Odds & house edge

The house edge is the share of each bet the casino expects to keep over the long run. In baccarat there are no playing decisions, so — unlike blackjack — the edge depends only on the bet you choose and the house rules. Every figure on this page is exact for a freshly shuffled shoe: it's calculated by working through every possible order the cards can be dealt in, not by simulation. The default table is eight decks, 5% commission, tie pays 8 to 1, where the Banker bet has an edge of 1.06%.

House-edge calculator

Set the rules of a table you've found and see what each bet costs.

How often each hand wins

With eight decks, every coup ends one of three ways:

About 34% of coups end with a natural, and in those nobody draws. Ties are rarer than most players expect — roughly one coup in ten-and-a-half.

Banker vs. Player

The two hands aren't treated the same. The Player hand follows a simple rule — draw on 0 to 5 — while the Banker hand acts second and, when the Player draws, takes the Player's third card into account (see the drawing rules). That makes the Banker hand the slight favourite in every shoe.

A Player bet pays even money, so its edge is just the gap between how often it loses and how often it wins: . The Banker bet would be a winning bet for you at even money, so casinos charge a commission on it — and even after the commission, Banker is the cheapest bet on the table.

Commission: 5%, 4% or none

The standard 5% commission pays 19 to 20. A few high-limit rooms and online tables charge 4%, which cuts the Banker edge almost in half.

No-commission tables are popular because they're simple: Banker pays even money, except that a Banker win with a total of 6 pays only half. That happens in about 5.4% of coups, and costs more than the commission it replaces — the Banker edge rises to , worse than betting Player. If you play there, Player and Banker are almost equally priced.

The Tie bet

Tie paying 8 to 1

Tie paying 9 to 1

A tie happens a little under one coup in ten, but 8 to 1 pays as if it came along one time in nine. That gap is a house edge more than ten times the Banker bet's. At 9 to 1 it is far less painful, but still costs more than four times as much as Banker.

Remember that when a coup ties, your Player or Banker bet is simply returned — you don't need a Tie bet to "protect" it.

Pair bets

Player Pair and Banker Pair win when the first two cards of that hand are the same rank. The chance depends only on the number of decks, because the second card has to match the first out of the cards that remain:

With fewer decks a pair is less likely, which is why single-deck pair bets are so expensive. Each pair bet is settled separately — both can win in the same coup.

Number of decks

In blackjack fewer decks help the player. In baccarat the deck count barely matters for the main bets — a few hundredths of a percent — and fewer decks make the Tie bet worse. Most casinos deal from eight decks; mini baccarat tables often use six.

Shuffling machines and counting

The cut card sets how far into the shoe the dealer goes before reshuffling. Baccarat shoes are usually dealt almost to the end. A continuous shuffling machine (CSM) returns the cards after every coup instead. Neither changes the house edge of any bet.

Card counting has been studied for baccarat, and it barely works: the Player and Banker bets are so evenly balanced that removing a few cards almost never moves either into positive territory, and when it does the gain is tiny and late in the shoe. Some side bets can be counted in theory, which is why casinos watch them — for a normal player, the deck composition can be ignored.

Betting systems

Because baccarat pays close to even money, it attracts betting systems — the Martingale (double after every loss), the Paroli (double after every win), 1-3-2-6 and many more. None of them changes the house edge. Every coup is a separate bet with the same expected loss, and a sequence of bets with a negative expectation adds up to a negative expectation, whatever their sizes.

What systems do change is the shape of your results. A Martingale wins a small amount most sessions and occasionally loses a large one: starting at $10, eight losses in a row — which on Banker happens roughly once in every few hundred sequences — means a ninth bet of $2,560 to win back $10. The table maximum is there partly to stop exactly that.

Patterns and the scoreboard

Many players follow the Big Road and bet on streaks ("follow the dragon") or on alternation ("the chop"). It's part of the fun of the game, but the shoe has no memory: once it's shuffled, a run of Banker wins doesn't make the next coup any more or less likely to go to Banker. The scoreboard tells you what has happened, not what will.

Table limits

The minimum and maximum bet don't change the odds, but they shape a session. Tie and pair bets usually have lower limits than the main bets. At the Salon, Player and Banker bets must meet the table minimum, while Tie and pair bets can be as small as a fifth of it; the maximum can be set up to $1,000,000 per betting area.

Common rule sets

These are the presets available in the game's settings. Choose Play to open the table with those rules.