Baccarat Strategy

KEEPING TRACK, AND HOW TO USE IT

Keeping Track at BaccaratNow that we have established one way that you are going to try to extract short-term edges in the game of baccarat, let's talk about the basic mechanics of how you are going to go about it. This is important, because, well, it involves the very fundamentals of this pursuit. You will want to keep that pad and pencil handy, as it is going to become critical to the first part of our three-step process, for lack of a better term, for how you are going to play.

First and foremost on this list of tasks, you're going to need a reliable and organized way of recording the results of hands. So how do you do that? Well, here is a way you can accomplish this; that is, if you have the capacity to do it quickly: on your pad, you are going to number the hands, right down the list, from one (1) all the way to, say, a hundred (100). That way you are always going to be aware of how many hands have been played.

You are going to separate your list into three columns - what you want to do is label them "B" for the Banker hand, "P" for the Player hand, and "T" for a tie. After each of the hands is played, you are going to check off which of those hands won. What you are also going to do is keep a "running total" of those results; that is, you are going to number each win with a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., so that after each hand you also know how many winners have been produced for the Banker, Player and Tie.

Then you are going to have to "calculate and compare." To lead off, it is time to make some fast calculations. For this, unless you are going to take a pocket calculator to the table and start banging it out, there is no getting around the fact that you are going to have to do some quick math in your head, and you have to have some aptitude with it. You don't necessarily have to get things down to tenths or hundreds of a percentage point, but being as close as possible really helps.

As close as possible to what, you may ask? Well, what you're looking to determine is exactly at what percentage rate each of these hands comes up at any moment in time. Using the pad will help you do that. So if you have just seen the Banker win for the tenth time and it's the 25th hand, you know right away, if you do a quick calculation, that the Banker has won 40% of the time. Then you have to ask yourself the question: how does that compare to the percentage that is customary for the Banker hand to have won by this time? That could be a way of deciding which hand to bet on next.

There is also bet sizing to consider, and that is what we are going to talk about next.