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Baccarat Card Game

But what about counting cards in baccarat?

Gamblers who are experienced with baccarat and blackjack sometimes wonder if the latter can be beaten through card counting. Reasons why include that baccarat is dealt from a shoe, and players can track card values as the shoe is dealt.

Baccarat maintains some similarities to blackjack in terms of card counting. The real question, though, is whether you can profitably use this advantage technique in baccarat.

I’m going to look at both sides of the subject, including why card counting is and isn’t worthwhile. But first, I’ll discuss the process of counting cards in baccarat.

As you may know, baccarat features three bets, including the banker hand, player hand, and both hands tying.

The banker wager is the best for basic strategy purposes. Despite the house taking a 5% commission from winning banker bets, this wager only has a 1.06% house edge.

A player bet features a 1.24% house advantage, which makes it a worthy proposition if you ever get tired of the banker hand.

The tie bet carries a 14.36% house edge when 8:1 payouts are offered. This edge drops down to 4.85% if you receive 9:1 payouts for successful wagers.

You can see that the banker and player hands are the only reasonable bets when using basic strategy.

The same holds true for counting cards in baccarat. Your main objective when doing so is to figure out whether the banker or player hand has a better chance of winning.

Before you begin counting cards, you need to find a table with a new 6 or 8-deck shoe. Starting with a fresh shoe allows you to track cards from the beginning and make better informed wagers on the banker or player.

Here’s how the baccarat counting process works:

• Add 1 (+1) to your count when an ace, 2, or 3 are dealt.
• Add 2 (+2) to your count when a 4 is dealt.
• Subtract 1 (-1) when a 5, 7, or 8 are dealt.
• Subtract 2 (-2) when a 6 is dealt.
• 10-value cards (10, J, Q, K) are neutral.

You should bet on the player hand when the count is +16 or higher. You should wager on the banker hand when the count is +15 or lower.

Note that making wagers at these specific points doesn’t mean that you’ll beat the house edge (explained later). Instead, it only increases your odds of winning when compared tousing normal strategy.

Why Counting Cards in Baccarat Is Totally Worthless

Earlier I discussed reasons why blackjack and baccarat card counting are similar. But the key difference is that aces and 10-value cards boost a blackjack player’s chances of winning.

When the deck is rich in these cards, players gain the following advantages:

• Better chance of forming a natural blackjack (21 on first two cards).
• More valuable double down opportunities.
• The dealer has a better chance of busting out when hitting towards a customary hard 17.

Blackjack players want more low value cards to exit the shoe, and more high value cards to remain in the shoe. Subsequently, the Hi-Lo blackjack system involves assigning +1 when 2-6 are dealt; 0 (neutral) when 7-9 are dealt; and -1 when 10-A are dealt.

Blackjack card counters have a clear-cut template on what cards do and don’t help their cause. Baccarat players, on the other hand, have a more difficult task in this regard.

A baccarat natural is a 9 being dealt on the first two cards. But unlike blackjack, baccarat naturals don’t offer a bonus payout for this hand.

Therefore, the reward for knowing when there are higher chances of a baccarat natural being dealt is diminished considerably.

Based on baccarat card counting methods, we know that 2-4 help the player score, while 5-9 help the banker score. But the advantage in knowing this information is so small that few gamblers will find it worthwhile.

Famed advantage gambler James Grosjean once explained that baccarat cards are too symmetric and don’t offer enough of an advantage one way or another.

Gambling author Peter Griffin once wrote that good baccarat countersonly make around $0.70 every hour. Plus, these gamblers must bet $1,000 per hand when the count is at the perfect point.

Considering the massive bets involved and how much work goes into baccarat counting, it’s easy to see why this is such a terrible advantage play method.

The idea of counting cards in baccarat seems ridiculous when considering that it results in so little money. I completely understand if you want to forgo this section and give up on the matter.

It’s true that baccarat card counters don’t earn nearly as much as blackjack pros. But there’s at least a little value to be gained when you keep an accurate baccarat count.

Earlier I mentioned how a +16 count or higher calls for making the player bet, while a +15 count or lower calls for the banker wager. But this only reveals when your chances of winning with one option or the other increase.

To truly gain the edge over casinos, you actually need a count of +235 for the player hand, and a count of -200 for the banker. The perfect scenario also involves only betting when you have the edge, while avoiding wagers when you don’t have an advantage.

The following shows your average profit when waiting for the perfect situations:

• $0.76 per hour (100 hands) when betting $1,000 per hand on the banker.
• $0.95 per hour (100 hands) when betting $1,000 per hand on the player.

