Baccarat Research for a script

Hello All!
Apologies that this question isn't directly related to the rules of the game but I've hit a dead end in my research!

Basically I'm writing a script for my university course right now and I'm struggling to find information on House Profits.

I would be incredibly grateful if anyone could help me with any information or re-direct me to some sites that are suitable for this kind of research.

My question is: how does the house make a profit on holding a game/how much profit do they make?

I'm looking at someone running a private game. What kind of percentage would the house take compared to the buy-in for example?

Just for reference, in my plot the main character is a student who sets up their own gambling ring for a group of rich kids in order to make himself some money, so I'm looking to make it realistic in terms of how much he could conceivably make in one evening with 14 players?

Any help would be really welcome!

 

What a story ! Those system vultures always come up with new tricks for freebies .



ROFLMAO.

 

Casinos win because they have enough bankroll to outlast the ups and downs of wins and losses. Most gambler don't have anything near these levels of bankrolls. Most gamblers can't quit while they are ahead. In fact you can find evidence that casinos make way more from gamblers than that slight house advantage that most people think is the profit that they make. It's in their corporation yearly earnings reports. They have to tell what they really make to their stockholders. It's commonly around 18% to 22%. The house edge on table games is from 1.2% to 5.4%.

You character running a casino, in one evening, could lose everything. So you could make him sweat losing everything and then hanging in there after all. Or he could go broke and commit suicide. He might get his bankroll from a loan shark and then get killed for losing it. It all comes down to how flowery you want the ending. He needs so much money that he has no fear of the players. You never know when a lucky streak will happen. There are also the idiots that think something must be due. It's so common that it has a name in the dictionary. It's called gambler's fallacy or gambler's ruin. There are tons of magical beliefs and superstitions held by all kinds of gamblers. It's easy to make a stressful moment in your story. Have fun.

 

LOL I'm not sure what system vultures are but I am legitimately hoping for answers. I'm on the screenwriting course at London's UAL going into my final project for my Masters.
Not sure what to do to prove this while protecting my personal data but here's hoping someone believes me and is happy to help.

 

OK that's very interesting... The loan shark idea especially as I hadn't considered him loosing on a night being a cause for obstacles in the story.
Also I wonder where I can find some yearly earnings reports for Casinos? I'll have a look online and see what I can dig up.

Thanks!

 

That's what I did when challenged that casinos make way more than the math says they should. I found it in the section on earnings from table games. I got it from the first casino that I visited that was publicly traded and had earnings reports. It was about a year ago so I don't know where it was. It worked well enough to shut up a big mouth of a mathZombie. MathZombies are people that think you can't beat a casino because the odds are against you. So I challenged him to what they really make which made him a confirmed liar. The casinos make more money because almost all gamblers are not skilled at winning. They get to a point so far down that they run out of room to maneuver. At that point everything becomes desperation.

 

I have seen threads elsewhere on Casinos loosing money and assumed it was due to bad luck with players winning too much on slot machines but it's much harder to find numbers on losses from card games.

At the end of my plot I need it to go in my main character's favour so I should keep him alive in the long run, but give him some hurdles along the way. In the final Act The "gambling den" turns into a bit of a con and the lead character uses his private game to rinse the villain of all his money.

Originally I was thinking of going the "Molly's Game" direction where he get's tipped and takes a rake to make profit, but being at risk as "the house" elevates the threat in the plot more, so I'm definitely looking into that!

 

I went looking for you, I knew where to look.

https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReports/PDF/NYSE_MGM_2019.pdf

 

In that picture you will notice that slots lose less for their players than the table games do. That is because the table games players think they are smarter than those dumb slot players. It's too funny. Cards, Dice, Roulette, and Baccarat. These are games for really smart players. Duhh? I very small handful of gamblers really know how to win year after year. These are always the quiet ones that try to look stupid like a carefree tourist. They sneak in, take a nice, but not obscene, win off the casino and exit making noises like it was all luck.

 

Yes I can help you with this. My father Ted Kneeland was a movie producer and writer and I'm a published book author. I think I know exactly what you need.

We should have this discussion off forum I think. It would unsettle folks on this site.

Find me on Facebook. I have hidden there under my real full name.

 

Please note that the vast majority of gamblers have severe cognitive distortion and thus coming to a site for gamblers to get information on gambling is actually a terrible idea. I have now spent four full years studying the psychology of gambling and its pitfalls. Yes I can help.

 

That report is super informative! Thanks for sharing. It'll be a long read but well worth it. Thanks for all the help!

 

Frank, it's starting to sound a little contrived to me. So I'll just ask. Are you a licensed board certified Psychologist or gambling addiction therapist? Those are great qualifications if you are.

