Baccarat Strategy
If you watch players playing baccarat in the high-limit area of a live casino, it’s easy to get the impression that baccarat is a game of deep strategy and complex calculations. Often, most of the players at a baccarat table will be keeping track of the outcomes of each hand using a scorecard, attempting to find some sort of pattern to the cards being dealt in an attempt to predict who will come out on top next: the player or the banker.
Well, there’s some good news and some bad news on this front. The good news is that you don’t have to do this; the players keeping track of the numbers are not helping themselves at all, and may actually be costing themselves some money in the long run by misleading themselves into making bad bets! You can safely leave the scorecards alone, and focus instead on enjoying the game.
The bad news is that there really isn’t much the player can do to change the odds in baccarat. Since the player doesn’t have to make any decisions at the table, and the action is completely controlled by rules the dealer must follow, there isn’t really any room for any baccarat strategy to change the odds.
Optimal Baccarat Strategy
With that in mind, it’s clear that picking the best baccarat strategy comes down to knowing what to bet on: the player, the banker, or the tie bet.
If your casino deals baccarat out of a typical eight deck show, the banker will win more hands than the player: the dealer will win about 45.9% of the time, while the player will win around 44.6% of hands (with 9.5% resulting in ties). However, while you’ll win a full bet when you win with the player bet, the house takes a 5% commission on winning banker bets, which makes the two bets carry nearly identical house edges.
So which one comes out on top? In the end, it turns out that the banker bet is a slightly better pick. Betting on the banker comes with a 1.06% house edge, while betting on the player carries a house advantage of 1.24%.
Of course, there’s also that tempting tie bet, that offers 8-1 odds on the two sides pushing. However, it won’t win nearly often enough to turn the bet into a winner for you in the long run. The house edge on the tie bet is an incredibly high 14.36%. If you can find a table offering 9-1 on tie bets, it becomes slightly more appetizing; in that case, the house edge is only 4.84%.
Playing with fewer decks can change the odds very slightly – generally lowering the house edge on the banker bet, while raising the house edge on the other two bets. These effects are barely noticeable unless you play with a very small shoe, such as single deck baccarat, which carries a house edge of 1.01% on the banker, 1.29% on the player, and 15.75% on 8-1 tie bets.
Card Counting in Baccarat?
Technically, there are good cards for the player and the banker in baccarat, which means that card counting is at least theoretically possible. However, baccarat card counting is neither practical nor particularly profitable, as removing single cards from the deck has only the tiniest of effects on the odds of the game.
According to a mathematical study done by The Wizard of Odds, it would be almost impossible to show any real profits by attempting to count baccarat games. If a player found a baccarat game with 90% shoe penetration, and bet $1,000 each time the odds were in their favor, they’d expect to make about one cent out on average for every 100 bets they made – and they’d only be better once every few thousand hands! Even with deeper penetration, a player would rarely be in a position to have an edge, and it would be extremely small when it did exist.
Ready To Play? Do so at These Casinos:
Even though Baccarat is offered at most online casinos, not all of them are great to play on. You see, some casinos can be counted on, while others are horrible and out there only to stiff you and take your money. Luckily for you, we are here to help you determine, which are the good ones and which the bad.
Most Popular Baccarat Online Casinos 2019
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