Obviously this isn’t a great profit rate. But the alternative is that you theoretically lose money in these same situations without counting.

You’d lose $1,060 when risking $1,000 on the banker for 100 hands.You’d lose $1,240 when betting $1,000 on the player for 100 hands.

By keeping an accurate count and only wagering when you have the perfect player (+235) or banker (-200) advantage, you save well over $1k per hour.

Whether or not you should count cards in baccarat is a subjective matter. One player may think that it’s a fun opportunity to make a few dollars on a game they love, while others will see it as a complete waste of time.

I’m personally in the latter category, because I can’t understand focusing so intently on counting cards when the reward is so small. Furthermore, I don’t like waiting hundreds of hands before I can finally bet on a favorable opportunity.

Odds are that the casino will only let you do this for so long before they say something about it. After all, casinos don’t want you lurking around the baccarat tables for hours when you’re only going to make a few bets.

It’s not that gambling establishments actually care about the $0.70 that you can win off them every hour. Instead, it just creates an awkward environment when you’re observing a baccarat game for this long and offering no value to the casino.

I won’t fault you for trying baccarat card counting, though, if you think that it could be a fun experience.

Counting cards in baccarat doesn’t have to be as weird as standing off to the side for hundreds of hands before taking a seat. Instead, you can merely count just to increase your chances of winning.

It’s not difficult to maintain your counting until deciding whether the banker or player is offering slightly more value. You only need +16 or higher to determine a good player bet, or +15 or lower to determine a solid banker wager.

Again, counting to these points won’t help you overcome the house edge. But at least you can trim the house advantage and improve your odds.

Edge Sorting and Cheating Are the Main Ways to Beat Baccarat

Card counting isn’t a viable way to become a professional baccarat player. But there are ways to beat this game that can make you a fair amount of money.

The most-obvious way to beat baccarat is by cheating. Baccarat cheating methods include marking cards, past posting, and false shuffling.

Marking cards is a simple cheating technique where you mark specific card values with ink so that you can later recognize them.

Most players use an invisible ink that only be seen with infrared contact lenses. Keep in mind, though, that casinos have caught on to this method and now use special machines to check for invisible ink.

Past posting is another simple technique, whereby you add chips to a winning wager after the outcome is determined. If you bet on the banker and this hand wins, you can quickly add more chips when the dealer isn’t looking.

The difficulty in past posting with baccarat, though, is that you must be extremely good at sleight of hand so that the dealer doesn’t notice.

False shuffling is a more complicated cheating method that requires a dealer and players to work together. The dealer performs a false shuffle, whereby they leave a certain group of cards (a.k.a. slug) in the same order that they were dealt in the previous round.

The players, meanwhile, track card values throughout each round on a piece of paper. Casinos allow this because some players like tracking cards in order to bet on trends.

But those involved in a false shuffling plot are merely doing so for the sake of tracking any potential slug. Dealers normally leave the slug towards the beginning of the shoe, so that the players have a better idea on when to expect unshuffled cards.

False shuffling can be extremely lucrative. A group called the Tran Organization made an estimated $7million with this cheating technique.

But they were also caught after trying to bribe an undercover agent. 47people were indicted, with some spending several years in prison after being convicted.

Considering the legal implications of being caught in any casino cheating plot, I don’t recommend that you use any of these methods to beat baccarat.

Edge sorting is the only quasi-legal technique to beat the game. This strategy involves identifying a deck with defective card backs and using this info to guess card values before they’re revealed.

Here’s an example on how you could pull off edge sorting:

• Gemaco manufactures a purple deck with inconsistent patterns on card backs.
• You study the card backs to find what values the inconsistencies reveal.
• You look for a casino baccarat game that uses the same purple Gemaco deck.

The main problem with baccarat edge sorting is that it’s extremely hard to identify card back patterns from any sort of distance. You need extremely good eyesight just to have a chance of identifying irregularities on defective card backs.

Professional gamblers Phil Ivey and “Kelly” Sun won over a combined $20 million through edge sorting. But they needed to use other sketchy methods to successfully pull off their plot.

The duo requested a mandarin-speaking dealer, allowing Sun to speak to them without the other casino staff understanding what was being said.

Sun used this advantage to tell the dealer to rotate cards 180 degrees, because Ivey is a superstitious player. But the real reason for this request is that it makes spotting defective card backs easier.

Neither Atlantic City’s Borgata casino nor London’s Crockfords casino caught onto what Ivey and Sun were doing until it was too late.

