Dragon 7 & Panda 8

1The rules, as data

EZ Baccarat replaces the banker commission with one pushing hand, and both side bets pay on the events that rule creates.

EZ Baccarat is standard baccarat with the 5% banker commission removed. The house funds the change by making one event, a banker win with a three-card total of seven, push the banker bet instead of paying it. Dragon 7 pays 40:1 exactly when that event lands. Panda 8 pays 25:1 on a player win with a three-card total of eight. Eight decks, dealt face up, cut about 14 cards from the end, which is a 0.966 penetration and simply how baccarat is dealt.

Baccarat gets its own small engine, with every rule that varies written down as a setting: decks, commission, the three-card-seven push, paytables, and how the shoe ends. The drawing rules are fixed by the game's tableau, so there are no decisions to model, and every card is dealt face up, which makes the tracking assumption weaker than blackjack's hole-card caveat.

2The published-figure gate

The enumeration matches the published combination table to the integer, and both published counting systems reproduce when I run them myself.

The exact calculator enumerates every ordered six-card deal. On the fresh eight-deck shoe it reproduces the published combination table exactly, 2,292,252,566,437,888 banker wins out of 4,998,398,275,503,360 deals, and every published edge to print precision: classic banker −1.0579%, EZ banker −1.0183%, Dragon 7 −7.6113% at an event probability of 0.022534, Panda 8 −10.1876% at 0.034543. The simulator then ran four million rounds against the enumeration with a worst deviation of 1.7 standard deviations across 16 checks.

The stronger check is behavioral. The Wizard of Odds' practical Dragon count, played out in my own simulation at the same cut, earns 0.592 ± 0.004 units per shoe against his published 0.597, with bet frequency and window edge matching too. The published Panda count reads 0.241 ± 0.011 against a published 0.238. Systems built by someone else, on someone else's code, landing within half a percent when I run them means my dealing, my depletion model, and my calculator all agree with the outside world end to end.

3The oracle

Exact enumeration at any composition. The combined ceiling at the game's own cut is +1.215 units per 100 rounds, with no toll to subtract.

The same enumeration that passed the gate evaluates any depleted composition in about two milliseconds, so every round of every run gets its exact pre-deal EV for both bets. Ceilings at the standard cut, betting exactly when positive: Dragon 7 on 11.1% of rounds for +0.845 units per 100, Panda 8 on 5.0% for +0.370, together +1.215. Trim the cut to 0.95 and the combined figure drops to +0.980. At 0.90 it reads +0.654.

The Dragon ignites early for a side bet, about six and a half decks out, and grows all the way in: the positive fraction runs 2.5% with five decks left, 22% at one and a half, and 36 to 40% inside the last half deck, where window edges reach +12 to +19%. The Panda sleeps until about four and a half decks remain and then follows the same shape at half the frequency.

4The state dataset

600,000 exact-EV rounds across three cuts. The Dragon signal is nearly one-dimensional, and the two bets share less than half their movement.

Each recorded round carries both bets' exact pre-deal EV, the running counts, and the depth. The Dragon EV correlates with its own linear count at about +0.905, so a single running count carries most of that bet, a far more one-dimensional signal than 21+3's suit quadratic. The two bets correlate with each other at only +0.41 and their positive windows overlap on 2.7% of rounds, which is why the pair takes two counts and the Panda earns nothing as a rider on the Dragon.

One calibration item stays on the page because the record keeps such things: the Dragon's pooled win-frequency z over the 600,000 rounds read −1.89. The predictor is exact by construction given the composition, the later 300,000-round scoring runs landed on the other side of prediction, and the figure stands as watched sampling noise.

5The fit, and the count

The counts come from exact removal effects, they land on the published tags digit for digit, and one rounding rule turned out to matter more than the tags.

Removal effects computed as exact gradients of the enumeration reproduce both published counts' shapes: eights and nines dominate the Dragon positively at +5.4 and +4.8 per card, fours through sevens run −2.7 to −3.6, and the Panda's nine stands alone at +4.5. Both published counts were already near-optimal linear counts, so the open value was threshold quality and the Panda's neglected half of the story.

