The only semi-practical counts are for the various side bets that are out there (i.e. Dragon 7).

Or all T's? Bet the tie?

Yup, spots like that are the best. There are other numbers it works too if you somehow had all 3's (much less frequent obviously) you'd also have a lock tie for example. Even with less extreme cases you can obviously have favorable odds.

I've also heard small cards are good for the player and big are good for the bank. I assume this has to do with drawing rules as the big cards will stop certain unfavorable draws for the bank where the small ones make more hands. The banker's advantage is in the drawing rules and different cards effect different draws. The edge here is usually so small and infrequent that's it's not practical from what I've heard but someone smarter/more diligent certainly could be keeping the information to himself.

fwiw I do base my first bet on the burn

I'm not a bacc degen but I usually play my coupons at that game, occasionally just take a flip because I want to, and occasionally sit at a game with a good view of a tv as basically a different type of a watch the game at a bar type experience (yeah, that's probably kind of weird but I enjoy it). Think I've lost roughly every hand since reading Sheets' bacc story betting on banker. They've all just been one time flips or coupons but it's probably been a good dozen in a row. Sick thing was on the first one I just walked by and put a pretty big stack of spare chips on banker and right as the cards were getting dealt I cursed myself thinking I should have gone player in honor of Sheets. Of course player won and I've kind of just stubbornly went with the "better" banker bet every hand since and of course not won any. If I'd have just remembered the player thing on the 1st hand I'd have probably went player on all the others (though who knows they might not have happened or been at the same time if you change that one detail).

I'm tempted to go play a long session with my fool proof poker hand strategy but don't think it would be healthy.

There was something in this forum a while back that discussed AP for standard Baccarat (no dragon). It requires sitting around for potentially hours waiting until < 25 cards remain and a favorable complex count to bet on tie. It is possible to beat but there should be far better opportunities elsewhere.

There is also a complex count for dragon but the yield is not as much as tie because of house limits.

I'm assuming the AP would be betting kelly, hence low limits could never help.

You can get $100,000 down at a VIP table baccarat in a 50%+ advantage situation. It is almost impossible to get that type of edge betting that type of money in other AP situations.

With the classic tie bet advantage remainder where all the cards to be dealt are even, your average gain will be 8% of your entire bankroll, roughly equivalent to the yearly return from the stock market. By contrast the blackjack card counter making a bet at a TC of +5 gains only 0.03% of his bankroll on average.

Another way of looking at this is to say that poker players, blackjack card counters or whatever, spend a huge amount of time betting small into a crappy, tiny edge. There's no real virtue in making lots of bets for the sake of it.

It's strange that we never hear of players being banned due to baccarat play. I'm not disagreeing or even asking for you to elaborate just stating this.

How does a single advantage play situation affect your entire bankroll, as opposed to the money at risk? Does the advantage scale with the players wealth?

It might be easier to estimate the relationship between a +5 wager and the AP's bankroll -- at least easier than a baccarat players -- but it's still pretty sketchy. Why are you calculating advantage using an unknown?

How many cubic feet in a huge amount of time? How tiny is crappy? Did you mean to say "virtue"? If so, could you provide a range for "lots" and explain what you mean by "real" and "it" for me? I would like to lead a virtuous life -- but not too virtuous, you understand. Your answer to these questions might help me properly stake the boundaries.

idk, this past summer i can recall numerous situations where I had a $3k+ bet in on the river where I was 100% ahead. Is that a small crappy edge? I'd say 100% was pretty good especially when I got called.

Not really. The notion that blackjack can be beaten has been impressed upon tens of millions of people through books sold through the last four decades. Blackjack is trivially easy to gain an advantage at (though making big money is much harder).

The situation with baccarat is analagous to the pre-Thorp era of blackjack card-counting. It is a secret known only to a handful of people, there are no books or online guides. It is also much harder to do than at blackjack. From the perspective of the casino, it doesn't really make much sense to bar people from counting cards at bac as, even amongst those few who attempt it, most are negative expectation players.

That said there have been people who have been barred from baccarat, some of whom have been barred publicly.

First, you are comparing apples to oranges here. I was talking about a pre-deal advantage. There's no meaningful way to exploit a post-deal advantage at poker, or for that matter any other card game.

Second, I'm not really down on poker or blackjack, I'm just emphasizing the point that matters is your overall edge or, more accurately your return relative to risk. How that advantage is distributed is irrrelevant from a rational perspective. There might be psychological reasons why people prefer to make lots of small advantage bets, but that's all it is, psychological.

My studies of shoe distributions indicate a per hour return of less than .01% using full kelly and 100% optimal play. I am not aware of any manual counting method to obtain anything better than 70% of optimal play. I do not doubt there are specific instances of very high percentage edges on tie (10% or more). Waiting for 95% of the shoe to be dealt I do not find an attractive opportunity, but to each his/her own.

I am aware tactics are available to take advantage of the casino, such as loss rebates. I am discussing the pure playing strategy aspect on its own merits. For those with access to such perks I am sure the game can become very lucrative for the player.

Our experience is very similar. Without computing the distribution (not advised) or simultaneously doing multiple independent counts, and then waiting for the rare opportunity when one of the many possible counts can be exploited -- there is very little to work with.

You don't have to play every shoe through to the end. That makes a significant difference. Have a look at the card distributions associated with advantageous end-deck subsets. If a lot of those cards are dealt out in the early part of the shoe you want to seek out a fresh pack.

Training yourself to determine whether a tie subset is valuable is harder than, say, memorizing a level-one blackjack count, but a professional level chess or bridge player would find it trivial. Most of the very valuable subsets have recognizeable commonalities.

Your comment about "waiting for 95% of the shoe to be dealt" is irrelevant for the reasons I explained above. Rational gamblers should not be interested in the amount of action they get.