It’s not entirely unreasonable to liken a casino game to a lover.

They are both capable of taking you on an emotional roller coaster ride from the depths of despair to the peak of adrenalin fueled ecstasy.  They are both capable of costing you a lot of money. They can both be very good to you at certain times while at others they can both be downright cruel.

In romantic terms, Macau, or rather its players, are having one hell of a love affair with the game of high stakes baccarat.

According to Macau’s Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau VIP baccarat accounted for 72% of total Macau casino action during 2010! That’s a staggering US$16.96 billion spent on one game alone…or rather one category of one game since this number doesn’t include what they call ‘mass market’ baccarat.

Putting the number in perspective, it’s more than twice the total revenue generated by all games played on the Las Vegas Strip for the same period.

Empty baccarat tables (pictured above inside the City of Dreams)  must indeed be a rarity in Macau.

Playtech's 'bead road' tracing indicator

Baccarat’s a pretty simple game right?  I mean leaving any exotic variations aside, your plain old garden variety baccarat  gives you 3 bet options and a deal that takes care of itself.  Bet on Banker, Player or a Tie and let the dealer do the rest, and if all goes well, pocket your extra cash.

Why is it though that when you play baccarat, whether online or in a traditional casino, you are usually presented with really confusing looking matrix filled with differ coloured shapes and/or numbers?  Do you need to know what this is all about?  Are you missing out on some crucial information if you don’t?

Well the short answers are: probably not, and no.  But it’s always nice to know what’s going on when playing any real money casino game.  And if you’re a baccarat system player, then these colourful little boxes become very important in the execution of your system (whether that is in fact a good thing or not).

What’s a tracing indicator?

Presented in a number of forms, these boxes/matrices/grids are known as tracing indicators or trend plotters.  Essentially they convey a short history of deal outcomes and serve to highlight any trends.  They are just like the indicators you always find on roulette games showing you which numbers and colours came up on previous spins to tell roulette players whether any patterns are emerging.

Now in the case of roulette, in the absence of an unbiased wheel (lets take this as a given) and a croupier not spinning sections (can’t always take this as a given) outcome history has absolutely NO impact on the outcome of the next spin, as the next spin is an independent event.

In baccarat, (live baccarat and ‘bricks and mortar casino’  baccarat,  NOT RNG) the deal is from a shoe of cards that is depleting.  The cards that have already been dealt from the shoe will have some bearing on which cards will be dealt in future rounds so an element of dependence does exist here.  For this reason baccarat tracers are arguably more useful that roulette history stats…but exactly how useful is a whole other topic.

Tracing indicators are presented in a number of formats. Some of the better known ones are:

• Big Road
• Bead Road
• Big Eye Boy Road
• Small Road
• Cockroach Road

Big Road

Playtech's Big Road. Red circle = Banker Win | Blue circle = Player Win | Green dash = Tie

Above is the big road you’ll find on Playtech’s interface. Each of the symbols depicts the outcome of  each past deal/round, moving from left to right (ie the right is more recent).  It also stacks successive outcomes vertically to illustrate any patterns.

So from the above I know the last round was won by the Banker (right/bottom red circle).  The 2 rounds  before were also won by the Banker, clearly shown as a 3 circle column, then Player, Banker, Player, Banker, Tie and so on.

Easy.  Now I know the winner of prior rounds…but I still don’t know the value of each winning hand.

This is where the Bead Road helps you.

Bead Road

Bead Road - winning hand value

The bead road (this shot again taken from a Playtech baccarat game, simply shows not only the round winner (again: red = Banker | blue = Player | green = Tie), but is also shows you the value of the winning hand.

Again the succession is left (older) to right (recent) and top (older) to bottom (recent).

Here the last few round winners in order from most recent to less recent are:

• Banker with 8;
• Banker with 9;
• Player with 5; and so on.

Big Eye Boy Road | Small Road | Cockroach Road

Shown below are shots of Evolution Gaming’s baccarat tracing indicators.  In addition to the Big Road, you can choose to view the Big Eye Boy Road, the Small Road or the Cockroach Road.

For a detailed explanation of how Big Eye, Small and Cockroach roads are constructed, click here.

He told me the other day about an article in one of his magazines that detailed how a  baccarat dealer somewhere in an American casino had dealt 27 consecutive wins to the Player hand. Amazed at the probability of such an event I asked him to show me the article, which he happily agreed to do.

That was 3 weeks ago, and for one reason or another he has yet to produce the goods, but swears black and blue that this did in fact happen, 27 IS the number, and it is all recorded in print in a very reputable industry periodical.

If and when said magazine is furnished, I’ll do a follow-up piece and fill in the who’s, when’s, where’s and which source, but for the time being have to to be a little scant in this regard so apologies in advance.

Anyway, proceeding on the basis that somewhere in a reputable casino such a streak did in fact happen, I just wanted to ponder the astronomical odds of such an occurrence, as well as the obvious implications for certain systems out there that are touted as sure things.

What are the odds?

Let me just preface the following analysis with the caveat that I’m no game mathematician or maths genius and I’ll be applying what I learned 15 years ago in sixth form permutations and combinations class.  Mrs Arnott was a great teacher though and I aced probability, so I’m pretty confident I’ve got a good handle on it.

So the odds of the ‘Player’ winning a distinct deal (according to the wizard of odds) is 0.446427.  The odds of the Player winning 2 hands in a row is the simple permutation ‘Player win AND Player win’, expressed mathematically as: -

0.446427 x 0.446427 = 0.1984.

The odds of the Player winning 3 hands in a row is simply 0.1984 x 0.446427 (or 0.446427 to the power 3) = 0.089

You get the idea right?   So the odds of 27 Player wins in a row is 0.446427 to the power of 27, or an incomprehensibly minuscule 1 chance in 2,862,449,084.

Let’s just call it 1 in 3 billion.

I think the odds of winning most standard lotteries is around the 1 in 3 million mark.  So to put this streak into perspective, it’s 1000 time more remote than winning a lottery.  Conversely, your chances of winning the lottery are a thousand times better than ever witnessing such a streak.

Streaks do happen

The other sobering lesson to take from this, is that enormous streaks happen. This one is a once in a lifer, but I’m sure a dozen or so consecutive hands has happened quite often.  In roulette terms, black or red winning streaks are common and have led to the undoing of many a faithful Martingale player.  Imagine starting with a $5 bet and doubling up each bet.  Let’s assume there’s no table limit, and you come up against a losing streak of 12 in a row.  Your 13th bet, which will put to $5 up if you win, will be $20,480.

In the very unlikely event that you hit a losing streak of 27 consecutive bets, your 28th will need to be just over $671 million dollars to put you $5 up.

Still want to play Martingale?