Baccarat is a popular casino game that involves wagering on the outcome of two hands: a player hand, a banker hand, or a tie. Each hand is dealt a pair of cards, following specific rules, and the one with a sum of digits closest to nine wins. While regular bets on the player, banker, or tie are low-risk, many players engage in high-risk side bets such as a “player pair” or a “banker pair.” The probability of winning these bets is significantly higher than those of placing a standard bet, but despite these odds, a large percentage of baccarat gamblers appear to be influenced by irrational trends and hunches.
Amid the glitz, Bond-dipped mystique, and booming beats that sonically define the casino’s high-roller enclave, Lou sits at a baccarat table and admits to having never played before. As he looks over the decks, he marvels at the pristine craftsmanship and ponders whether Baccarat’s rituals are designed to manipulate his money.
It is well established that people exhibit a number of cognitive biases in gambling, including positive and negative recency. However, these psychological effects are not well understood in the context of a specific gambling environment, which may amplify their impact. The aim of the current study is to explore the role of the belief in positive recency in baccarat gambling behaviors. Using large-scale field data from a real-world casino, we consistently found that baccarat gamblers tend to follow recent results, suggesting that they believe future outcomes will be positively correlated with past outcomes. This finding challenges existing theories about the influence of positive recency, which are typically based on analyzing simulated laboratory data.
We further analyzed the results and compared them to a random re-simulation of the experiment, thereby controlling for the effect of chance. We also analyzed the influence of other possible factors such as frequency and streak length. We found that the majority of baccarat gamblers preferred betting on an outcome that had occurred recently, and this preference was largely independent of frequency or streak length. Our findings suggest that a general tendency to follow trends in baccarat betting could be an important contributor to problem gambling, reinforcing maladaptive gambling behavior by increasing the likelihood of a win after consecutive losses. This effect is particularly strong when a player follows the Martingale strategy, in which a bet is doubled after each loss, with the hope that the next win will recoup all previous losses and generate a profit equal to the initial investment. Our analysis suggests that baccarat gambling environments could be used to identify gamblers who are susceptible to this common cognitive distortion. This is a critical step towards developing an intervention that will help to reduce the prevalence of pathological gambling.
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