davelevad

Carmines ... mmm ... my mouth is watering! Nice memories!

Carmines ... mmm ... my mouth is watering! Nice memories!

Congrats, Keith ... a card-carrying Six Sigma member!

Thanks, Kevin! I appreciate the kind words. Didn't know you were watching me play at Rivers. Funny thing is I always won at Rivers. Problem with Rivers, though, is it's so crowded, so a shoe takes forever to play. Seems like everyone has migrated from Horseshoe over to Rivers. Yeah, I wish I were able to witness a lot more real-time play of winners such as yourself and Ellis. Also, Archer (Jim), too, who likewise claims to have attained his own mastery of the game. I can name a dozen others, too, including, of course, Mark Maverick Teruya, all of whom belong to what I call the "Sixth Sigma Club." Kudos to all of you, and may you all enjoy continued winnings. Dave

Yes, regular old 3 prong power cord. Wireless would be easy to check with an RF detector. I'm afraid I might get into trouble if they catch me scanning the tables with an RF detector, though, lol - unless I figure out a way to be stealthy about it. My pleasure, Andy.

Quick update: The new version of the Shufflemaster MD 2. I was able to get a pretty good look at the newer version MD 2's in use and one of the older model MD 2. I was sitting right next to one of the new ones yesterday. This newer version of the MD 2 has a video screen, about 2" by 3" like a cell phone screen. The older MD 2 just has a 1" by 4" blue LED readout with 2 lines of scrolling capable info, like 416 cards, shuffling X % complete, etc. The interesting thing I noticed yesterday is that while the machine is in shuffle mode, (the shuffle mode is ON always about 8 minutes), the screen says: Shufflemaster Card Recognition OFF 416 cards Shuffling X % complete After the procedure is complete, the green light comes on & screen reads: Shufflemaster Shuffling complete 416 cards Push Green button to remove cards. ( Or something to that effect. --couldn't read all the words without being too obvious at the angle I was at.) What is interesting is the "Card Recognition OFF" line during the 8 minutes of shuffling. Nevertheless, I can still see Black (UV) Light escaping from the machine. Some possible explanations: 1. It's meaningless. The card recognition is turned ON, but they want to fool us. But, if that were the case, why would they bother to display that information at all? 2. Card recognition is an option listed on their website. Maybe it is installed on all machines but it can only be turned ON and OFF at the factory. Since the option is an added cost, maybe this casino is cutting costs and leased machines without it. 3. The casino itself has the option to turn it ON or OFF as desired. For whatever reason they have it turned OFF. 4. Anyone else have other ideas? Another thing I have noticed about both the newer & older versions of the MD 2 is that the only wire coming out of the machines is the electric cord. On 2 occasions I watched as they had to remove the machine from it's housing to fix machine jams. (These were the older version MD 2). I watched pretty closely and the only wire they had to unplug was the electrical cord. There are no other cables leading out of the machines, so it appears no wiring exists which would allow remote control of machine functions from elsewhere. Wondering if others have noticed this or other aspects about the Shufflemaster machines at their tables. It might be interesting to check the screen during the 8 minute shuffle period to see if your casino has the card recognition turned ON or OFF.

ktd, For U1D2M2, when you are winning, you would keep betting back and forth between 1u and 2u bets. So, for example, if your current bet is 1u and you won the next 6 decisions, then your bet sequence would be: 1-2-1-2-1-2 .... If your current bet is 3u and you won the next 6 decisions, then your bet sequence would be: 3-1-2-1-2-1 ... If your current bet is 4u and you won the next 6 decisions, then your bet sequence would be: 4-2-1-2-1-2 ... etc ...

If you play systematically by a set rule-based procedure over a random selection of baccarat shoes, I've already performed this "contest" computationally dozens of times, and unfortunately, you will lose. For example, I know you're aware I had tested an earlier version of your Advanced System40, which was a prototype of your present NOR system. The results were posted here: Baccarat Simulation Series 9 Results: System 40S (Advanced System 40). It could not do better than always betting Banker. Nor could any other system or combination of systems. Nor will NOR, ADN, SAP, or any other additional systems or rules you'd like to add. As far as 1000 shoes not being random, there's really no objective evidence to support that view. For example, I've thoroughly examined the events distributions of Zumma 600 shoes, Zumma 1000 shoes, and 2361 hand-collected live shoes. All of these are live shoes. The results are posted here: P and B Events Statistics: A Comprehensive Comparison. In all cases, each data set showed characteristic distributions expected in a random set, matching exactly the statistics in a set of 1,000,000 randomly generated shoes. I could repeat the exercise indefinitely with data-sets consisting of 1000 randomly chosen shoes, and I will find the same thing. Indeed, I don't need 1000 shoes. Probably 100 is more than sufficient. Indeed, it only takes on the order of a few hundred coin flips (roughly equivalent to about 5 baccarat shoe's worth of P/B decisions) to demonstrate the clear signatures of a random distribution. I've requested this several times before, but never got a response, that if you or John would send me your data set of live shoes, I'd be happy to run an events analysis on it to see whether it shows any signs of non-randomness. If you claim to be able to beat always betting Banker in a 1000 random shoe contest, then you're essentially claiming to be able to beat random, since you should be able to just do the same thing in the next 1000 shoe data-set, one after another indefinitely. So, are you claiming to be able to beat random? If so, I sure would like to learn how, too!!!

