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Grand Monkey

Introduction

Grand Monkey is a side bet offered on Monkey Baccarat, a commission-free form of the game, that pushes a winning 3-card Banker 7. The rules are below.

As of this writing, in November 2019, I am aware of a placement at the Commerce Casino in the Los Angeles area.

Rules

As usual when writing about baccarat, I capitalize the names of the Player and Banker bets and use lower case to refer to those playing the game, to avoid confusion.

A "Monkey" in baccarat is a term for any face card. A 10 is not considered a Monkey for purposes of the Monkey 6 side bet.

  1. The Grand Monkey can be found on games titled Monkey Baccarat.
  2. Eight decks are used.
  3. Monkey Baccarat follows standard baccarat drawing rules, which I assume the reader is familiar with.
  4. Banker wins in Monkey Baccarat pay even money, except a 3-card winning Banker total of 7 is a push.
  5. The Grand Monkey wins if the Player and Banker hands both consist of three face cards.
  6. Wins pay 6000 to 1.

Analysis

The following table shows my analysis of the Grand Monkey side bet. The lower right cell shows that when wins pay 150 to 1 the house edge is 19.86%.

Grand Monkey Return Table

Event Pays Combinations Probability Return
Win 6000 667,474,778,880 0.000134 0.801226
Loss -1 4,997,730,800,724,480 0.999866 -0.999866
Total   4,998,398,275,503,360 1.000000 -0.198640

The following table shows the house edge for every pay from 4000 to 6000 to 1, by thousands.

Grand Monkey House Edge

Win Pays House Edge
5000 33.22%
6000 19.86%
7000 6.51%

Effect of Removal

It doesn't take a genius to see this bet would be countable. The effect of removing a non-ten from a fresh eight-deck show is a decrease in house edge of 1.17%. The effect of removing a face card is an increase of 3.91%. I'll leave the rest as an exercise to the reader.

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