Ellis’ NOR Seminar in PA and Field Trip to AC

As I had briefly relayed in my previous two posts (Shadowing Ellis and Ellis and I Take on Atlantic City), Ellis convincingly demonstrated to me with real money in live play that he can consistently win at baccarat.  Thanks to him, I am a little wealthier today in terms of chips, experience, and perspective.

Ellis Teaching at NOR Seminar, Holiday Inn, Grantville, PA.

At Saturday’s NOR seminar, Ellis explained the mechanics of his NOR methodology to about a dozen of the BTC attendees, a great bunch of guys (and one gal, Lorie, who was in charge of videoing the seminar) of all levels of playing experience.  Some had never played baccarat, while others had been playing for over 20 years.  Many had their own strategies and perspectives on the game, and they played accordingly.   All were very friendly and happy to compare notes.

NOR stands for Neutral, Opposite, Repeat, which consists of three sub-methods to handle neutral, choppy, and streaky biases respectively.  Ellis selected these three methods based on the criteria of overall effectiveness and ease-to-play.

Ellis unquestionably acknowledges that the mechanical rules of the methods in NOR (or any other mechanical system) in and of themselves cannot give a player a consistent edge against the house.  Rather, a player can find an edge when he is able to accurately select a favorable table to play, which greatly increases the chances that the appropriate method will be able to successfully exploit the shoe bias at hand.  For Ellis, this table selection process is that “something else” (ref: Transcendental Baccaratology) which  transcends the mathematical confines dictated by the game.  Without this edge, the best one can hope to achieve with a mechanical system in the long run is to lose as much as he wins, and pay the House its take in the process.

For example, consider Mark Maverick, who had been Ellis’ student.  While Mark did teach a few aspects of table selection which he had learned from Ellis, Mark focused primarily on the mechanics of his method, and with them, he believed he could win every baccarat session he played.  This was the appeal of Maverick / Maverick Ultimate, and Mark marketed it accordingly.  Offer any baccarat game to Mark, and he will gladly start playing it.  This is why Mark was bold enough to play baccarat online, something Ellis believes is a recipe for disaster.  On the other hand, Ellis would only play if he could identify beforehand the most likely shoe bias tendency, thus securing for himself a better chance at choosing the correct method to apply.  Without this advantage, Ellis would simply not play the shoe, because otherwise, he would just be gambling and “gambling is sick.”

Throughout the trip, I watched Ellis practice what he preached.  For example, after dinner at Carmines in Atlantic City on Sunday night, Ron wanted to play at the Hilton.  However, Ellis insisted on going back to play at Trump Plaza, because that is where he knew the tables were currently more consistently biased.  Then, at Trump Plaza, we completely avoided the high-stakes pit, because the baccarat tables there had no tote-boards, and Ellis commented it would be suicidal to play blindly.

Always before sitting down to play a game, he would carefully study the tote boards or another player’s scorecard to see if that shoe was producing a consistent bias.  If during play, the bias became unclear, he would either stop betting or lower the wager to 1 unit until the picture became clearer, and adjusted accordingly.  In other words, half of the work involves identifying the right situation to help him choose the right method.  Only then would he start playing.

Ellis Answering Questions at the NOR Seminar

While I was not there to personally witness it, on one occasion on Friday night before the seminar, Ellis decided to play despite having to play blindly with no clear advantages.  Since some of the BTC group had arrived early, they decided to go to Hollywood Casino to play baccarat.  It turned out to be a disaster.

Reflecting back on what had happened, Ellis explained that they had played under the worst possible conditions: no table selection, casino management reneging at the last moment its agreement to set up a dedicated MIDI table for the group with new cards every shoe, the casino being freezing cold which forced Ellis to leave the table several times to go outside to warm up,  the high excitement and anticipation of folks having just arrived from out of town, and a party atmosphere of beers and fun.

Robert, who had lost money that night, told me discipline and money management were gone.  As Ellis lamented the next day in the seminar, sometimes you just need to walk away when things get tough.  There will always be the difficult sessions, though if you’re doing things right, they should be infrequent.  There will be plenty more easy sessions to make up for the tough ones.  And if you can’t identify an advantageous situation in the first place, the best thing to do is simply not play.

In hindsight, Ellis realized that another one of his methods, AD Net, would have been the best system to use on Friday night, because the shoes were quite random without a consistent bias.  For the first hour of the seminar on Saturday, Ellis taught us the mechanics of AD Net using a particularly difficult shoe from Friday night as an example.  Whereas NOR had scored -4u on Friday night, AD Net scored +15u.  At the end of the seminar, Paul demonstrated how he would have played the shoe using SAP, but eventually he was also stopped out at -9u.  Of course, this is all easy to see with the clarity of 20/20 hindsight.  The challenge is being able to recognize going forward which system best suits the shoe.

Later Saturday night at the casino, after losing a shoe with NOR, Harold used AD Net to win a couple of shoes, scoring one in the teens and another over twenty, more than recouping his initial loss.  Apparently, Hollywood Casino at Penn National currently presents random shoes favoring AD Net.

Keith Preparing a New Shoe for Ellis

Why does table and casino selection work?

Based on his own observations, as well as directly being told by casino employees and management, Ellis knows casinos deliberately control the shuffle.  While playing blackjack, Ellis’ preferred game, he started noticing how the dealer’s procedure of picking up and stacking the played hands were artificially clumping the shoe into distinct bands of low and high cards.  The more the shoes were played, the more clumped and thus less random the shoes became.