Ellis, your original question was in the context of computational testing, which assumes baccarat is a fair, random game. In that context, always betting Banker is best. That's the real mathematics of it. Put it another way, if we have a contest of playing 1,000 randomly chosen shoes, and I only bet Banker always, while you play however else you wish, then the odds favor my winning the contest, with or without Banker's commissions taken into account.

Simply because 50/50 is in the long term. These gamblers bust long before approaching that realm. On the other hand, I've personally witnessed pure gamblers win left and right. Ironically, the last time it happened was during my last session in the first shoe (the "shoe from hell.") I wrote at ImSpirit: As I mentioned in my response to Rick’s comment, yesterday was a day when Luck won over Method, because the guy sitting next to me in the first shoe was winning by truly “gambling,†wagering huge stacks on purely intuitive guesses. He was quite a showman, too. Most of the time, as it turned out, he was betting against me, and hence was winning left and right. He even won 2 dragons in a row. He walked away with several dozen times his buy-in. Later, other folks must have also noticed how much I was losing, and they started to bet against me, too. Lucky them. Now I know what it feels like to be the dupe in the “bet against the loser†method. (ImSpirit: Cause for Pause)

With regards to being in the right place at the right time, that is definitely what I would like to be able to consistently do, and it is the fundamental prerequisite of someone hoping to have a consistent, positive edge. Those should be the only conditions under which to play, otherwise, it's just gambling with the usual long term negative expectancies. If only we can figure out how to systematically be at the right place at the right time. With regards to entirely omitting commissions from my testing, by far the best system to play without commissions is Bet Banker Always. That would definitely yield a positive expectancy in the long run (without commish.) Any bets on Player would just diminish the yield in the long run. Best to just stick to one side Banker always. Of course, risk-of-ruin always exists, because no one has deep enough pockets to withstand all drawdowns in practice. But in terms of long term expectancies, Banker is always the best long term bet. (By the way, "no commission" EZ Bacc like the one we played together at Trump Plaza, AC, is not truly no commissions, since you push on a 3-card Banker 7. This still gives the House a 1ish% edge on Banker in the long run.) With regards to casino profits/holds and mathematical expectations, my thoughts are just that most people who play the game are "gamblers," not "players." At least that is what I see when I go to the tables. Very few are betting systematically, and virtually none are flat betting. Most of them bet all over the place ... this hand 1 chip, next hand 10 chips, next hand all in. Moreover, they're betting the side bets, like tie and dragons, which have much higher House edge. I've seen people place stacks a mile high on tie. From what I've seen, most of them lose all of their buy-in relatively quickly, which is technically a 100% hold. They simply don't have enough bankroll to keep betting into the realm of "long term." The mathematical expectancies of 1ish% would only occur if everyone always flat bet systematically, and only on P/B. In reality, that happens rarely. If mathematicians are puzzled why casinos holds are so large, I think it's just because they haven't gone to the tables themselves and watched how the majority are gambling. It truly is a spectacle. I was talking to Tom about this the other day. He explained ... HOLD measures the % of the money that is won by the table for any given time period. More specifically: Total$$ won by that table divided by amount of money dropped down the chute. Kind of a difficult thing to explain, but a few simplified examples will help: For these examples imagine a bac table with only 1 customer for the entire shift: Customer comes to table & buys in for $100, and plays for an hour lets say: Breaks dead even & leaves = 0% hold for that shift Looses $20 & leaves = 20% hold for that shift Wins $20 & leaves = negative 20% Hold for that shift Looses $80 = 80% hold Looses entire $100 buyin = 100% hold for that shift If you watch closely you can see the supervisors & pit bosses get mad when a player comes to the table, buys in for a large amount like $2000 or $5000, makes a couple small bets & leaves. Why do they care? They know he just screwed up their hold % for that shift. If the rest of the players are small bettors & they would have scored a 30% hold for that shift, then that guy just cut their HOLD % down to 3 %. Still the same gross amount of $$ won by the table but divided by that larger amount = hold % down. That's why I almost always bring chips to the table with me & rarely buy in for cash. I may take a few of their chips home with me but I won't be hurting their hold % anywhere near as much as if I had bought in for cash. I like the tables I regularly play at to have a nice high HOLD % (love those tie bettors:-). So hold % is really a measure of how long people stay at a table & gamble, what type of bets they placed (tie vs. Banker), and how lucky or unlucky the table was if measuring a short time-frame like 1 shift. That's why a bac table can have a much higher hold % than a roulette table, --- people stay there longer (and tie bettors, of course). No HOLD % would surprise me very much, even with a fairly long time frame like 3 months. There are alot of factors at play. Some casinos cater to whales (very large bettors) who can drastically change a casino's bac hold for the quarter. I hear Kerry Packer likes to play bac @ 1/4 mil per hand. Pit bosses under ever increasing pressure to produce could conceivably fudge some numbers. Possibly dragon betting was introduced durring the time frame of the study? Maybe more people were betting tie? Maybe people started staying at the tables longer? Just glanced @ a 2010 UNLV study that was done on a New Jersey casino that I had looked at before.. Not sure if it was the same one you are referring to. Actually, in that study pg 5 shows the win % declining on a yearly basis from 05 to 09. Bounced up in '10 but far less data.

