alpax, thanks for that interesting report. Somehow I missed it when you posted it initially.
Questions for you:
If you ignore the bonus bet and just do the original bet, how does this machine pay out?
I ask this because normally baccarat pays even money for the player and 0.95 for the banker. However, despite what appears to be a 5% house edge for banker bets, it is not. In reality, the house edge on player bets is just 1.24%, and the house edge on banker bets is only 1.06%!
Provided that the pay table for regular bets is 1.00/0.95 as described above, then this machine might be a nice opportunity to rack up "slot" points/comps on a low house edge game.
Can you also describe the tie bet a bit better? In regular baccarat, the tie bet is horrible, and has a house edge of up to 14%!
As the bonus bets are a new thing for this machine, and do not exist in regular baccarat to my knowledge, I have no idea what the house edge is on those, but I imagine that the edge is high. Usually you get screwed pretty hard with a high house edge in these "bonus" situations.
Here is an interview from last year with the machine's creator:
http://www.wgm8.com/baccarats-new-spin/
In the interview, he says that baccarat is boring, and this machine seeks to spice up the game a bit by making it more like a slot machine.
There may be a nice opportunity to be seen as a high-theo slot player by simply running regular bets through this machine, as I doubt it differentiates between regular bets and bonus bets when reporting theo. For whatever reason, it seems that machines tend to report one theo value back to the player's club, and it does not attempt to analyze what your real theo should be through your actual play.
One other nice thing about this machine is that, provided the edges are what I described above, those will be your true odds. Video poker's expected return numbers are somewhat overstated because they require perfect play, which is difficult due to human error. Also, this game has less variance than video poker, due to the lack of high payouts (again, ignoring the bonus situation).
It's worth monitoring if this game appears in other casinos, but please give me more info.