There are stages that most gamblers go through. They start with simple progressions and then move up to magical thinking. This might be the cognitive distortion that you are referring to. They then give up on most of those simplistic approaches and try elaborate systems made up of complex rules in order to create the illusion that their obfuscation schemes somehow makes the odds work in their favor. Then they abandoned all attempts to beat the game and become math experts that support only an absolutist sort of a frequentist form of mathematical Nazism. At this level they consider themselves expert gamblers.

All gambling addiction therapist repeat and stand behind the same lie. They treat their clients by telling them that you can't win because the odds are against you. So why try? This is an attempt to get the troubled gambler to give up. At that point the healthcare practitioner tries to put the unsuccessful gambler on a different course in life. So failure is the path to the cure for this process. There are chemicals in the brain that allow a troubled gambler to suspend logic and to reside in the pleasure center of their brains while gambling. This condition is real. But it can be treated by education and discipline.

What healthcare addiction specialists won't give or can't give to cure their unsuccessful gamblers is a way to win. That is because they don't know themselves. So this viscous cycle of treatment goes on and on with terrible results. The cure rate for gambling addiction is almost likened to a crime. But that is what society likes right now so that is the landscape for healthcare and gambling.

So I would be very careful who says they can treat gambling problems. The way things stand now you need to be licensed and certified or you might get sued into the next century.

 

Have you ever read the story of Henry sugar by Roald Dahl? Soon to be adapted by netflix

You should do a spin off. Henry sugar has a son and teaches him how to do precognition. The son then offers rich kids to play a fair dice game with no house edge. You don't have to worry about boring research into house holding odds. You can research precognition and remote viewing which is much more fun and will make the story more interesting.

You can explore ideas like, what is luck? And is luck hereditary?

 

You seem to be inquiring as though you don't know who I am. If true, remind me to fire my publicist. I Started "Gambling with an Edge", the radio show. I got Bob Dancer as my co-host. I passed on the name for the show to Bob after leaving. He wanted to go in different directions. Ring any bells?

Well since you asked, I'll give you the whole unedited history. You may wish to grab a some tea or a nice glass of wine, I'd recommend a woody Cabernet.

After writing the first draft of my book on Video Poker Progressives, I put it out to exactly 30 test readers. It took me about 2 years to write that first draft.

I was very careful to try to get people evenly distributed across the full spectrum of gambling. Five in each category.

1. Never gambled at all not interested and never will.
2. Never gambled but always wanted to.
3. Have gambled a few times, but not regularly.
4. Gamble frequently, at least once a week.
5. Problem pathological gamblers.
6. Professional Gamblers.

Oddly, and I'm still trying to figure out why, the people with NO INTEREST in gambling loved the book the most, and rated it a 10 out of 10.

The Pro gamblers already knew everything I was saying and found it boring with too much pointless humor.

Category 2-4, really liked it and rated it highly, but with varying levels of utility.

Of the FIVE category 5 people I gave the test copy of the book to: Three of them simply emailed, or called me, and said they couldn't read it. They said it was too painful. I had offered all of my test readers cash money, but this was a task you couldn't pay someone to do if they had a gambling problem. It chalenged their core-beliefs.

One person in this group, set the book on fire, and tossed it on my lawn. I never heard from them again.

The fifth reader in the "problem gambler" category was my editor's girlfriend.

She attempted suicide half-way though Chapter 4, after texting Michael (my 1st editor) why she was "ending it". Suffice it to say, it's a citation I didn't want.

At 12:05 AM on my 21st Bday I began my career as a Professional gambler. It was my job, nothing else. I have never gambled if I wasn't getting paid to do it. I had no idea this thing could be so destructive to people.

Seven hours in an emergency room praying your best friend's love doesn't die, because of something you said, fixed that...

I did 3.5 years of additional research into gambling addiction and treatment. Then I did 2 years of re-writes and eventually published 9 years later.

Since publishing, I decided I wanted to become a full time psychologist. I was 2 years into a four year degree in substance abuse and domestic violence counseling.

THEN PANDEMIC

Here's link to a text version of an interview I did with the leading researcher in gambling addiction in the country. He was a guest on my show 4 separate times.

https://www.mgnccloud.com/index.php/s/EJ2y2xtjxezF5F2

If you have still have doubts as to my qualifications, I cannot provide more.

 

I wanted to say I liked your reference to this paradigm. It's of course, not true. I've always thought that teaching people how to get a real edge was a better way to go. If they don't fall asleep before you're done talking...

A non-gambling-example There was a young kid who was the son of some folks my Mother knew, that supposedly had a "drinking problem" at age 14. They had tried everything...

I asked his parents if I could talk to him. They said, "yes".

I spent a week hanging out with him and taught him how to home-brew honey wine (mead).

So far as I know his "problem" went away. Though he now loves bees...

