A small matter of time

Quote: Wizard

I still say if I could go back in time by 99 minutes, I'd pick baccarat.

Your reasoning, that of having a shoe which would remain unaffected by minor timing or atmospheric changes induced by a new player, is sound.

But Baccarat is still a bad choice - unless the table has a side bet.

At best, the basic Baccarat game is even money, with the occasional higher paying tie. Therefore, the only way to win big is to bet big, and consistantly win. If that happened, it wouldn't take long for the casino to stop the game.


At Keno, or even Roulette, it's easy to include a couple throw-away losing bets, thereby disguising your actions, and still make money, thanks to the long-shot, high payout nature of those games.

Do many Baccarat tables have side bets? Are how often does the high payout hit, and for how much?

It seems to me that even if there was a good side bet candidate, there would be too many other issues to make it work.


Therefore, as was discussed in the other thread about a time-travel / Roulette sci-fi story scenario, the best course of action would be to go to a casino that uses a computer rather than ping pong balls for it's Keno game.

Quote: Ayecarumba

Kidding aside, couldn't the same environmental changes also affect the baccarat shuffle? How quickly do the contents of a shoe turnover?

A Baccarat shoe is like a BJ shoe. It holds 6 or 8 decks.

But, unlike BJ, everybody bets on the same hand, which uses at most 6 cards, and there are no decisions. I.E. Every round of betting used at most 6 cards. Once the cards are inserted into the shoe, the sequence is destined. The ONLY thing that can randomly change it, is if they burn a card with a dealer change. Do they do that?

Therefore, as long as the time traveler shows up after the cards are inserted into the shoe, you're good to go!

Let me address a number of points since my last post. I would pick a baccarat game with no players and a new shoe, which you can identify from the discard pile. The first card determines the number of cards burned, so that would not change. As someone wrote, there is no decision making ability, so the sequence of outcomes would be predetermined.

There are sometimes sides bets in baccarat, like the Dragon Bet, but they seldom offer huge odds. I would stick to just the primary bets -- Player, Banker, and Tie. The nice Vegas casinos should take a $150,000 bet off the street, so it would not be difficult to make $2 million or so, and even mix in enough losses to make it look like you just got lucky.

However, if you must have wins bigger than that, how about play the Power Ball lottery, or something like that, where the draw is televised. A believer in Chaos theory might argue that just buying a ticket 99 minutes before the draw at a gas station in Seattle would likely change the outcome where they draw the balls in Florida. About that, I'm not sure.

If you have the extra words, I would use the opportunity to just explain the rules and procedures of baccarat. You don't need to dwell on the specifics. I think a good writer both teaches and entertains.

You can't go backward in time, only forward. What already happened can't be changed.

If Daryl went through a wormhole and wound up in a place where everything looked like it did 99 mins ago, except Daryl's there, well, that's a different universe. Not only is everything that happens after Daryl arrives obviously affected by him being there, there's also no reason to expect, even if he didn't make any bets, that the numbers would come up in the same order in universe 2 as they did in universe 1.

The same would be true for a horse race or a lottery draw. You're not actually in the same place. There's no reason to expect what happens in the next 99 mins in universe 2 to be the same as what you experienced in the "same" 99 mins in universe 1.

Quote: Wizard

However, if you must have wins bigger than that, how about play the Power Ball lottery, or something like that, where the draw is televised. A believer in Chaos theory might argue that just buying a ticket 99 minutes before the draw at a gas station in Seattle would likely change the outcome where they draw the balls in Florida. About that, I'm not sure.

I hesitate to say more about the story ebcause I think I may have hit on a kind of new idea. But for story purposes it is flatly impossible to win the Powerball Lotto by jumping back 99 minutes.

Quote:

If you have the extra words, I would use the opportunity to just explain the rules and procedures of baccarat. You don't need to dwell on the specifics. I think a good writer both teaches and entertains.

