Marina Bay Sands Trip Report

[Pando]

After some good results in Macau I was really looking forward to playing

again at MBS. It turned out that I was somewhat disappointed.

Firstly our time there was restricted to only 1-1/2 days due to the funeral

of the Singaporean great man, Lee Kwan Yew. The population turned out

in their hundreds of thousands to say good bye - it was very moving and I am

honoured to have been there at that time.

Consequently the casinos were closed for 6 hours that day, and getting anywhere

was a nightmare as there were no taxis available. We stayed at the hotel and caught

up with some sleep.

Having said that, I still had half a day to do my research and a day to play which is still

enough if everything is clear in the mind.

My Observations:

Firstly, the table minimum at the weekend seems to be S$150 although I have been told

that downstairs in the smoking section there are cheaper tables. I point blank refuse to

play in any smoking area. How smoking is allowed in a Singapore casino I do not know.

Secondly I took a lot of time to peruse the shoes on offer at every table and to be honest,

they were pretty ugly. Compared to Sands Macau there were very few MDB+ signals and

those which were there had a low hit rate. I quickly came to the conclusion that the cards

are NOT the same as they are in Macau.

Thirdly they did not seem to be great NOR shoes either, which is strange as they have to

be one (MDB+) or the other (NOR). Perhaps its better to say I did not have much confidence

in myself playing NOR with these shoes.

I tried a look at Rapid Baccarat and found that their decks are not pre-shuffled factory cards.

In fact they have 2 decks in an automatic shuffling machine and use those decks alternately.

These shoes are even worse than those in use in the touch games.

So what to do. I didn't do anything.

I simply could not get a handle on the touch game shoes and at $150 minimum I was not

about to undermine my good performance in Macau by playing badly here.

It is quite possible that at another time or another day the shoes may be better, but on this

day they were terrible.

So although the outcome in that sense was not great, it cost me nothing, remembering

Ellis saying don't play a table you cant beat. Table selection can also be nil.

regards

Pando

[bighorn]

Thank you for sharing your experience. MDB and NOR do not work well in Singapore, not that you are unlucky. So what do you think will work here? U2Hi? ? I hope so!

[brad01]

Hi Bighorn, start recording some shoes and then do SAP counts and B/P, O/R, O/T counts and lets see if we can see any patterns that is consistent.

Maybe B/P always runs close, maybe it always runs minus and then back to 0

If there is no bias then NOR wont work well, if there is no random then MDB wont work as well but maybe B/P is always running close consistently.

I think its just logic that shoe design cant cover everything - they can make some strategies hard to win with but at the expense of allowing others to win more easily

[Pando]

Hi Bighorn,

I actually did spent some time to track some SAP counts just as Brad01 has suggested

I did find that the SAP counts were skewed, meaning there were some biases (=NOR shoes)

eg:

16/16/4/16/32 (Low 3's, high 5+'s),

14/20/8/16/24 (low 3's)

In these cases we can bet as Norm Allen did, by playing away from the 3's

so we bet the 2's stay 2, and 3's go to 4.

That would have worked on these two shoes.

That may give you an idea of how to track the MBS shoes

regards

Pando

Edited April 8, 2015 by Pando

[brad01]

or nor S40 M2 will bet against 3's and get OTR for the 4+'s ?

[brad01]

If in doubt usually S40 will be a good default to play?

M1, 2, or 3