How to Play Baccarat
Baccarat is the busiest table in most Asian casinos, and it is also the simplest. You are not playing a hand. Two hands are dealt in front of you — Player and Banker — and you pick which one you think wins.
Everything after that is decided by a fixed rule sheet. You make no choices at all once the bet is down.
The three bets, and only three
Banker — pays 1 to 1, minus 5% commission on a win. House edge 1.06%. It is the best bet available on the table.
Player — pays 1 to 1 with no commission. House edge 1.24%. Fractionally worse, and perfectly reasonable.
Tie — pays 8 to 1. House edge 14.4%. This is the bet that funds the room.
Why the banker pays a commission
The banker hand wins slightly more often than the player hand, because it acts last and draws its third card with more information. Left alone, backing the banker would be a winning bet.
The 5% commission on banker wins exists to remove that advantage. Even after paying it, banker is still the cheapest bet on the felt.
Some tables advertise commission-free baccarat. Check the small print before sitting down: those tables normally pay banker wins on a total of 6 at half odds, which costs you more than the commission did.
Reading the card totals
Card values are not what you would expect:
- Ace counts as 1.
- 2 through 9 count as their face value.
- 10, Jack, Queen and King all count as zero.
Then the tens digit is dropped from any total. A 7 and an 8 make 15, and the hand is worth 5. A hand can never be higher than 9 and nothing ever busts.
A total of 8 or 9 on the first two cards is called a natural, and the hand stands immediately.
The third card rule
Whether a third card is drawn is decided by the rule sheet, not by anyone at the table. The dealer follows it automatically.
In outline: the Player hand draws on a total of 0 to 5 and stands on 6 or 7. The Banker hand then draws or stands depending on its own total and, in some cases, on the value of the Player’s third card.
You do not need to memorise the table. It runs itself. It is worth knowing only so you understand there is no decision being made that you could have made better.
The roads, the streaks and the scoreboards
Every baccarat table displays the history of recent results in coloured grids. Players read them for patterns and bet on the streak continuing or breaking.
Those grids describe hands that have already been settled. The shoe does not know what it produced. No arrangement of past results changes the odds of the next hand.
They are an entertainment feature, and they are very good at their job. Enjoy them. Do not stake on them.
A sensible way to play it
Pick banker or player, stake consistently, and leave the tie bet alone. That is genuinely the whole strategy — the edge is fixed and nothing you do moves it.
Betting systems that tell you to double after a loss do not change the house edge either. They change the shape of your losses, making small wins frequent and the eventual loss very large. The maths underneath is untouched.