Actually, betting opposite a losing system does not yield a winning one. For example, betting Player Always is a losing system, and betting its exact opposite (betting Banker Always) is also a losing system. Likewise, betting Repeat Always is a losing system, and betting its exact opposite (betting Opposite Always) is also a losing system. Etc ... for any other system or combination of switching between systems. Indeed, part of my testing of Xin/Sofer's system was to bet exactly opposite its bet placements, and the results were still negative. (See the results in the tables "1M Normal" and "1M Reversed" at http://imspirit.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/baccarat-simulation-series-30-results-zuan-xin-baccarat-great-learning/) The only reason why I tested the reverse bets was because one of my readers noted that in my original table, I had -4% in some of the results, quite remarkable, because he thought it's just as hard to consistently lose more than expected as it is to consistently win. He would be right if only flat bets were used. But in the tests, I used a 1,1,3,6 progression, per their methodology. When a Martingale-type of progression is used, worse-than-expected results can occur in a relatively small sample size, due to the larger bets losing more often than winning. I tried to convince him of that, but he kept insisting, and finally I just had to do the simulation outright to demonstrate reversing the bets does not help. (See the exchange of comments in the reply below the post.) So, the statement "Dave's tests go a long way toward proving my view of this game" is not true. Normal or reversed, Xin/Sofer's method yield the usual negative expectancies, and taking my results at face value, they technically disprove your view of the game. But of course, as Sofer acknowledged in his reply, and as you have acknowledged as well, my simulations don't take into account the kind of live casino conditions which both of you believe exist (though at opposite ends of the spectrum), so I can't make any firm conclusions about the game played under live conditions purely on the basis of my simulation results. Nevertheless, my simulation results (thus far) certainly cannot be construed to support your views. I would very much like that one day I'm able to run a simulation which actually demonstrates a positive expectancy, but that day is yet to come. To support your views would require someone to be able to win a significant number of live games consistently. We'll take it for granted that you have been able to in your decades of professional play. But so far, I'm finding it not so easy to reproduce your success, because I'm not seeing the consistency and stability of shoes which are part of the basic requirements of your edge. I sure would like to.

