A.P Heat

The question of why advantage players do what they do is answered in the popular media by images of glitz, glamour, parties, piles of chips, cat and mouse, and youth. The motive is greed and the time frame is now. But there is another class of advantage players (APs) who definitely do not fit this Hollywood stereotype. I’m talking about professional APs – the life-timers.

Shuffling cards is a challenging task. It is the one part of the game where we humans directly interact with the randomness of the hands that follow. A hand shuffle never fully randomizes the cards. However, if enough goes right with the shuffle, then it can be considered random enough to effectively defeat shuffle-based advantage play.

It is easy to get the impression when writing articles for this blog that the average reader fully understands the mathematical ramblings I present. Then I am brought back to earth by E-mails and comments like this one I received a few weeks back:

There were two articles in the news over the last week having to do with players getting the edge over the house. In one case, an article in the Baltimore Sun described the travails of professional poker player Joseph Stiers who was banned from all Caesars properties for card counting. In particular, Stiers will not be allowed to play in the World Series of Poker this year.

Card counting baccarat side bets is one of the strongest ongoing opportunities for advantage players. These opportunities arise from the intersection of four game protection deficiencies, none of which has a good solution. Consider:

The Natural 9 (NAT9) side bet is the wager that the Player hand or Banker hand will be a natural 9. NAT9 is actually two different side bets, as the wager can separately be made that the Banker hand will be a natural 9 and that the Player hand will be a natural 9.  Similarly, the Natural 8 (NAT8) side bet is the wager that the Player hand or Banker hand will be a natural 8.

At G2E (2013) last week, I came across a baccarat side bet I had not seen before at the Galaxy Gaming booth, called “Lucky Win” (LW). The side bet can be made on either the Player hand or the Banker hand and it pays when the winning hand totals 0, 1, 2, 3, or 5.

A short time back, I was contacted by a casino interested in offering a high rolling blackjack player a 30% cash rebate on  losses he had incurred. The player apparently made this demand to the casino, saying he would not play again unless he was given this rebate.

Baccarat side bets are often named after exotic or mythical animals. SHFL has the Dragon Bonus side bet. There are the Dragon 7 and Panda 8 side bets to EZ Baccarat.

When an AP finds a dealer on Ultimate Texas Hold'em (UTH) who is vulnerable to hole-carding, it is not unusual for her to expose the bottom card of every packet of cards she delivers (see this post for an introduction to UTH).