Strategy for playing Baccarat Punto Banco
Punto Banco baccarat is merely a game of chance that you cannot influence by your decisions. Nevertheless, there is a huge number of guides available on the Internet, which claim the very opposite. We shall take a closer look at them in the following passages. To start with, here is a very important piece of advice: do not pay for any strategies found via the internet. Spend the money on playing baccarat instead. The only ones to profit from these strategies are the people selling them.
Martingale
Martingale is a bible of all the online scammers who make false promises about how to get rich quick. I remember my own experience as a college student, when I had to create mathematical proofs to convince my crazed classmate about the erroneous claims of Martingale. It makes no difference whether it is a roulette or baccarat. When applying Martingale’s strategy, you select either the banker or the player and you bet. You will start with betting one chip and you will always double your bet in case of losing. If you win you start betting a single bet again. Initially, the strategy will be working for you and you will be enjoying the game. After each win you are at a slight profit. "Great!," you tell yourself. However, there isn't a casino where infinity exists. Although the probability is low, a series of losses of any length will occur sooner or later, and you suddenly find yourself having to bet a huge amount. You only hope the unfavourable sequence of bets will end. Such a situation is always a matter of time, believe me. Martingale would only work under the theoretical concept of infinity. When applied to a concrete number of games, the player always ends up at a loss. Moreover, your bank is limited and the maximum bets are limited by the casino. Martingale would also be profitable if the probability of the banker´s or the player´s win was higher than 50%. Just one millionth of a percent would be sufficient. But we already know that the advantage is on the side of the casino. This is the reason why you should avoid the Martingale strategy; it really is not the miraculous way to beat the casino you have longed for. Even when betting on a game where the likelihood of winning is 50:50, like when tossing a coin, the Martingale strategy would produce a game of zero totals and you would end up with your original bet.
1-3-2-6 system, Fibonacci, d`Alembert, Avant Dernier
All of these strategies are in fact only Martingale variations. The only difference consists in the system of adding bets. The fact that these strategies do not work was clearly demonstrated by simulations in our article on roulette.
Card counting
This strategy sounds really attractive. We will track the dealt cards and choose the best bet regarding the remaining ones. This is the theory. Unfortunately, the practice is different. Although the house edge of a bet placed at the banker is only 1.06%, and we could turn this over to our advantage by the mathematically correct counting of cards, we would get an edge over the casino only to a negligible extent. The reason is that, unlike blackjack baccarat does not have any cards that could tilt the scales significantly on the side of the player or the banker. The ineffectiveness of the card counting strategy was proved mathematically by Edward O. Thorp in his book, "The mathematics of gambling". Anyone interested can simply download the book for free from the Internet. Peter A. Griffin, who also devoted a part of his work, "The Theory of Blackjack" to card counting in baccarat, says:
,,Playing baccarat at an optimum way in the Atlantic City casino, you can win 70 cents an hour at the bet of 1000 USD."
You could only bet in approximately one in five hundred games; that would leave you betting twice every 8 hours. Pretty boring just for a few cents, don’t you think? John May, another author of books on baccarat, developed a system of card counting when the bet is placed on a tie. Theoretically, of course, it would be amazing if the same cards with a value of zero (i.e. tens, kings, etc.) remained in the deck. We would bet on the tie which would mean a sure win. This is true. However, the truth also is, that a situation when the bet on a tie has a statistical advantage over the casino occurs approximately once in 10 000 games. If we considered 80 hands played per hour, eight hours of playing per day, we would bet once every two weeks.
Games on series
Everyone will make up what he enjoys the most. Someone might think that a series of wins by the banker must come to an end. On the contrary, someone else might think that the banker will continue winning as he is just lucky with his cards. Such a strategist keeps standing at the table, carefully watching everything and recording the results. This strategy is absolutely unnecessary. What really matters is that the result of an actual game is completely independent of the previous result, and as the casino has a statistical advantage at Baccarat, the application of such strategies are doomed to fail.
As you can see, there exists no working strategy for playing and winning over the casino at Punto Banco baccarat. Please forget such strategies. If you follow them, your enjoyment of the game will be spoilt by the limitations such strategies set. There will be no financial benefit for you. Do not look for the non-existent, get-rich-quick scheme, the Holy Grail for the gambler. Despite all of this, there are certain rules that would be sensible to follow. I would definitely not name these rules as a strategy, but rather as basic principles.
Principles of playing baccarat
- do not bet on a tie
- bet on the banker more often than not
- find a casino with the most advantageous conditions (low commission, lower number of decks of cards)
- keep your money well managed–bet the lowest possible sums
- define the maximum acceptable loss in advance
What is there left to say? Baccarat is not a bad game. If you follow these principles, you can have fun and you will not lose too much. Most recreational activities cost something these days, whether you go to the cinema, to the pub, or to the tennis court. Just do not expect to get rich by playing Baccarat. You would have to be extremely lucky to do so. If you do go to the online casinos in order to make a profit, I can only recommend to you one very simple piece of advice - set your goal, define the amount of profit you want to gain. As soon as you have it in your account, run away! Why? Because you were just lucky, and this lucky streak will not last forever.
