Eliot Jacobson Ph.D.

The methods used to protect against blackjack card counters are among the most costly managerial decisions many casinos make. Contrary to popular belief, there is not an army of card counters waiting to pounce at the first opportunity.

Lucky 8 (L8) is a baccarat side bet I first heard about on the Wizard of Vegas website in this thread. As the name implies, a Player/Banker final total of 8 is key to winning this bet.

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever. -- Dylan Thomas

In this post I am going to give the win-rate statistics against the Tie bet using computer-perfect play. In this analysis, I assume the AP is keeping track of the cards that have been played from the shoe. Before the start of each round, the AP uses a computer to give him the exact edge on the Tie bet based on the knowing the composition of the cards left in the shoe.

In this post, I wrote about exploiting advanced knowledge of the specific location of a Ten or Ace in the shoe. Among the many ways an AP can know that an Ace or Ten will be dealt is when the bottom card is exposed to a skilled cutter.

From time to time the question of card counting in baccarat comes up. Because baccarat is dealt from a shoe, it follows that the odds for the banker/player/tie bets change as cards are dealt. As more and more cards are dealt, a counter will get an ever more precise estimation of the composition of the cards that remain.