There are worse things.

 

Hi: If you google "UNLV casino math" I think you will find everything you need and from a reliable source. Good Luck.

 

Oh that's so focused and to the point. If you give her more advice like this she won't need us...

P.S. I know the guy that wrote that blog. He wouldn't drink coffee, because it was a "drug". Just saying. Good guy...good information. They say love makes the world go around, but my vote is for coffee...

 

I'd also recommend:

1. Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (by Natasha Dow Schüll)

2. The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (by Leonard Mlodinow)

AND THE MOST IMPORTANT

3. Best Possible Odds: Contemporary Treatment Strategies for Gambling Disorders by William G. McCown (Author), Linda L. Chamberlain (Author)

I was very fortunate to meet in person, or interview these authors on my radio show.

The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe
John D. Barrow...gets honorable mention, as never before has so much been said about so little so well...

 

So I read this and commented.

"If we liken a descent into pathological gambling to jumping off a cliff, where should we expect to find the psychological community? At the top, preventing people from jumping? Sadly, no. At the bottom, catching people when they fall? Um... no again. Closer to the truth, we'll find them silently waiting at the bottom for bodies to hit the rocks and then trying, often fruitlessly, to patch the broken and battered pieces back together again."

How old is this article? The DSM-4 has it as a pathological gambler but the summer supplement DSM-4.5 and following DSM-5 has it now as gambling addiction.

Surprisingly enough to me, I find myself in full agreement with you. Finally someone that might teach others some day has figured it out. I know first hand. My discussions with healthcare providers on this topic have met with people best described as being addicted to their paying clients. They have no interest in anything other than fulfilling charts that validate DSM-5 criteria and making sure that accounting is happy with the assessments and documentation. If you do get board certified and licensed, ( somebody likes your dissertation ,) I sympathies with you in your new world of bureaucratic red tape.

"Q: What is the current treatment success rate for treating problem gambling and how do the current stats compare to those of years gone by?

A: Previous treatment success rates were generally abysmal, usually around 5% at the end of a month. We know that a subset of people can greatly be helped by the Twelve Step model pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous. However, this treatment is often irrelevant to the needs of the gambler, especially if it is misapplied. It rarely is effective, in my opinion, without other interventions."

Might I suggest teaching a problem gambler (addicted gambler) to win? It's like teaching a child not to run out into traffic. At first it's a rule or a whipping. But later in life it makes perfect sense.


"Q...What, if anything, is currently being done for people with serious gambling problems who simply haven't been fortunate enough to lose yet?

A: Present treatment has often been successful when it teaches people the basics of probability theory. But this is hard to do. We have an innate tendency to believe that two or three events always indicate a trend, this is just the way evolution or Mother Nature has constructed us. We do this all the time, but it's only disastrous when wagering."

Exactly like I said. All of the known knowledge regarding gambling and odds is a fallacy being perpetuated by the lack of knowledge on this topic.

"Q : I remember reading in your book, Best Possible Odds, about some marvelous studies using skin conductance and EKG's done into how people get a rush thinking they have found patterns in random events and that when they were told the number sequences were completely random they lost interest and stopped enjoying the activity. I believe recent studies have linked this to dopamine pathways and even likened the effect to doing cocaine. Could you elaborate on the recent research and how this affects gamblers?

A: This is fascinating research that has since been replicated many times. We used to think that the major purpose of dopamine being released in the brain was to give us pleasure when we did something related to survival. The field of neuroscience is moving fast. That view is generally regarded these days, as not quite right. We now know that this dopamine-related pleasure is probably just a side effect. The real reason dopamine is released is that it sensitizes us to situations where we are being rewarded. It makes rewards more noticeable, so that we can find them again and indulge. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes tremendous sense. From ahuman perspective, where we are surrounded by randomness, well, sometimes the effects do not work out to our advantage."

Good, you're aware of the current beliefs found by advanced research. That conclusion has tangential, almost subjective, conclusion to it where it is just anecdotal of a possibilities of multiple directions leading to cause. In other words it can't be a root cause. Yet this will likely be a basis for treatment.

"Simply put, if you believe you find a pattern, even in randomness, your brain will release more dopamine than it usually does. This will become a self fulfilling loop. Finding a pattern, even a false one, releases more dopamine, which heightens our belief that we found something in randomness."

This is a subjective conclusion. I can prove it to you. You can take randomness and turn it into a science and a skill that would eliminate any production of dopamine, in the right skilled hands. It's not possible for me to talk you into becoming a heretic. But you have just bumped into an an expert on teaching a successful way to use randomness as a skill to win at gambling. It's based on dropping the magical beliefs and accepting it as coincidental, not probabilistically. Of course the skilled expert must stay in the logic center of their brain and not allow chemicals to ever highjack their ability to stay logical.

