Baccarat Win little, lose big?

GERT REAL . Leave Fantasy Island .

 

I think I'm the one who doesn't get it. I have been hearing people recommend leaving when you are ahead for years as the indispensable trait a gambler needs to have to be successful. I just don't / can't see it or understand the advice.

If you're playing a positive expectation why would you stop as a result of having a positive outcome??? Just keep playing!

If you're on a negative expectation--well there's no point in talking about that since in that case you should never have played at all.

This is the advantage play forum, so I assume that everyone here plays with an edge, which means there's never a reason to stop or leave beyond daily time constraints for sleep and rest.

The whole thing mystifies and confounds me. I think this has more to do with me than all of you. It's like there's a hole in my mind missing the concept I need to understand.

I am trying guys. And thanks as always for putting up with my ignorance on subjects like this. HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!

 

A game of pure Luck is not considered advantage play .

 

Let me ask Frank, do you apply this philosophy in any other place in your life? When you're full from eating do you just keep eating? If you've reached your destination in your car do you just keep driving? If you're out for a walk do you just keep walking until you can't walk anymore? When you're shopping at the grocery store do you just keep filling your car till it can't hold another item? You see where I'm going with this. If you have a reasonable goal at the casino why would you stay there longer if you've reached your goal. If you have the edge over the casino why would you not have a goal if you knew you could come back tomorrow and do the same thing. What could possibly be the point of just playing and playing and playing. The only way you would do that is if greed was a major motivator in your life. You would do that if you had no faith that you could come back and do it again. It's the hoarder mentality, that enough is never enough. When I reach my goal it never even occurs to me to keep playing. But again, I'm not a gambler. At all. My wife is the gambler in the family, she's the one who cannot stop if she's winning. Or losing for that matter. She just plays and plays until she runs out of money. My best friend from high school is the same way. He will not leave the casino and the slots until every credit card is maxed out for the day. He eventually had to quit going because his wife threatened to leave him. He went to the casino with me once years ago and I left him there, stranded, because he refused to leave. He was up over $1,000 and he just kept playing and playing until he lost it all long after I had left.

I have the edge over the casino, I make my goal and I leave. Playing any other way makes no logical sense to me. What could be the possible point of just playing and playing. I don't get it.

 

It which case, close the Roulette and Baccarat sections on this board? People like to create strategies, as you point out, the maths remains the same. Bacc and Roulette will always be neg expectant endeavours, whether people on this board should play them, well that's up to them.

Personally I think you have to take into account what effort is needed to give the player the edge. If you just sit there and bet, then yeah, play for a week before you burn out, if on the other hand, you have to maintain iron clad discipline, performing all kinds of calculations, well you won't be able to remain fresh after a few hours.

If your culinary skills are anything like your Roulette claims, then that explains everything, Mr Baker, arffff

 

As always Mr. Spike great analogies and I love that we are both having trouble understanding each other. If it was only me not being to understand you it would be a bigger blow to my ego.

Yes, I apply this philosophy to almost all other areas of my life. However, it does not result in over eating or gas pouring out on the tarmac. My goals are inherently finite and close-ended. They are not similar.

I had goals when playing progressives. Very strict goals in fact!

1. Never play when the progressive was low!
2. Always play when the progressive was high (over a certain point)
3. Never leave once you start a play until the progressive was hit and down. (I could leave, but only if I passed off to a partner)

When casino promotions started becoming a thing and progressive play was no longer the only thing I did, I had to set alternative goals. If there's no obvious jackpot to hit and end your workday then one needed to make a decision on what a "day" is... I had three main criteria.

1. A certain number of hours, 8, 10, 12, etc...
2. A certain number of points on the slot club card.
3. A certain number of hands played in a day.

What do all those things have in common? I won't bury the lead.

All of them were decided when I walked out my door in the morning. None of them were influenced by what happened to me once I made it to the casino. Winning or losing never influenced my decisions in anyway. All my decisions were made at home at the point of a pencil with calculator in hand.

