The Adventures of MDawg II

Oh when I read the title I thought it was going to be about A.Wolf and me.

Quote: unJon

The 25% of the tie bet assertion happened.

Correct. I have never asserted an average tie win percentage other than about 25%.

Subsets of my tie bets, such as larger bets (up to $5000. on the tie) I have had greater success at. Also during a session or so, pit bosses have remarked that I was winning nearly all of my tie bets.

But my assertion is 25% or so.

Quote: MDawg

Quote: unJon

The 25% of the tie bet assertion happened.

Correct. I have never asserted an average tie win percentage other than about 25%.

Subsets of my tie bets, such as larger bets (up to $5000. on the tie) I have had greater success at. Also during a session or so, pit bosses have remarked that I was winning nearly all of my tie bets.

But my assertion is 25% or so.
link to original post

Since tie happens slightly less than 10% of the time, a win % of 25% (or so!) is so astounding as to frankly be not credible. I of course don’t know how many tie bets you have made in your career, but from your number of trip reports andmentions of tie bets it must be in the thousands. Winning 250 out of 1000 tie bets is so unlikely that it assuredly has never happened, barring cheating of some sort.

How many tie bets do you think you’ve made?

Can a ‘math guy’ give us the likelihood of winning 250 (or more!) of 1000 tie bets?

That depends on how many ties are left in the shoe.

Quote: MDawg

The most relevant factor is - how many ties in that shoe? Pushing 20 or just 2?

Shooting fish in a barrel crammed with fish is easier than in a sparsely populated lake.

But the shoes I played had above average ties. And as always I rarely bet the tie.
link to original post

MDawg has been almost too busy to take no prisoners lately. Almost.

Wynn got fined too.

Wynn agrees to settle anti-money laundering violation, pay $5.5 million fine to Nevada regulators

Things have really gotten tight in the AML department.

Too hot in Vegas, going back to Staadt for a while.

The JCK show was something though popped in for a few days just to visit that and pick up some diamantes at wholesale.

Made it out of town just in time.

Two dead in shooting near Bellagio fountains on Las Vegas Strip

A friend of mine fed me some video from a stadium Baccarat game because knows that I beat the game, but watching the games as they proceeded it seemed that even tracking all the cards isn't enough to assure a win. I did guide to a win, after had been in the hole before contacting me, but it was slight.

My wife was around during the overseas call, not that the time zone difference was the issue but it was late where we are, but finally she got tired of hearing the play by play analysis, so I had to cut it short and wish luck.

One thing my friend does, which is very hard to overcome in terms of net gain, is bet the tie every single hand. I kept trying to say that you can't do that, but wouldn't listen.

Quote: MDawg

Quote: MDawg

He was playing six decks "only" apparently. 😁


Nico Zoographic
Nicolas “Nicky the Greek” Zoographic is a famous baccarat player who lived during the early twentieth century. He was a member of a group of gamblers who toured European casinos. They made a fortune playing high-stakes games of baccarat, and Zoographic was renowned for his memorization skills and mathematical abilities. His memory allowed him to memorize every card in a baccarat game and alerted his team when the odds were in their favor.

During the early 20th century, Zoographic was a member of the Greek Syndicate, which controlled all baccarat tables. He had an amazing memory, and he was able to remember the order of three dozen cards when played with six decks. Zoographic also had an amazing ability to gauge fluctuations in odds in favor of the bank, and he was able to make the best bets according to that information.
link to original post

If you believe that knowing everything about what cards have been played and what are left makes a difference then it is possible to use one's brain or a computer to derive an edge.

This is not to say that this is the only Baccarat advantage play. There are more mundane but even more effective ones unrelated to perfect memorization.
link to original post

But somehow Nico did win using just that same ability I have, but I think the advantage I hold of occasionally knowing what the first card out of the deck will be is what turns the tide.

Have you looked at the aras plus v2 thread?

Let's just say that I don't know what he is doing.

Big blackjack player playing $25K a hand supposedly denied a smoothie by pit boss at Resorts World Vegas

I watched the video it is unclear to me what is going on (or not going on).

However, it is possible that the guy is currently overcomped. Comps are based on either of these:

Perpetual Comp Machine

10% of actual loss , or up to 40% of theo loss, whichever is greater.

So the guy supposedly lost a million beforehand, that's worth a hundred grand of comps assuming his theo didn't warrant more than that. He might have already burned through that and maybe at this moment he shows as overcomped. Heavy action and extended stays like I have enjoyed in Vegas cannot be sustained by losses, in my case I would have had to lose on the order of millions of dollars per year (one year recently burned through something like a half mill in comps, which would have required a straight loss of $5M that year to justify from the casino's perspective). Monster comps like I have received over the years are sustainable only by theo loss, which in my case is representative of winning, but could for someone else be representative of breaking even or a small loss. This is why the guy who loses twenty grand at a sitting is barely able to stay at the resort in a suite for more than a few nights comped, while the guy who sits at the table playing for hours and neither wins nor loses might have built up enough comps to stay a week.

Getting back to being overcomped - I recall once years ago (before my decade or so hiatus from gaming) I was told that I had negative comps when I asked for something from a pit boss, but the pit boss just overrode it and extended the comp anyway (this was back when pit bosses could issue comps directly for say, restaurants). Maybe in this case, this RW pit boss couldn't override the negative comp balance the guy was showing at that moment.

Or this video could be representative of something as simple as that at RW, pit bosses don't have discretion to comp anything that is not served directly by the cocktail servers. Or it could be a glitch - When RW first opened, I clocked them for six figures that same night, and ended up having to pay for my own late night meal at their food court, because their system wasn't working yet and hadn't applied any comps to my account.

