Side Bets

The Royal Match (RM) wager is one of the oldest blackjack side bets still available. It pays if the player’s first two cards are the same suit. If the cards form the rare hand KQ suited, then there is a premium payout.  It is intuitively clear that there must be situations where the player has the edge. Quantifying the value that can be obtained through practical methods is where the work of the AP begins.

In this post I considered ordinary blackjack card counting (BJCC) for six decks. The purpose of that post was to compare BJCC to card counting the various side bets for the six-deck shoe game. This post presents the analysis for the two-deck game.

A few days ago I was contacted by an advantage player who asked me to evaluate a new card counting system for Lucky Lucky (LL). I told him I would do the analysis only if he gave me permission to post the results here. He agreed. His e-mail to me was the following:

One of my informal rules for this blog is that I don’t consider ordinary blackjack card counting (BJCC). Any easy Google search reveals myriad resources that give the minutia of every aspect of BJCC. At least three generations of APs have dedicated themselves to this game. For my purposes, the question is: how does BJCC stack up against card counting blackjack side bets? In order to answer this, an analysis of BJCC using parameters similar to those used for blackjack side bets was conducted. This post gives the details of this comparative analysis.

In 2009, I made it my mission to visit every casino in the Las Vegas area and to take note of the proprietary table games and side bets they offered. One side bet (Lucky Lucky) in particular caught my eye, both because I had never seen it before and that it was now wide-spread. I decided to contact the distributors of the game and quickly got to know the young entrepreneurs. They were highly motivated and extremely excited about the rising popularity of their side bet. It was clear that their game and their company were undergoing the type of success that few in the industry realize.

I first considered if the Dragon 7 baccarat side bet was susceptible to a card counting methodology in mid-2011 when it was exclusively a proprietary side bet owned by DEQ that was associated with the commission free baccarat variant EZ Baccarat. Since that time, the patent for both EZ Baccarat and the Dragon 7 bet have expired (see this post). Naturally, Shuffle Master (SHFL, Bally, whatever) pounced on the opportunity to grab the intellectual property.

One of the first games I posted about on this blog was the blackjack side bet Twenty One Plus Three (21+3). In this post, I showed that there was very little possible profit against 21+3, even using perfect play.

Many of the side bets I analyze on this blog are small-time opportunities that are unlikely to get much action from card counting APs. That is not the case with UR Way Egalite (URE) baccarat side bet or its first cousin, Super Pay Egalite (SPE). The ordinary Tie bet allows the player to wager that the result of the hand will be a tie. The Tie bet is effectively unbeatable (see this post and this post).