"A... And when I told them the real aim of the experiment, they still would not agree with me that games of chance are simply that-chance. The importance of this is that even scientists educated in advanced statistics tend to make cognitive errors, especially when they're winning."

Hahaha! LOL. So true. People are so stuck on attributing meaning to things that are just common randomness and coincidence. That's the first mistake to undue in becoming skilled at randomness. Nothing is ever attached to an explanation for cause and effect. Not even probability or much less magical notions.

"FK ...My own solution to this human deficit has been to try to get people to avoid doing anything involving randomness in-head."

I can see that we would go round and round on this. Let me suggest one idea. Trends only work some of the times. When they work they are a win streak, if they are streaking at the time. They also lose a lot of the times. People that are married to them get disappointed when they don't work. But when they work they signal that they are working in the current state. Therefore a trend that appears to be working is signaling a win streak condition. In this use of gathering information from a trend, randomness & seeing figure formations, the skilled player does not have false expectations. They don't have dopamine production and become desensitized to losing. They in effect fly the plane on the instruments and not on what they feel the plane is doing. The greatest opportunity in gambling does in fact come from reading coincidental opportunities. This tend to supplement a notion for "variable change" when it comes to mathematics, my hypothesis, unproven.

With so much leaning in the direction of leaving trends and patterns behind as some form of cause and effect to be researched I will be real interested in finding out that this research will begin from a position of bias in search of confirmation bias. For me it will probably be a sort of comedy of errors. But money for research is an addiction for some anyway. Can't wait to hear that treatment plan.

"A ...People believe that something, whether it's luck, their skills, the Divine, or whatever, will make them special and enable them to beat the laws of probability."

Hahaha! He doesn't know it yet but this is subjective projection reinforced by currently believed mythical axioms. I know this because everything believed about probability is wrong. Everyone is wrong and I'm right. This is fun being Columbus and wanting to sail off the edge of the world. Don't worry about confirming your first diagnosis. I've been down this road for decades. My adversaries, the mathZombies, and I are in full agreement on this. They are right or I am wrong. I have been teaching people to see my perspective. It's a very slow, self funded, research project with no peer review. I know that you are tempted to categorize this by making up your mind. If not then you should be. It contradicts everything that you believe.

So what would you do with it if I taught you to upset everything you believe about probability? Would you be able to consider that the process of teaching a problem gambler to win might be the cure?

"FK Comment: I’ve had some personal experience with such folk on the online forums. I wish there was more I could do, but from what you are saying, confrontation could be dangerous. I will take that under advisement."

I admit freely that almost all gamblers, be it ignorance or motivation from personality traits, will not solve their problems if they become successful. So I'm not suggesting that winning alone is the cure. Just look what winning the lottery does to some people.

"Q: We've talked a lot about the negative side of things. What would some positive mental attitudes be that might insulate us from gambling problems?

A: Well, if you have knowledge of the underlying mathematics of gambling and can consistently apply it, you are at very low risk for gambling problems."

This is sort of funny. The DR. here is suggesting using math to protect you. Only you can't use math to beat the casino, at least for now that is. He is suggesting that the casino can't be beat because the probability says so. So the positive idea for new gamblers is to save yourself the trouble. I intend to blow everything up. I'll blow up that myth and the supporting math that suggests it. You can win by implementing variable change. That math is proven. All I have to do is make people see it. I'm not angry at the state of math or therapeutic planning. I'm just trying to help. If people were skilled enough they would not take senseless risks. I know the difference between senseless and skill risk taking. One way is a problem and the other way is the execution of near perfection in some extreme cases.

"A ...The idea is to break the connection between the place and the idea of winning."

The idea is to win in the long run aggregate. You do this everywhere you gamble. It's is a known fact if you allow yourself to consider it. This long run winning is clearly demonstrated by skilled card counters and skilled gambling teams regarding Blackjack. How many addicted gamblers are skilled Blackjack players? Anyone bother to research that?

"FK Comment: It is very important to explain that what Dr. McCown is suggesting, “taking a break after a memorable jackpot”, is in stark contrast to the concepts of “quitting ahead” or “leaving the casino a ‘winner’”, which are instead fallacies caused by cognitive biases that are considered risk factors for problem gambling. The best way to insulate yourself from these issues is to keep accurate lifetime records, carry your losses forward and not press the mental reset button every time you leave a casino. For a complete breakdown of this issue see my article, “Catching the Tabula Rasa Fairy”, which was reviewed by Dr. McCown."

I can see from this that you are going to be one tough nut to crack.

"FK ...I would also like to stress what you said about irritation being the normal response to new information. If you are reading this article now and find it anything other than merely interesting, then it could be this natural defense mechanism in play."