The Borgata lost $9.6 million to the pair, while Crockfords lost over $11 million. However, both gambling establishments fought Ivey and Sun in court and won.

Judges in both cases noted that they didn’t think Ivey and Sun did anything illegal to win. But their plot was deceptive enough to where the judges didn’t think they used fair advantage play methods to win.

I think that had the duo would’ve kept their money in both instances had they won entirely through edge sorting. But requesting the Mandarin-speaking dealer and cards being rotated 180 degrees are what lost both cases for Ivey and Sun.

Is it worth the effort to count cards as a baccarat player?

My final thoughts are that it’s okay to casually count cards and boost your odds. But don’t waste your time trying to earn profits with this advantage play method.

Given that you can’t even make a dollar per hour under perfect circumstances, it’s just not worth spending the time on baccarat card counting.

The truth is that there’s no really good way to beat baccarat. Your choices include either cheating or using edge sorting.

The latter is legal in a sense, but edge sorting is so difficult to pull off that you may must use unsavory tactics to win. Considering that Ivey and Sun have already exhausted these questionable tactics, your chances of successfully using them are almost zero.

If you really want to become an advantage player, then you should choose a more worthwhile pursuit like blackjack card counting, hole carding, poker, or sports betting.

None of these games and advantage gambling techniques are easy. But at least you can be assured of profits if you master any of them.

If you read the right literature, like the famous book Beat the Dealer by Edward O. Thorp, you’re probably aware that some players can count cards well enough to beat blackjack.

Once players learn this they usually quickly learn that it’s somewhat difficult to be good at counting cards. And it’s even more difficult to get away with it at a level where you can turn a decent profit.

Then many players start looking for other games where they might be able to count cards to get an edge.

Blackjack is the most watched game in the casino. The casino owners and personnel know that card counters can hurt them, so they’re always watching for possible counting activity.

The truth is that most card counters aren’t very good and don’t hurt the casino in the long run, but this doesn’t stop the casinos from trying to catch card counters and stop them from playing.

Counting cards isn’t illegal, but the casinos are on private property and they don’t have to let you play. They can ask you to leave or bar you from placing bets at any time.

In a few areas they aren’t technically allowed to bar card counters, but they can run you off in other ways. And even if they don’t run you off, they can make the game unbeatable, even for the best card counters.

What does all of this have to do with baccarat?

When potential card counters start looking around the casino for other games that may offer an advantage when counting they don’t come up with many options.

The one game that looks like it’s possible is baccarat. As you learn in the next section why card counting works you’ll see why baccarat looks like a possibility. But in the section after that you’ll quickly see why counting baccarat is simply a waste of time.

Why Card Counting Works

A deck of card has 52 cards of which we know exactly which cards are included. If we take a single card out, say the ace of diamonds, we know exactly which 51 cards are left.

If you take 50 cards out of the deck and you know which 50 are missing you know what the final two cards are.

Mathematical studies and simulations have been completed that determine the exact value of a card being removed from a deck of cards for a game of blackjack.

In blackjack, as more low cards are removed from the deck it leaves more high cards, which is good for the player. The more tens and aces left in the deck in comparison to low cards means the player is more likely to be dealt a blackjack.

A blackjack pays three to two, so it’s makes up a great deal of the player’s return in blackjack. A deck high in cards worth 10 also makes the dealer bust more often because she can’t stand on a 15 or 16.

On the other hand, if a deck is missing more high card than low cards it swings the edge more in the favor of the house.

So when a blackjack player counts cards what they’re really doing is keeping a running ratio comparing high cards remaining in the deck to low cards remaining in the deck.

This means you don’t have to remember every card when you count. You simply start with a number, usually zero, and add to it whenever a low card is played and subtract from it whenever a high card is played.

When the count is positive it means the remaining cards have more high cards than low cards and when the count is negative it means the remaining cards have more low cards than high cards.

Of course there’s a little more to being a winning card counter than this, but this is the basic idea.

As it turns out, baccarat is also played with a deck of standard playing cards and the removal of certain cards does change the chances of which cards can still be dealt and this does slightly alter the house edge.

Most blackjack games and almost all baccarat games are dealt from multiple decks, or a shoe.

This doesn’t change the fact that removing certain cards are good or bad for the player, but it does mean that to get an edge you need to be able to see a large percentage of the stack of available cards before you can gain an advantage.

In blackjack, depending on the rules, you often need to consistently be able to play deep into the shoe. The closer to 100% of the shoe you can see the better your chances of beating the game through counting.

The problem is the casinos now this as well and won’t let you see 100% of the shoe before shuffling. It’s rare to be able to play through more than 75 or 80% of a shoe.