The lesson worth a page of its own: integer tags rounded from exact effects must sum to zero per deck. My first rounding summed to −4 per deck, the running count drifted with depth, the true-count triggers went quiet, and the scored run captured 17% on the Dragon and nothing on the Panda. Rebalanced, the integer Dragon card keeps 89.8% against a 91.3% real-valued ceiling, and the published Panda tags turn out to already sit at the integer frontier, tying the sharpened set I derived.

Escalation past linear was checked and priced. An exact quadratic model buys about four points of capture on the Dragon, worth roughly $3 an hour at a $100 unit, with no human-shaped structure in the Hessian to carry it. On the Panda it buys nothing, and the missing sixth of that bet's ceiling lives in extreme late-shoe compositions beyond any low-order model. The two-count card is the human frontier for this game.

6Certified live

Scored in true exact EV over 300,000 rounds at two cuts, every parameter analytic or published beforehand.

Every candidate system replays with its bets scored against the exact calculator, and thresholds come from the closed form, untouched by the data being scored. The integer pair combined reads about 1.11 units per 100 rounds, 87% of the exact ceiling and within $3 an hour of the real-valued tags, so going to whole numbers on a scorecard loses nothing meaningful.

The shared-count shortcut is certified dead. Triggering the Panda off the Dragon count bets 11.6% of rounds at −4.7% each, a −147% capture, and the +0.41 correlation between the bets is nowhere near enough to save it.

7The ledger

No toll while you wait, as long as the table runs without you. The scenario sits at the game's own cut.

This page's scenario runs at 0.966 penetration instead of the site-standard 0.75 because 14 cards from the end is the game's own dealing custom, and that custom is most of why the bet is this strong. Sitting out non-trigger rounds is ordinary behavior at a populated baccarat table, so the waiting rounds cost nothing, and the income arrives on the 10 to 15% of rounds the counts light up.

The side maximum sets the ceiling, since income scales with the unit and the waiting still costs nothing. At a $50 maximum the same play clears about $58 per 100 rounds on a $40k bankroll. At $25 it clears about $29 on $20k, which still outruns the entire 21+3 operation at a quarter of the exposure.

8The verdict

Beatable, on the best terms any bet here offers, and the room's conditions are the whole risk.

The usual killers of a side-bet attack are absent here: the deep cut is the house's own custom, the bookkeeping hides inside the game's scorecard culture, and waiting costs nothing. What remains is the room itself: the posted side maxima, whether the table keeps dealing while you sit out, and the 40:1 settlement variance, which is why an $81k bankroll stands behind a $111-per-100 income.

§When you fund every round

Heads-up, rounds only happen if you bet them, and the main-bet cost becomes a fixed toll the side unit has to outrun.

At an empty table the dealer deals to your money or nobody's, so every round needs a main bet, and the cheapest one is the EZ banker at the table minimum, costing about 1.02% of it per round. That toll is a fixed dollar amount per round. It does not shrink when you shrink the side unit, while the side income scales with the unit, so small units die first: at a $25 main minimum the breakeven side unit is $23.

The consequence runs against instinct, and I checked it because I expected the opposite: bankroll bottoms out near a $50 unit at about $71k and rises in both directions from there, so no small-stakes sweet spot exists in this mode. The play wants the biggest unit the table allows, and even at a $100 unit it gives up about a quarter of the toll-free hourly.

§What this verdict depends on

• Dragon 7 at 40:1 and Panda 8 at 25:1 on an eight-deck shoe. Different paytables reprice everything.
• The cut at about 14 cards from the end. The combined ceiling falls by nearly half at a 0.90 cut, so a shallow-dealing room removes most of the reason to play.
• A real shoe. Any continuously shuffling machine kills this, like every counting attack.
• A table that keeps dealing while you sit out, or the funded-round variant above is the real ledger.
• Side maxima of at least $25 for the money to matter, since income scales with the unit.
• Burn cards are unmodeled, a single-digit percent effect on rounds per shoe and none on the conditional EVs.
• 80 rounds an hour heads-up sits behind the hourly translations. A full table runs near half that.

Last updated 2026-08-10.