I appreciate the suggestion. I fondly recall learning the basics of celestial mechanics reading Arhtur C. Clarke's short stories. But an SF novel isn't the place to impart knowledge of gambling, just as a gambling story isn't a good place to expound about science (except math). And I still don't know much about Baccarat.

Anyway, hopefully I can find some time this weekend to write the thing. I'm thinking of calling it either "99 Minutes" or "Taking Chances."

Quote: Wizard

However, if you must have wins bigger than that, how about play the Power Ball lottery, or something like that, where the draw is televised. A believer in Chaos theory might argue that just buying a ticket 99 minutes before the draw at a gas station in Seattle would likely change the outcome where they draw the balls in Florida. About that, I'm not sure.

If you change would to could, I'd buy it from Chaos theory. The idea is that the small change has an immeasurable and unknowable consequence. It might just be the status quo (strange attractors and all that jazz, where I'm kinda mangling the theory a lot).

Quote: thecesspit

If you change would to could, I'd buy it from Chaos theory. The idea is that the small change has an immeasurable and unknowable consequence. It might just be the status quo (strange attractors and all that jazz, where I'm kinda mangling the theory a lot).

For that matter, the time travel scheme could be completely successful, but winning the money could have unimaginable unforeseen consequences for the future timeline. Maybe if I win big bucks, there's a catastrophic nuclear war or something. That kind of thinking could paralyze any potential time traveler.

I remember reading an old science fiction story where hunters pay big bucks to go back in time and gun down dinosaurs, but one of them isn't careful enough and accidentally crushes a butterfly. He returns to find a world where the neo-Nazi politician, instead of being a fringe nut, is winning the Presidential election, and all the words in the newspapers are spelled differently than how he remembers them.

I really, really don't like the idea of the baccarat shoe. Most readers will never have played baccarat; that's why I suggested a horse race instead. For that matter, I think that the idea of using the time travel power to go back 99 minutes and gamble is a trivial way for your character to use that power. The way it stands, it feels like the Weird Al Yankovic song where he is abducted by aliens, and as a reward for allowing them to experiment on him, they offer to take him to anyplace in space or time that he cares to go, and he chooses to go to last Thursday, so he can pay his phone bill on time. I'm sure that with the exercise of a little imagination, you can think of many ways that your character(s) could use this time travel in some immensely powerful way, more than just making a few bucks. I also like the idea of unintended consequences, which ties in nicely to the whole time travel paradox shtick.

Quote: mkl654321

I remember reading an old science fiction story where hunters pay big bucks to go back in time and gun down dinosaurs, but one of them isn't careful enough and accidentally crushes a butterfly. He returns to find a world where the neo-Nazi politician, instead of being a fringe nut, is winning the Presidential election, and all the words in the newspapers are spelled differently than how he remembers them.

I read that story in a Sci Fi class in High School. GREAT story.

The company running the time travel hunt would go back and see which dinosaur would die of natural causes, then bring the hunters there a day before it dies, to kill it.

I LOVE Google and Wikipedia. It took about 2 minutes to find it. It was a Ray Bradbury short story called A Sound Of Thunder.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder

Quote: DJTeddyBear

The company running the time travel hunt would go back and see which dinosaur would die of natural causes, then bring the hunters there a day before it dies, to kill it.

A movie based on it came out not too long ago. A B-movie (or direct to DVD, which is the same thing). It's amazing how far B-movies have come and yet remain B-movies

I didn't like the movie too much, though I certainly did see it in the theatre.

Quote: mkl654321

I remember reading an old science fiction story where hunters pay big bucks to go back in time and gun down dinosaurs, but one of them isn't careful enough and accidentally crushes a butterfly. He returns to find a world where the neo-Nazi politician, instead of being a fringe nut, is winning the Presidential election, and all the words in the newspapers are spelled differently than how he remembers them.

Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder

It was made into a movie in 2005. Which was not so good, even with Ben Kingsley.