the results will be the same. The randomness of a RNG is determined by the algorithm and the period length.

Actually the SEED does have something to with RNG as it has been taught to me. The SEED will initiate a sequence of randomly generated patterns with not one pattern being the same because the length of each pattern changes and the pattern within the pattern changes based on a continuously changing pattern factor, does that make sense to you?

Anyway, I think we are going off the edge on this. Yes, what you say about "Mixed" being "Mixed" seems like it should make sense, but believe me when I say this, there are only several types of shuffling machines out there that are used for Baccarat, and these machines do NOT do a complete RANDOM shuffle, their shuffle is based on a set of fixed algorithms that are embedded into the "Firmware" that generates the shuffle, thus "MIXED" really isn't "MIXED".

Here's a TRUE story. My friend and I played at an Indian Casino one day, we played the BLUE deck, then the Red deck, then came the BLUE deck back into play. As we always keep our cards from previous sessions he and I noticed something really amazing, the outcomes were coming almost precisely as they did in the previous distribution of the Blue deck only in reverse; what was PLAYER was now BANKER and so on. As the shoe ended we counted (14) sets of patterns that were exactly opposite of the initial distribution of the Blue deck, and the ODDS of that occuring are simply "Galactic" in nature. That is why I believe that REAL shoes are totally different from computer generated shoes ... nuff said?

That’s not quite correct. The RNG generates a series of random numbers. The seed determines what the first number is. That’s all the seed does. After that it usually doesn’t do anything. As long as all of the successive numbers are random it doesn’t matter if the first number is 1, 12 1890 or whatever. As long as the sequence is random it doesn’t matter where you start it. Imagine being on a road that is infinitely long. It doesn’t matter where you start from, the end is equally far away.

As far as the “non-random” shuffler that you saw, it’s actually not that unusual. If the sequences had re-occurred on exactly the same hands then it would be unusual, but for a particular sequence to reoccur at any point in the next shoe is very common. It is like the difference between the first card being an ace twice in a row and seeing an ace in in any location in two successive shoes. Since you are not considering the specific location of those cards the results are much more likely to occur. If you also consider the fact that it could have happened in any two successive shoes during the entire night, it becomes even more common.

And if what you saw was not just a coincidence, why didn’t you continue to play the following shoes with complete knowledge of the sequences? You would be rich by now. If the RNGs are strong enough that the casinos use them without being vulnerable to non-randomness, they are good enough for anyone else.

When you play long enough you start to see crazy things like that happen all the time. Sometimes they will mess with you. You will swear that you see patterns that don't exist or sequences that seem unusual but are completely expected. That is one of the reasons you cannot trust the results of short term play. All of the pro players use computer simulations to test their systems. You can't get reliable results without testing lots of hands - too many to test manually. The only reason people think that computer RNGs aren't reliable is because bogus system sellers try to discourage people from finding out that their systems are bogus. The only people who don't like simulation programs are scammers like John Patrick, Jerry Patterson and E. Davis becuase the programs show the flaws in their systems.

You know, I think you and I are sort of on the same page, let's just agree to shelve this topic for awhile. The real issue here is that I would like to see some data, (2 - 3) shoes from a LIVE Casino derived by others for some final testing, I can get RNG data any day of the week. Just for the record, I have played and tested this method and it works for me, however, that really isn't "Good enough" for me yet; I just need some additional data to ensure that I am NOT experiencing "delusions" from Baccarat Heaven! Some external data would be appreciated and I will send the RESULTS back to the participants. It more than a "Fair Exchange" because if this requested data pans-out as I expect it will, all of the membership of this Forum will know that TRULY this game can be beaten consistently without requiring a big bankroll and isn't that what we are all looking for at the bare minimum?

As far as a consideration of the TIE hand in computations, please see the following URL.

♠Baccarat Appendix 4 - Streaks in Baccarat - by The Wizard of Odds