娱乐场台桌游戏发明创新的关键是抽水或佣金，罗杰•斯诺号脉对了——没有人喜欢佣金！首先是玩家不会喜欢，即便赢着支付从也是“自己嘴边的肉被生生抢走一块”，心理上就极为不爽，所以当下中国民间娱乐中，围绕此的争执几乎是时时发生的，几乎占了一大半的游戏时间；其次是荷官不爽，超负荷工作真金白银的压力，抽水的计算是收取是过于繁杂的工作内容；最后是娱乐场老板不爽，毕竟娱乐场的生存在于抽水，而抽水总量的多少是佣金率与游戏速度两项因素决定的，因为游戏设计不当导致抽水过程繁杂而降低了游戏的速度，最终抽水的总量就要下降。所以，业内看到，博彩娱乐业从民间到企业化的过程，核心要点就是规范简化抽水的过程。Baccarat几百年发展的历史，更是一部抽水优化的历史，但是程阳要说的是，全球博彩业台桌游戏抽水游戏理论上的偏差，导致了所有的优化都是“只见树木，不见森林”的短视。台桌游戏大师罗杰•斯诺也不例外，罗杰•斯诺号脉对了，但是开的药方却是错了！

Escaping Vigorish

By Roger Snow  Thu, Apr 27, 2017 

Speeding up the game by eliminating the speed bump

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To vig or not to vig. That is the question.

Whether ‘tis wiser in the pit to

suffer the coins and calculations of outrageous fortune—WTF is 5 percent of $2,375, anyway?—or to take up lammers and collect them later? Talk about a sea of troubles. And by opposition what, stop the practice altogether and lose money?

Ay, there’s the rub.

Whether or not casinos should continue charging a vig (or a “tax” or a “commission”) on certain bets in certain games is indeed the question. The answer, however, comes not courtesy of Shakespeare’s Crown Prince of Denmark but rather Mattel’s 8-Ball of Magic: “Outlook not so good.”

Scour the world and you’ll find a handful of games that deduct commission from some or all winning bets: 1) baccarat; 2) pai gow poker; 3) pai gow tiles; 4) three-card baccarat; and 5) fan tan.

OK, to be honest, you really had to do some serious scouring the find the last two, but hey, they’re out there. You just have to know where to look. And then be willing to go there.

Which we were. And we did. And lived to tell about it.

Over the next two months, we will dig into each of these games—two now, three in May—and explain how to best remove commission from them, if such is your desire. But before shoveling the first scoop of dirt out of the ground, let’s clear a little underbrush out of the way.

The truth is that nobody likes commission. Nobody. Not the customers, who occasionally find themselves in disputes over its accumulation; not the dealers, who constantly find themselves calculating 19/20ths of any amount they can count; and most definitely not the casinos, who invariably find themselves looking for ways to speed up game play, not grind it. To. A. Halt.

Commission endures not because people think it’s good and wholesome and fun; rather, because of the understandable unwillingness to fix what appears to be working just fine, thank you very much. Gamblers play the hell out of these games—well, the hell out of baccarat and pai gow poker, anyway—so why monkey around?

But maybe, just maybe, the slow pace of change is about to change.

 

Baccarat

By far the most popular game in the commission club, with 10,000 tables around the world, and growing. And growing and growing and growing. Everyone thinks baccarat comes from Asia, but it actually comes from Italy. So, basically, it’s the opposite of spaghetti.

【程阳说明】面条——面条在中国有将近四千年的历史了，而同时期的意大利还没有这玩意儿，还是马可波罗在1200年时在中国“发现”面条并将其带回意大利。

In the standard, commissioned version, casinos take back 5 percent of all winning Banker bets. Necessity is the mother of this convention: The game’s drawing rules favor Banker over Player 46 percent to 45 percent, with ties accounting for the rest. If casinos didn’t collect a toll on Banker wins, that’s all people would bet on. And then, faster than you can count from 0 to 9, the table would hemorrhage all its chips out of the rack.

https://www.casinopedia.org/terms/r/rack

The most widely used version of commission-free baccarat takes one specific event—Banker winning with a three-card total of seven points—and makes it a push. The second-most widely used version takes another specific event—Banker winning with a point total of six—and pays it 1 to 2. While both methodologies result in similar house advantages, the former is considerably faster.

 

Pai Gow Poker

Though not a juggernaut in the class of baccarat, pai gow poker—the slow game with the funny name—is hardly a lightweight. Instead, it’s one of the most popular poker-based titles in the history of table games.

And also unlike baccarat—or pai gow tiles, three-card baccarat and fan tan—this is not a game with an overwhelming Asian clientele. It’s much more Occidental than Oriental: it’s poker-based; it’s from Southern California; it’s played almost exclusively in the United States and Canada. You would be hard pressed to find a single table in a single casino in Macau, Singapore or Malaysia, or anywhere in the Far East, come to think of it.

Casinos typically employ two countermeasures to create a house advantage on pai gow poker: they win ties; and they charge players 5 percent commission when they beat the dealer. Combined, these yield a mathematical edge of about 2.6 percent.

