Discount Gambling

Click on the screenshot below to run my shoe-by-shoe simulator for counting the EZ-Baccarat Dragon-7 side bet:

I’ve been playing the EZ-Baccarat lately, because it’s really easy to count for the 40-to-1 Dragon-7 side bet, and it gets pretty exciting when you’re betting for big payouts at the end of a shoe (each $10 pays out $400). I’m still a baccarat newbie, but I’m starting to appreciate the drama of the game. Most people record notation of the hands, and they all study the hand history displayed on the monitor. They’re looking for long runs of Banker or Player wins. On a Banker run, they increase their bets, and everyone makes a lot of money, and all are happy. When the Player is on a winning run, they wait until they think it’s impossible for the Player to win yet another hand. Then they bet big on the Banker. If the Player wins again, everyone is outraged, and they bet even more to win back their money. It gets pretty dramatic, especially when the Player wins yet again. People don’t think like this on blackjack, probably because there’s no hand history display, and because you can’t bet on the dealer. Baccarat is a very dangerous game that feeds off of people’s natural instincts to see patterns in nature.

Anyways, I don’t care at all about Player/Banker, I’m just tracking the Dragon-7 count, and waiting for the opportunity to bet it. Mostly, this comes at the end of the shoe, so I make minimum Player or Banker bets just to feel a part of the table. Overall, betting $10 Banker/Player every hand will cost an average $8/shoe. I make $10+ dragon bets when the count is good, so I’ll win back at least $5.30/shoe of that on average. Overall, it’s very cheap entertainment.

I use the baccarat recording cards provided by the casino to track the dragon. Everyone uses the cards in Landscape orientation, and draws red and blue circles. I turn the card 90° and write down the +/- running count for each hand. This way, each row tracks 12 hands, and it’s easy to see where you are in the shoe. The display tells you what hand you’re on, and I keep around a list of the minimum running count vs. hand number required to bet the dragon. It’s really easy. You end up remembering the RC_min for hands like #60, #70, #75, #80, and it’s pretty easy to interpolate the values in-between.

My Flash game simulates one shoe at a time, showing the running count (RC) that I record on the baccarat cards. I indicate the outcome of +EV dragon bets with green for wins, and red for losses. When a dragon occurs while not betting, I note the “miss” in yellow. For example, in the screenshot above, 81 hands were played in the shoe, and 3 dragons hit (hands #54, #59, and #67). The count was good enough to bet on the last dragon, which we won (green). We missed the early dragons because the count wasn’t good enough (yellow). Overall, we bet the dragon 6 times in the shoe. We lost 5 times (red), but won once, so we made a net +35 units in the shoe. That means if you’re betting $10 dragons, you’d have netted $350 in profits in the shoe.

Play around with the simulator if you’re thinking about trying to make a profit at the bet. While it’s probably the best +EV game you’ll ever find (easiest to implement, and most average profit per shoe), the game is very slow at a full table. In order to try to make money, you’d need to get heads up with a dealer, which can yield up to 3 shoes an hour (optimal). Needless to say, the swings are huge, due to the nature of the 40-to-1 payout. However, (2 shoes/hr)($100 dragon bets)(0.53 profit/shoe) = $100 profit/hr looks pretty attractive.

Above, you’ll see that I played a little over 2000 shoes in the simulator. That would take a year of full-time work (assuming one shoe per hour). If you bet $100 per dragon, you’d have netted $164,800 in profits, plus player comps If you bet $250 dragons (the Barona max), you’d have profited $412,000.