He also knew that casinos were not shuffling the cards sufficiently long enough to randomize them.  The more he studied shuffling procedures, the more he realized that each one could consistently produce specific results.  Back then, there were eight main types of hand shuffle procedures; today with machines such as ShuffleMaster, there are hundreds.  While casinos can easily control a choppy vs. streaky bias, Ellis does not believe they have the ability to control a Player vs. Banker bias.

The same kind of shuffles are used in both blackjack and baccarat, so Ellis realized he could use this knowledge to gain an edge in both games.  Thus the process of table selection became the first and foremost step in his approach to playing the games.

Ellis told me how once casino management had ushered him to a back room to interrogate him about how he was winning; they wanted to know how he was cheating.  Ellis bluntly told them he was simply using knowledge of their own shuffle control against them.  They let him go.

Do the casino regulatory agencies know that casinos manipulate the shuffle?  Ellis thinks they do, but because so much tax revenue comes from gaming, Ellis believes they are in cahoots with the casinos or at least turns a blind eye.

I asked Ellis how much of what he was telling me could be shared here.  He said I was free to write whatever I wanted to.  None of this is secret, and he has been teaching and preaching it for decades in his books, seminars, forum threads, and emails.  Most people can’t believe it anyway, he joked, so it doesn’t really matter.  And of the others who can believe it, most are too impatient to actually use table selection.  They just want to sit down at any table and start playing.  It just doesn’t work that way if you want to consistently win, Ellis warns.  Patience pays.

Last year, when I first considered Ellis’ ideas regarding casino shuffle manipulation, I was among those who could not believe it.  I found it very difficult to accept that casinos would cheat in such a way.  I could believe that they may have the ability to control the shuffle on a technical level, but with my naive mindset, I trusted that casinos did not use this ability in practice and were operating fairly.  After all, since casino games are designed in their favor, they were sure to win in the long run, so why would they have the need to cheat?  In my post, Shuffle Control: Why It’s Bad for the House, I offered several other logical objections to Ellis’ proposal.  While I still do not know with certainty due to lack of experience and knowledge whether casinos deliberately manipulate the shuffle, I do agree that if Ellis is right, a player can gain an edge.  For now, I am willing to assume that Ellis is right and just see how far that assumption can take me.

Ellis Plays NOR on a Randomly Selected Shoe

In the second shoe of the Saturday night Hollywood Casino session, a mechanical component in the shoe box froze up, requiring the dealer to perform a double shuffle.  Ellis capitalized on this opportunity by assuming the bias would be choppy, which usually results from a double shuffle.  In that shoe, the entire table of BTC members shadowed Ellis’ bet placement until he was up +10u, which occurred very quickly.

At one point during the game, the dealer expressed his surprise at how quickly our scores had accelerated, which must have appeared especially curious to him since everyone was always betting on the same decision.  ”Hmm … that’s interesting!” I heard him marvel with a funny expression on his face, perhaps alarmed at how rapidly his chip box was emptying.  Indeed, he had run out of $1.25 commission-chips which he was using to keep track of Banker commissions.  He was visibly flustered at having to use smaller denomination chips for the accounting, and when the situation overwhelmed him, he begged the pit boss to see if the other table could spare any of its $1.25 commission-chips.

At +10u, Ellis colored up, and I took his lead.  Ellis explained that with the conservative progression we were using, +10u is a very reasonable, achievable target, and usually trying for more is not worth the time and effort.  The rest of the players at the table continued the shoe, while Ellis and I headed back to the hotel.  Before leaving, Ellis noticed that the shoe produced three 3s in a row and thus had started to become much less choppy.  He was concerned for how the others were doing.  Later that evening, Paul told us that the shoe’s bias ultimately changed to streaky, and there was even a Player streak of 9.

Keith, Laurie, Ron, Ellis, and Donna

Sunday morning, Ellis, Keith, Lorie, and I drove to Atlantic City, where we met up with Ron and Donna, as I relayed in my earlier update Ellis and I Take on Atlantic City.  Over a decade ago, Ellis had played blackjack and baccarat there professionally, and eventually he got barred from every casino, his picture plastered on the first page of the blue book of barred players.  Ever since, he had not been back.   Ellis was doubtful anyone would recognize him today.  I hoped not.

Trump Plaza Entrance from Boardwalk

As we began playing the first shoe at Trump Plaza, the pit boss asked us for our player’s cards.  We didn’t have any, so we gave him our driver’s licenses to register us.  After entering Ellis’ name into the computer, he came back to the table and asked if he still lived in New York.  For a moment, I was afraid the pit boss was going to ask him to leave the premises due to the fact that he had been barred more than a decade ago!

As it turned out, he merely wanted to verify Ellis’ mailing address.  Whew!  Apparently, Ellis’ status had been cleared after all these years.  The pit boss told us he had been working there back then, too, and Ellis tried to remember him.  Fortunately, the pit boss did not remember Ellis, since by the end of the night, we had each taken them for +35u.

A summary of the results of shoes which I had witnessed Ellis play in PA and AC:

Shoes Played: 6
Shoes Won: 6 (100%)
Shoes Lost: 0 (0%)

Bankroll: 20u

Total Winnings: +55u
Worst Drawdown: -4u

Average Number of Hands Played Per Shoe: 25
Average Player’s Advantage: +26%

For individual shoe histories and scores, see:

1.  Shadowing Ellis at Hollywood Casino at Penn National Race Course
2.  Ellis and I Take on Atlantic City

YouTube Videos:

1. Ellis Plays NOR Baccarat

2. Ellis NOR Baccarat Q&A

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