Yeah, I spend a lot of time testing this "Harvard" approach. (Actually, I called Harvard several times to try to verify whether Zuan Xin and David Soffer were actually alumni, but they never got back to me.) Simulation Results: Baccarat Simulation Series 30 Results: Zuan Xin Baccarat Great Learning Discussion: Does A Harvard Education Help You Win Baccarat? I have a lot of email correspondence from David Sofer, and the last one after I posted the results at ImSpirit was the following: Many thanks for the information. Here is what I have to say about this. This is a very cynical age we live in, some even call it a "neurotic epoch" of history. Everybody questions everybody's intentions, it's the way it is, but it is a free world, and I have absolutely no complaints about it and would have it no other way. And if someone wants to criticize someone else, at any level of detail or analysis, that's perfectly okay, too, but it is up to people to weigh all of the arguments and to assess the methods and motives underlying them. The problem with this instant analysis is that it has very little to do with how Baccarat gamblers actually gamble at Baccarat, no one does play or should play "robotically" at Baccarat or any other casino table game for that matter. As for me, I am one of the best followers of Zuan Xin and very proud to say so, he has made a contribution to the Baccarat literature that is unparalleled, many many thousands of Baccarat gamblers across the world, many of them serious gambling addicts who lose a lot of money that nobody can afford to lose, have become Baccarat players by studying his teachings online that are available free of charge at MacauCasinoWorld. Please see the following chart of Macau casino Baccarat winnings. http://www.dicj.gov.mo/web/en/information/DadosEstat/2010/content.html#n3 http://www.dicj.gov.mo/web/en/information/DadosEstat_mensal/2010/index.html http://www.dicj.gov.mo/web/en/information/DadosEstat_mensal/2011/index.html All analytics aside, this is an epidemic, and that is what Zuan Xin was interested in impacting. Trillions of Hong Kong dollars will be wagered in the Baccarat rooms of the world this year! And tens of billions will be lost! You should know, that those who have actually participated in special learnings have been for the most part very happy that they did, it is a large commitment of time and effort to conduct a special learning properly and that is why tuition has to be charged. Everyone that inquires is urged first to study harder and more rigorously, most never contact us again, and that's what we want. Special learnings are not an ongoing business. The Baccarat Great Learning, "Baijialedaxue" in Chinese, is constantly misunderstood to be a "system" and it is not that at all. What Zuan Xin did was reveal the deep underlying mathematical structure of a game that both the Baccarat casino professionals and their casino gambler "customers" generally believe is a game of luck with no underlying mathematical structure. Attached please find the classic saying of one of the Asian "gods of gambling" Dai Zilang to that effect, also an article that was published by Sing Tao in December 2007. Those who practice "best quality discipline" using the "Baijialedaxue" of Zuan Xin play very carefully and very conservatively after selecting the shoes that they will play very diligently, this is what Zuan Xin teaches, in the same way Edward O. Thorp used his "Beat the Dealer" approach to Blackjack very carefully and very conservatively. I would close by advising you that the large casino companies all employ "mathematical consultants" who have torn apart every table game that you see on the casino floor from virtually every mathematical angle and brought about the implementation of countermeasures against any and every approach that conveys even the possibility of advantage play. Zuan Xin has never claimed that he developed a "system" that can be played "robotically" and defeat the casinos at their most important and most profitable table game of Baccarat, but for the many many thousands of followers of his Baccarat Great Learning worldwide, the Baccarat playing field has been leveled. I think Oscar Wilde once said that the cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, all of us should remember that, we should question people's intentions when there are grounds for that and full understanding underlying such grounds, but there is no virtue in cynicism for cynicism's sake. Thanks again for writing in to me, and I hope that these comments have been helpful for you. As our Baccarat master Zuan Xin said, "Be a player, not a gambler!" Best regards, David Sofer (By the way, Sofer teaches Zuan Xin's bacc method in Los Angeles for $888. It's a two-day, one-on-one course called "Special Learnings," consisting of lectures/exercises, and afterwards going to a casino to play. Not that anyone here would be interested in that, LOL.)

Clarification - by "convinced," he's referring to the basis of the edge, that is, the premise that baccarat shoes are consistently exploitable because they are non-random. (Not questioning that Ellis is a great baccarat player, irregardless, so I hope you did not misunderstand or were offended.) Well, I was happy to be the guinea pig myself and planned to play 20, 50, 100, 1000+ shoes and document my journey. But I'm afraid I might be stuck at 11 for awhile, out of fear that I have not yet secured that true edge and thus am not presently capable of properly applying this approach to its maximum potential. If anyone else is up to the task, please let me know, thanks.

Thanks - appreciate the good advice. Speaking of Vegas, my friend Tom provided a great Vegas tips guide that I just posted at ImSpirit: Things to See & Do in Vegas. Also, he asked if during the next BTC meet / demonstration there, if you'd be up to playing more than 6 games. Well, in his words: Personally speaking, 6 out of 6 would not convince me (not counting the 6 shoes already won); 25 out of 30 would convince me; 32 out of 40 would; 39 out of 50 would; 60 out of 80 would; or 73 out of 100 would. 80 out of 100 & i'd be convinced & impressed. 90 out of 100 & I'd be convinced & in awe. Seeing is believing. Hopefully you will be able to go to Vegas to watch Ellis play some more. Not sure it'd be possible for you to play 30 games, but maybe 20? Not that you have anything to prove. Just passing along some feedback. Thanks again for everything. Dave