Beating online Bacarrat?

[Mr. Curious]

Probability Forum Cross Post

Given a finite set of cards and a limited set of rules, it seems like online bacarrat should be beatable through card tracking. I'm not talking about a point system like blackjack counting, what I am thinking about is tracking every single card dealt and then calculating the odds of the remaining cards coming out in either a banker win, player win, or tie.

This seems possible, right?

First you calculate all of the possible premutations that a deck could end up as (8 * 52) ^ 2. Once you have all of the possibilites indexed, you would then be able to start narrowing the remaining cards down as each one was dealt. It seems like after N number of decks, the likelyhood of one of the three possibilities ought to increase because of the static nature of the game.

Has any already tried doing something like this? I was trying to figure out if you could pattern match an 8 deck game with fixed rules and this came to mind as an easier variation. Online would be MUCH easier than live because you can use the computer to track all of the cards and have precomputed all of the possibilities.

Not sure whether just posting WoO links here is kosher or not, but: http://wizardofodds.com/baccarat/baccaratapx2.html

[joshman1204]

too bad they shuffle after every hand or in most cases they use a continual shuffle.

[Double Down]

I believe it is in one of Sklanksy's books where he talks about other beatable games and he discusses baccarat, explaining that it is not beatable with any sort of card tracking system. He ran computer simulations where he would remove one card of the same ranking (all of the aces, then all of the 2's...) to see if the absence of that card had an effect one way or another on the house advantage and it did not. So knowing which cards are left would not make an exploitable difference.