Why we collect 2,000 shoes a day: what the Hiddenpick R&D centre does

2026-09-25

Most baccarat talk is gut feeling or war stories. We collect what actually happened instead. Here is what the data is, what we throw away, and what we do with it.

How it is collected

The Evolution lobby broadcasts the results of every open table in real time. The collector listens to that stream and writes down every hand from the 90 or so baccarat tables. It never joins a table or presses anything. It only listens. When a shoe ends, the whole shoe is stored, including the time of each hand and every tie.

This is data we collect ourselves, not data we buy. From September 9, 2026 to now there are more than 25,000 shoes recorded from the first hand to the last without gaps, more than 1.68 million hands.

What is thrown away

Some shoes come out broken: a connection dropped and came back, so a few hands in the middle are missing; the collector started while the shoe was already running, so the start is missing; or the first hand is uncertain. Count column lengths with shoes like that and the numbers come out wrong.

So research and the numbers in this blog only use shoes recorded completely from start to finish. Throwing away almost half of what we collect is better than publishing wrong numbers. Shoes with a missing start are no longer stored at all.

What it is used for

Most of the work is checking. Run a betting method over every past shoe and you see how often the bet table broke, how deep it went, and how each shoe ended. We choose on the earlier period and check on the later one, and look at whether both periods say the same thing.

To be honest, most of this work confirms that something does not work. A good share of plausible-looking methods fall apart against the data. Knowing what must not be shipped is the most useful thing the centre does.

What is published

The size of the collection, what we throw away, and general statistics like column lengths and tie frequency are published in this blog and on the R&D centre page. The rules of a particular betting method belong to whoever made it and are not published.

Hiddenpick is a Windows program that runs Evolution live baccarat on Stake (stake.com) for you, following the rules you set. The current size of the collection is updated daily at the R&D centre.