When I am at RW playing, but not staying, and I want something like a meal at the Crockford's butler service area, or at a restaurant, I don't ask a pit boss I ask a host to load the comp onto my player card.

Things definitely have changed from the way it was a couple decades ago. For example the cigarette / cigar girl: At Cosmo I have asked for cigars for friends, and the girl can't simply hand them over, the pit boss has to look up your account and apply the value of the comp to it on his computer before giving her the okay.

And I will say that overall, RW Vegas has gotten tighter with comps over the past year compared to when they opened.

Quote: MDawg

Too hot in Vegas, going back to Staadt for a while.
link to original post

Back now! was starting to get a little rainy there anyway, after a heat wave.

Already in Tahoe for the next month, celebrity golf coming up.

Not windy, which is nice. Weather about perfect.

The new Harvey's (Caesars' Republic Tahoe) is actually quite nice.

The theme of Caesars' Republic is the wolf - not as in the Wolf Vanderpump restaurant, but as in the wolf cubs Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome.



New carpet,



but it doesn't stop there.

New poker room,



New High Limit,




new pretty much everything on the Casino floor



Revamped lobby



This is the prior table games area, which has been slight revamped.



Mountain Bar is the same.



Same old Sports Book however.



The balcony suite we staycationed in for a week is the same, not upgraded yet, but same beautiful view of the lake still too.



We'll be up here in Tahoe another couple of weeks at least, may go back and stay for a bit in another balcony suite, or try the 16th floor Harrah's butler suites, have not stayed in any of those Harrah's suites in a couple decades or so. Harrah's Tahoe is very much the same on the ground floors, but at least they did revamp their top suites recently.

So if I play say 200 hands of Spanish 21 at $5/hand with a 0.5% theo loss of $5, I should get $2 in points (40% of the theo loss), but if I lost $200 of my buy-in, they may adjust it after I leave and add $18 of points (10% of the actual loss)?

200 X $5 = $1,000
$1,000 X 0.5% = $5
$5 X 40% = $2
OR,
$200 (loss) X 10% = $20

Dinner: $23.50 in points excluding tax and tip.

My card balance keeps changing after the fact, and this could explain why. I only got $1.10 in points instead of $2 or $20, and I don't know if they entered in my 2nd $100 buy in. I only got 4 cents in points when I lost a $25 match play on the pass line, so maybe they are only paying 10% of the theo loss in points at this place.

I'll leave this casino with a point balance one day and come back weeks or months later and point balance is a few hundred off from where I left it and maybe even at an even dollar amount like they rounded it up or down to the nearest dollar after they did some more calculations while I was gone. I would hope they add $22.50 to it minus the $1.14 I've already gotten. But I did win a 500 point food coupon at the kiosk, so that's why I ate there or it expires. I wound up leaving a $5 cash tip to the waitress since I can't use points to tip the waitress. If I used a credit card instead of points, they'd add 3% onto the bill for the CC fee, but then I could add a tip not in cash.

Quote: ChumpChange

So if I play say 200 hands of Spanish 21 at $5/hand with a 0.5% theo loss of $5, I should get $2 in points (40% of the theo loss), but if I lost $200 of my buy-in, they may adjust it after I leave and add $18 of points (10% of the actual loss)?

That is similar to what we usually did but 10% of loss and higher was usually for the bigger gamblers.

Quote: MDawg

The new Harvey's (Caesars' Republic Tahoe) is actually quite nice.

The theme of Caesars' Republic is the wolf - not as in the Wolf Vanderpump restaurant, but as in the wolf cubs Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome.
...

Fontainebleau has a restaurant with the wolf+R&R theme too. Menu looks nice, never been in it.

The decor in this place looks remarkably like Foxwoods in CT. No relation of course, but they could have a contractor in common.

How is the baccarat? Do they have sidebets?

Up here I still play a reserved table, and since I do not bet those exotics other than very occasionally the tie (in Vegas there are periods where I have bet the Banker 6 bet, but at least one of the Majors has discouraged that by cutting away a full deck and half at Baccarat making it harder to count down or track the 6 bet), I might play a standard table


or one with all those side bets.



Sorry that the pic is out of focus but I believe the sides bets are all the ones you will find at Station Casinos Vegas.

They have both kinds up here in high limit (Midi Bacc), at either Harrah's or Caesars Republic, but even the Midi Bacc table with side bets is a commission table.

I believe the mini bacc table at Harrah's (maybe there is also one at Caesars' Republic, but I don't know) has all those side bets too.

Jon Pardi gets into the casino spirit!



Time was, all the same big celebrities who would play in Vegas would play at Harrah's Tahoe showroom, and even before that and before my time, I believe they might have even played Reno.





I think by the time I was coming a lot to Tahoe, in the very late 1990s and very early 2000s, things were fading, but I think Harrah's Tahoe still drew some big names.

These days the outdoor Caesars Republic venue is place to perform in Tahoe. I don't know if Jon Pardi is considered A List, but he put on a good show and we were in the suites so there was food, hosted open bar, and not too many people in the suite itself relatively uncrowded.

Quote: MDawg

...
Sorry that the pic is out of focus but I believe the sides bets are all the ones you will find at Station Casinos Vegas.

They have both kinds up here in high limit (Midi Bacc), at either Harrah's or Caesars Republic, but even the Midi Bacc table with side bets is a commission table.

I believe the mini bacc table at Harrah's (maybe there is also one at Caesars' Republic, but I don't know) has all those side bets too.
link to original post

Thank you very much! That's 5 Treasures. Station has Frog. Both are good, but 5 Treasures brings the fun!

Frog is a little tougher; makes me feel, you know, jumpy.