What This Guide Gets You To
By the End of It You Will Be Able To
- Score any baccarat hand at a glance, and say why a king and a nine is a nine.
- Follow the third-card rule as the dealer applies it, instead of taking it on trust.
- Name the three bets, what each pays and what each costs, and explain why the one with the biggest payout is the one to leave alone.
- Look at a scoreboard full of red and blue and know exactly how much it tells you about the next hand: nothing.
The Object of the Game
Two hands are dealt, called Player and Banker. You bet on which will finish closer to nine, or on both finishing level. That is the whole game.
The names are the first thing to get past. The Player hand is not yours and the Banker hand does not belong to the casino: they are labels for two boxes on the felt, and you can bet on either one.
In a UK casino, online or live, the game is almost always the version called punto banco, where every card is dealt by a fixed rule and nobody at the table makes a decision after the bets are placed.
Ace counts one, two to nine count their face value, and ten, jack, queen and king count nought. Add the cards and keep only the last digit: a seven and an eight make fifteen, which is five. A king and a nine make nine. Nothing can go bust, because nothing can go above nine.
Each hand starts with two cards. A total of eight or nine on those two is a natural, and the hand is over at once. Otherwise either side may get one more card, decided by the rule below. No hand ever holds more than three cards.
Watch a Hand
An eight-deck shoe, dealt by the standard rules and narrated as it goes. Deal a few and watch how often the third card is the whole story.
The Third Card, Without the Mystery
This is the part that makes people think baccarat is hard. It is a table, the dealer reads it, and you can read it too.
The Player hand goes first and follows one line: on nought to five it draws a third card, on six or seven it stands. If either side has a natural, nobody draws.
The Banker hand goes second, and its rule depends on what the Player hand did. If the Player stood, Banker follows the same simple line: draw on nought to five, stand on six or seven. If the Player drew, Banker looks at that third card:
| Banker holds | Player’s third card: 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0, 1 or 2 | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw |
| 3 | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw | Stand | Draw |
| 4 | Stand | Stand | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw | Stand | Stand |
| 5 | Stand | Stand | Stand | Stand | Draw | Draw | Draw | Draw | Stand | Stand |
| 6 | Stand | Stand | Stand | Stand | Stand | Stand | Draw | Draw | Stand | Stand |
| 7 | Stand | Stand | Stand | Stand | Stand | Stand | Stand | Stand | Stand | Stand |
You do not need to memorise any of it. The dealer applies it, the software applies it, and your bet was settled, in the sense that matters, before the first card left the shoe.
What the table is worth knowing for is the next section: it is written so that the Banker hand wins slightly more often than the Player hand, and that fact decides which bet is cheapest.
The Three Bets, What They Pay and What They Cost
The same bets as numbers, from the exact odds of an eight-deck shoe. Switch the table rules and watch the last column.
Banker wins about 45.9% of hands, Player about 44.6%, and 9.5% are ties, on which both bets are returned. Paid at even money, Banker would be a bet in your favour, so the casino keeps 5% of every winning Banker bet. That leaves it costing 1.06% of what you stake; Player costs 1.24%. Both are among the cheapest bets in any casino, cheaper than every bet on a roulette table.
The One Decision That Changes the Maths
It is which box the chips go in. Everything after that is the shoe.
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Banker: 1.06%The cheapest bet on the table and one of the cheapest in the building. The 5% commission is already counted in that figure.
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Player: 1.24%A fraction dearer, no commission to think about. If you prefer round numbers, the difference costs you about 18p an evening per £100 staked.
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Tie: 14.36%Pays 8 to 1, which sounds generous until you see that a tie comes up on fewer than one hand in ten. Thirteen times the cost of a Banker bet. Some tables pay 9 to 1, which brings it to 4.84%: still the worst bet on the felt.
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Pairs and the other side bets: 10% and upPlayer pair and Banker pair pay 11 to 1 and cost 10.36%. Perfect pairs, Dragon bonus and the rest vary, and none of them is close to the main bets.
