Discount Gambling

In today’s Grail quest, I took a look at the countability of a Baccarat variant called 7 Up Baccarat, dealt out of a constant shuffle machine (CSM). If you’ve read this blog closely, you know that a CSM does not eliminate all countability in a game. This is because cards are in buffered in the exit chute of the CSM, so recently dealt cards have no chance of coming out soon. A windowed count may be effective against a CSM.

You can browse or download all the code for this post, if you want to see how I roll.

Anyway, here’s what I found for 7-Up Baccarat. Both the banker and player bets have very high sensitivities to removed cards (EORs). (Compare this to normal baccarat, where the EORs are effectively zero.) Simulations show a windowed count is strongly correlated to the EV of the next hand dealt out of the CSM. The figure below shows a 20-card windowed count tells you when its better to bet Player or Banker. Unfortunately, the count almost never gets good enough to be +EV. You can see if they made the game more “fair” (house edge only 1.3% instead of the chosen 2.6%), then you’d often find some +EV opportunities. I doubt they did this kind of analysis, but who knows.

Same thing with the Super-7′s side bet. If they made the nominal house edge closer to 5% than the 8.9% they chose, then it’d be very countable. The count is very simple. Any 7 you see is -12, and any non-7 is +1. I think everyone can imagine that it’s better to bet the Super-7′s when they haven’t seen any 7′s out of the CSM in the last few hands. And I’m sure no one bets Super 7′s just after seeing a bunch of 7′s come out. Simulation of the Super-7′s bet show a perfect linear correlation between the count and the EV of the bet. In all simulations, a minBufferDepth of 20 was used (minimum number of cards in the exit chute buffer).