was played were readily accessible. Our techniques can be carried over to the other forms of Baccarat and Chemin de Fer.
We were originally motivated by the observation that Baccarat and Chemin de Fer have several points of resemblance to the game of Blackjack, or Twenty- One. The fact that practical winning strategies for Twenty-One have been recently discovered suggested that there might also be practical winning strategies for Baccarat and Chemin de Fer [14], [15], [16]. In contrast to the situation in Twenty-One, we found that there are no current practical winning strategies for the main part of the game, i.e., for the money Banker and Player bets.
During this work we learned that the Nevada version of the game sometimes had certain associated side bets. In the greater part of this paper we show that there are practical winning strategies for these side bets and we develop the details of a strategy based on the Kelly criterion.
Our favorable strategies were successfully exploited by players. This forced the casinos to remove the (once profitable) side bets from their layouts. We will talk in the present tense about these side bets even though, as of this writing, they are out of favor. There is a picture of the former layout at the Sands, complete with side bets [13, p. 419].