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“No commission” tables: 1.46%The commission goes, and a Banker win with a total of six pays half instead. That happens often enough to cost more than the 5% did. A table that advertises no commission is a dearer table.
Put the chips on Banker or Player and you are paying about 1% for the evening’s entertainment. Put them anywhere else on the layout and you are paying several times that for the same cards.
Watch the Scoreboard Say Nothing
Every live baccarat table shows a grid of red and blue dots, the results so far, and players read runs into it. This runs two thousand hands by the real rules and counts what actually came after every run.
The run of five reds happened; it is on the board. What the board cannot tell you is whether the next hand is red or blue, because the shoe did not look at the board before dealing.
After a run of three or more, the next decided hand matches the run about half the time, which is the same as it would with no run at all.
Every hand costs about 1% of what is on it, Banker or Player, streak or no streak. A pattern only changes which box the chips go in. Adding together a set of bets that each lose about 1% cannot produce anything but a loss of about 1%; the pattern you chose makes no difference to the total.
The Shoe Has No Memory
This is the belief the scoreboard exists to feed, and it costs more money than any bet on the table.
Banker has won six in a row. Player is not “due”, and Banker is not “hot”. The cards were shuffled before the shoe was loaded, and the next hand is drawn from what is left in it, which does not know how the last six hands were scored.
The odds on the next hand are what they were on the first: Banker about 45.9%, Player about 44.6%.
There is a true thing buried in here, and it is worth separating out. As a shoe is dealt down, its composition does change, and in blackjack that is what card counting lives on.
In baccarat the effect exists but is too small to use: the best published counts find a bet worth making a handful of times in a shoe, for an edge that would not cover a cup of tea.
The scoreboard is not that. The scoreboard is a list of results, and a list of results predicts nothing.
Live Dealer or Software
Both are offered at UK casinos, and the difference is in the experience, not the odds.
Live Baccarat
A real shoe, a real dealer, streamed from a studio. Around forty to sixty hands an hour, with the cards squeezed over slowly on some tables for the sake of the drama.
Same 1.06% on Banker
RNG Baccarat
Software, with a random number generator tested by an independent lab. Several hundred hands an hour if you let it run.
Same 1.06% on Banker
Speed Baccarat
A live table with the squeeze and the pauses removed: a hand every half-minute or less. Popular, and the most expensive way to play by the hour.
Same 1.06%, twice as often
Speed is what separates them for your money. The cost is per hand, so a table that deals twice as many hands an hour costs twice as much an hour.
If you set aside an evening rather than a number of hands, the slow table is the cheap one, and the squeeze is doing you a favour.
What Baccarat Is, Honestly
There is no skill in it. Once the chips are down, every card is dealt by rule. That is the appeal: nothing to learn, nothing to get wrong, nobody at the table playing better than you. It also means anyone offering to teach you how to win at baccarat is either mistaken or selling something.
Two of the three bets are good value. Banker and Player are among the cheapest bets a casino offers. The Tie and the side bets are not, and the layout puts them where your eye lands first for exactly that reason.
It will cost you money over time. Not might: will, given enough hands. About a pound in every hundred staked on Banker, a little more on Player, and the only things that change that are the bet you choose and the number of hands you play.
If You Decide to Play
Decide what you are willing to lose before you deposit, and set that limit at the casino rather than in your head. Every UK-licensed site must offer deposit limits, reality checks, time-outs and self-exclusion; the operators we list are compared on those tools as well as on their games.
Baccarat lives in the live lobby at most of them: our live casino comparison shows which studios each one carries and what the table limits are.
Free, independent help is available from GambleAware, from the National Gambling Helpline on 0808 8020 133, which is open every hour of every day, and through GamStop, which blocks you from every UK-licensed gambling site at once.
The rules, odds and payout figures in this guide are checked against the providers’ published game rules and the rules pages of the UK-licensed casinos listed. No strategy here removes the house edge, and none is presented as if it does.