It is possible to lose doing something in your favor and win doing something with negative expectancy. Therefore, none of my goals were subject to results or the vagaries of random chance & fluctuation. To me, setting goals based on winning or losing, would be like planning my schedule on the flip of a coin. I can't imagine a calendar schedule entry that reads, "flip coin at 1PM and go right in the event of heads and left should it come up tails."

I had goals as completely vague and hard to understand as playing 9AM-5PM. (no lunch hour) [extended to 7PM if Natasha, the Azerbaijani bartender was on shift...I miss her.]

Would you go into your job as a car sales person, where you are scheduled to work from 10AM - 6PM and leave work at noon just because you sold three cars by 11:45AM? Do car sales people set win limits, or max sales goals for a day? I think not.

Gambling is simply a job to me with an hourly wage that's calculable down to at least four decimal places. Get in as many hours as possible and don't forget money is only a tool and ends to a mean--it is not an end, in and of itself...

“Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last stream poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.” Native American Proverb.

~FK

 

The only reason you would do this is in the back of your head you believe what you're doing is not going to last. That someday it's going to stop and you don't know when that day is so you just play and play and play while you still can. And indeed it did stop, did it not? Aren't those days gone forever when you can take advantage of those machines? What I do has no expiration date, it will always work. There's no rush, there's no hurry, set a goal make the goal, leave. It would be pointless to play past the goal because if you want more money just set a higher goal. You want a $10,000 goal, have a big enough bankroll and make a $10,000 bet. It doesn't matter if your goal is $5 or $10,000 the wheel doesn't know the difference, the method I use doesn't know the difference. A unit is a unit.

 

There is truth in your statements, but it seems obfuscated by concepts I do not grok.

Yes, it is true that when we found something that was almost too good to be true (and yet was) we tried to play as much as possible, since we knew it would not last... and it never did. Played a three meter progressive once that could hit, but never reset and just kept getting higher forever. The last quarter 4K I hit on the bank was $465...for four 5's...LOL. The SF was $1750 (already hit it twice for over $1000) and the Royal was $6500. They shut the bank down and moved the money.

If you find something good you do it as much as possible.

I still fail to understand limiting your play based on "winning a unit"?

This honestly, makes less sense to me than anything else we've ever talked about.

Doing something in your favor, that one should be doing, should not ever be truncated, stopped, or cut-short by success at the venture.

If you are playing with an edge, why the hell would you stop when you win?

------------

I'm having a duh moment...

 

I would also ask this question:

When you have reached your win goal and stopped playing, how much time, and what events need to occur before you consider the next time you play to be separate from and disconnected to when you stopped playing the last time???

Explain why and how those events and the passage of time makes your next play any more unrelated to your last bet, as two hands played in a row.

P.S. If you don't want to answer just plead the 5th. I know you've had a lot of grief over the years from people like me. I am not trying to grief you. I am trying to understand you...I am failing most horribly.

 

We're dealing with random events, nothing is connected to anything. The current outcome is not connected to the last outcome in any way, let alone connected to tomorrow's outcomes. They are completely independent of each other, each spin is an independent event or it's not random. I'll just come back the next day and tap into the never-ending stream of independent events take what I want and leave.
This is one of the reasons why I chose roulette because they can't change the game. It will always be a constant stream of random events there's nothing they can do about it. For instance, after Thorp wrote his book, the casinos basically changed blackjack forever, for the most part. They can't change roulette, all they could do is get rid of it and they never will because they make too much money from it.

 

I may have understood that. Let me mule it over and I'll get back to you tomorrow. Visiting a dying friend in the hospital for rest of day...

 

Let`s put it this way that the roulette EC are easier to handle than the game of Baccarat .

 

I keep saying that if bac had more than one stream of information I would play it, but it doesn't. Some people here say it does but so far they haven't demonstrated one that works.

 

Ver simple : for the bacc cats " No way out " .Take it or leave it .

 

You made me reach that same conclusion. The negative factor in Roulette is zero, but we can make a defensive bet on it. Ex: If the value of the unit is R$50.00 we can put R$1.50 at zero to earn R$48.50 or R$54.00 in profit and if we lose it will be R$51.50.

 

I see that the al-relax retard has returned, yet again, hey hey.