Because pai gow poker’s earning power is already handicapped by its leisurely pace and propensity for pushes, when casinos stop charging commission, they typically start doing something else. They have to reclaim that lost edge back, right? Yes, with the notable exception of Washington state, where custom dictates not charging commission nor implementing some new rule to goose up the house edge. In other words, geographical proximity notwithstanding, if you’re going to play pai gow poker, the Pacific Northwest and its 1.5 percent house advantage is like literally your best bet.

There’s good news if you don’t operate a casino in the state of Washington and you don’t want to continue charging commission. You’ve got options. Lots and lots of options:

If the dealer’s entire seven-card hand contains less than a pair, all player bets win 1 to 2; if the player’s entire seven-card hand is Queen-high, all player bets push; if the dealer has a Joker in his hand, all player bets push; when the dealer’s two-card hand is 9-high, all player bets push; when the dealer yawns and checks his watch twice in a 10-minute interval, all bets made by left-handed players with red hair lose half their bets.

Hey, just seeing if you’re paying attention.

To be continued . . .

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Last month we began a quest—a quest to identify which table games charge commission on winning bets, a quest to understand the mathematical and historical rationales behind it, a quest to balance the pluses and minuses of its practice, and, ultimately, a quest to determine—if that’s what you want—the best way to 86 this 5 percent once and for all.

Stuff that up your windmill and spin it, Don Quixote.

Having already waxed on (and on and on and on) about baccarat and pai gow poker, let’s now train our focus to pai gow tiles, Three Card Baccarat and Fan Tan.

PAI GOW TILES

Unlike the mass-market juggernaut pai gow poker, the tile version is more of a cult hit. Not as in the Manson Family; more like as in The Addams Family. True, this ancient game is played in most major casino markets, but there are only about 250 tables around the world. Pai gow poker, a relatively recent derivative, has muscled up to 1,500 placements.

Here’s a crash course: You get four tiles (aka, dominoes) and arrange them into a high hand and a low hand of two tiles each. To win, your high hand must beat the dealer’s high hand and your low hand must beat the dealer’s low hand. To lose, just do the opposite of that.

Winning bets are paid 1 to 1, but the house will claw back 5 percent. This, along with taking “copies” (exact hands) is how the house maintains its advantage.

How can you kill commission? Let us count the ways: 1) Players push if the dealer’s high hand is 5 points or lower; 2) they push if the dealer’s low hand is 2 points or lower; or 3) they automatically lose if their highest tile is 6 or lower.

See? Easy as pai.

THREE CARD BACCARAT

Now we’re delving into the deep tracks. Unless you’ve been to the top of Resorts World in Malaysia or the back of Greek mythology in Macau, or—a little closer to home for most of us—Ameristar Casino in East Chicago, Indiana, you’ve probably never heard of Three Card Baccarat.

Traditional baccarat and this game share a surname and are sort of similar, like Pamela Anderson and Loni Anderson. Baccarat is a common-outcome game, where more than one player can have the same cards, while Three Card Baccarat, which sometimes goes by the alias “Three Kings,” in reference to the highest hand you can get, is more like blackjack. Players get their own hands and compete individually against the dealer. The game uses the same scoring system as baccarat, with 9 being the highest result and 0 being the lowest, but it incorporates a tie-breaking system based on the number of face cards in your hand, and collects 5 percent on every winning hand.

Hmmm. Maybe it’s more like Pamela Anderson and Louie Anderson.

As with the other games we’ve discussed, methods abound to resign this one from its commission. You can take a specific winning outcome and make it a push. Or you could borrow the dealer qualifying rule from poker-style carnival games: If the dealer has less than 3 points, players automatically win 1 to 2.

FAN TAN

You have to see Fan Tan to appreciate it. Or believe it actually exists. There’s truly nothing else like it, a game and a setting so surreal that you wonder if you’re in a legitimate casino or the back room of a Chinese laundromat.

In China.

In the ’80s.

The 1880s.

Most table games are played with cards, dice or a ball of some sort. But not Fan Tan. It uses buttons. Yes, buttons. Small, white ones, ones you might find on an Oxford shirt. Or beans. Yes, beans. Small, white ones, ones you might find at a Trader Joe’s. And then, for some non-obvious reason, the dealer starts the proceedings by ringing a bell—one like they have at the front desk of a hotel—before the start of each round.

Then it really gets weird.

The dealer takes a bowl and covers a random portion of buttons, 50 or so, from the pile of a few hundred on the table. Players then bet on how many buttons will remain after the dealer removes them in groups of four. The dealer doesn’t touch the buttons by hand because that would be, uh, ridiculous; instead, he uses a metal wand and separates them out of the pile four at a time, like a pharmacist filling a prescription of Zoloft.

Fan Tan is all about the remainder. After the dealer removes the buttons four at a time, there will be zero, one, two or three remaining. That’s what you bet on. Guess correctly and you win 3 to 1, minus a 5 percent commission.

Fittingly, Fan Tan, the oddball, the misfit, the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer of table games, is also the one member of the commission club that will never get out. How would you do it? How can you infrequently punish the player in order to eliminate the 5 percent vig?

Best we can come up with is this: Drop the standard payouts to 2 to 1, which will make the house edge 25 percent. Then, randomly—once everyone has bet, of course—trigger some electronic gizmo that may randomly increase the payouts; for example, winners this round pay 5 to 1, 10 to 1, whatever to 1. You’d just have to calibrate the frequency and the amount so you land on the appropriate mathematical edge.