The best counters can still gain an advantage in blackjack, but it’s a challenge.

Baccarat games tend to play through the entire shoe or almost all of it, and I seems like it offers a good counting opportunity.

In addition, the casinos don’t watch the baccarat game for counters. They even provide pencils and paper in some casinos so you can track results, etc.

The absence of concern from the casinos is the first big clue that you might not be able to beat baccarat. If the casino doesn’t worry about it then it’s a good sign that it can’t be beat.

Of course the casino isn’t perfect so are they missing something?

Can you beat baccarat by counting?

Why Not to Card Count Baccarat

Under 100% perfect counting conditions the answer to the question at the end of the last section is yes. You can theoretically get an edge against the casino playing baccarat.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the edge is so small and difficult to get that it’s a complete waste of time.

In The Theory of Blackjack by Peter Griffin, an excellent book for potential card counters, he has a small section about counting baccarat. Through his calculations if you find a baccarat game that deals through almost the entire shoe, count cards and only place bets when you have an edge, and make bets of $1,000 when you have the edge, you’re long term profit will be roughly 70 cents per hour.

And the biggest problem beyond only making 70 cents per hour based on $1,000 bets is that counting baccarat isn’t simple. It’s nothing like counting blackjack.

Many popular blackjack counting systems only require you to add or subtract one at a time. A perfect baccarat counting system requires adding and subtracting large and varied number from the count, and to do it perfectly you actually need to keep at least two separate counts perfectly.

And you only make a bet when the count is in your favor, so according to some mathematicians you only place a bet on one out of every 400 hands or more. Even if the casino let you count cards for hours on end they’re probably going to tire of you only making a wager every couple hours.

I’m sorry to disappoint you, but counting baccarat is simply not worth the time or effort. You also have to risk large amounts of money for miniscule returns, which is rarely a good idea.

If you really want to find an alternative to counting blackjack, your best bet is to learn how to count Spanish 21, a derivative of blackjack. It doesn’t have as much heat as blackjack, but the casinos do watch it some.

But you can get a much higher edge playing it if you know how to count than playing baccarat.

Can You Beat Baccarat?

The answer to this is included at the beginning of the last section. But even though you can beat the game by counting I showed you why it’s a waste of time.

But a few players have been able to beat baccarat by using other tactics. But even this is a rare occurrence and if the casino figures out what you’re doing they’ll fight you, going to court if they need to.

The best way to beat baccarat is by using a technique called edge sorting.

A few casinos use playing cards that have an imperfect design on the back. So if you turn some cards one way and other the other way you can tell which group is coming off the top of the deck next.

So if you could sort all of the cards certain ways you can change the house edge enough to play with an advantage.

Many problems exist that make this difficult. The first one is you have to find a casino using cards that make this possible.

The next problem is how are you going to sort the cards? You can’t normally touch all of them, so you end up only being able to sort a percentage of them.

Then if the casino knows what they’re doing they’ll turn parts of the deck during shuffling. This eliminates the ability to sort cards during one shoe and have them stay pointing the proper direction after shuffling.

If you want to learn more about edge sorting baccarat search for the Phil Ivey incident where he and a female accomplice beat a casino for millions doing it. They were able to negotiate a private table and get the casino to let his accomplice deal the cards.

She edge sorted them as she dealt and the casino shuffling technique didn’t turn any of them around so they played with a strong advantage over the house.

The casino eventually figured it out and took Ivey to court. It doesn’t look like he’s going to get to keep his winnings.

The only other possible way to get an advantage, other than cheating, is by shuffle tracking.

Shuffle tracking is a system where you track the cards as they get placed in the discard tray and are able to track where certain cards are through the shuffle.

If this sounds difficult, you’re right.

You actually don’t track individual cards through the shuffle; you track slugs of cards that can be helpful.

To show how this might work let’s look at blackjack again.

If you know a group of 20 cards packed together has three aces and 14 cards valued at 10, you’d bet big when these cards were coming out.

The same thing can possibly give you an advantage playing baccarat, but once again this sounds good but is almost impossible to use.

Many casinos have started using shuffling machines to mix the cards and even tracking a slug through a hand shuffle can be challenging.

Baccarat Card Counting Approved

Once again, it looks like a method for beating baccarat just isn’t worth the effort.

Conclusion

Card counting works for blackjack and Spanish 21 if you know how to do it and can get away with it. It can even work for baccarat, but as you can see it isn’t worth the effort.

If you’re looking for an edge against the casino you can safely skip baccarat and move on to the next game.