 

Why would you bet on zero, it has just as much chance of showing up as the 18 black losing pockets. Why don't you pick one of those at random, that would be the same as betting on zero.

 

OK, I thought about everything you said, and the peculiar thing is we seem to be in agreement.

You said, "with random events, nothing is connected to anything." This is exactly my stance. In my funny article, "Catching the Tabula Rasa Fairy" I joked that people who keep trip records don't understand that since they are actually sampling independent random events, a record of what happened "today" was no more or less a valid reckoning of results than recording your results since the last time you cleaned out your belly-button lint or had a solid bowel movement.

When I was a full time pro gambler I kept exactly ONE type of record. I kept running life-time records for each game type including hours played. So I had one for Rapid-Five-Ways, Flush-Attack, Frontier 3-Meter, Deuces, JKR, etc... I did not total anything or make a separate record at the end of a day or month or even year.

Because of this modality I would have actually had a really tough time answering the question, "How are you doing today on the 5-Ways?" I would probably have pulled out my calculator which had 10 non-volatile memories and looked up the one which contained my 5-Way results and given you my total earn up to that date. If that question was posed in year two of my 5-way play I could have told you I had earned exactly $49,285 at $92.34 per hour. I could not have told you how I was doing that particular day without counting down my in-pocket BR, and giant bucket of quarters, which I never did in the casino. You know that whole, "you never count your money when you're sitting at the table" thing...

So if we agree that two hands played in a row and two hands played days apart are functionally identical and not related to each other (Seems we do agree) I'm even more confused by your "leave after wining a unit" statement.

When you return you're starting right back up where you left off. You also agree that nothing changes and the game is a "never-ending stream of independent events". In my mind this means leaving served no purpose. Seems to me like if you're returning to an identical game you never really left.

See in progressive play, leaving serves a very easy to understand function. After hitting the progressive you have to leave and stay gone so regular citizens (We called them "pumpers") can play and pump the meter back up for you. When you return to the casino, the meter is no longer reset and exactly as you left it. It's different. Leaving and coming back later actually alters the return of the game.

I think my progressive experience is really getting in the way of me understanding this dynamic in non-progressive play. Leaving after the progressive gets hit make perfect sense to me. Leaving after hitting a "win goal" does not. And I'm sorry because I know it makes sense to you and I just think too differently to comprehend your reasons. I must be driving you crazy by now...I am sorry. Perhaps, we should let this topic go.

Hay look we really tried. I really appreciate you putting up with what for you must be all my dense stupid questions.

I hope all my prattling helped you to get my POV better as well.

P.S. If you're not annoyed with me I'm happy continuing the chat. I just wanted to give you an easy out. I know I can be frustrating...even to me...LOL.

 

Now I'm the one that's confused. The purpose of leaving was I made my goal. If I made my goal, what will be the purpose of staying? If I was working in a factory that ran 24/7 and I was done with my shift, and that was my goal to finish my shift, why would I stay longer than that. Are you implying I should stay at the factory job just because it continues to run 24/7? That seems to be what you're saying and I don't get it.

 

OMG: I think I got it. I walked away from the computer and made coffee and I think I get it now. I honestly can't believe it took me this long.

You acknowledge that each play is random independent event. For you leaving after reaching your win goal is just a personal choice to make your daily play finite, like I decided once when playing 2-Pair 678 JKR at the Hilton in the sports book, that I would go home when they started playing disco music on the intercom after midnight.

Obviously, I didn't think disco music playing altered my earn, it was just a convenient way to know it was around midnight, I'd been there enough hours for one day and it was time for bed.

You don't think leaving changes anything, you were just telling me your system, how you do it and I kept trying to attach more significance to it. Arrgh.

What finally made the penny drop is I remember a change girl at the Hilton asking me why I always left at the same time and I said, "Because their playing disco." Seriously, screwed me up the next day, because the change girl thought I had meant I didn't like disco and thought it was "unlucky". She told the manager and they removed the tape. LOL. You can imagine my surprise when I glanced up at the clock the following night and it was 3:00 AM and still NO-DISCO. Huh? I inquired, and was told she had taken care of it for me. There would be no more of that unlucky music...