Baccarat online

In punto banco, the baccarat of casino tables and live studios, the player takes no decision about the cards: the drawing rules (the "tableau" that says when each hand takes a third card) are fixed, and the dealer or the software applies them. What remains is the bet, on "banker", on "player" or on a "tie", and the three bets differ by more than a factor of ten in what they cost.

The arithmetic on this page follows a player who stakes $20 on every hand for 1,000 hands, so that each percentage reads as dollars on $20,000 staked. We have recomputed every probability by enumerating the cards of an eight-deck "shoe" (416 cards, from which both hands are dealt), and our figures match the published tables to the sixth decimal.

Three bets on one deal

A hand worth 8 or 9 on its first two cards is a "natural" and ends the deal at once, and otherwise the player hand draws on a total from 0 to 5 and stands on 6 or 7, while the banker's choice depends on its own total and on the player's third card. The banker wins more often because its drawing rule looks at that third card before deciding (an advantage of position that the "commission" exists to pay for).

In an eight-deck shoe the banker hand wins 45.86 per cent of the deals, the player hand 44.62 per cent, and 9.52 per cent end in a tie, on which the banker and player bets are returned. The player bet, which pays even money with no deduction, keeps 1.24 per cent, the gap between the two hands' chances.

Without the commission the banker bet would give the player an edge of 1.24 per cent (45.86 less 44.62); with 5 per cent taken from each win, a $20 banker win pays $19 and the edge becomes 1.06 per cent for the house. The commission is the only source of the house's margin on the banker bet, which is why it is charged on every win.

The bets of punto banco with eight decks (house edge per hand bet, ties counted as hands)

Bet	Pays	Probability of winning	House edge
Banker	19 to 20 (5% commission)	45.86%	1.06%
Banker at a no-commission table	1 to 1, but 1 to 2 on a winning six	45.86%	1.46%
Player	1 to 1	44.62%	1.24%
Tie at 9 to 1	9 to 1	9.52%	4.84%
Tie at 8 to 1	8 to 1	9.52%	14.36%
Player pair	11 to 1	7.47%	10.36%

Two rules, then, carry the whole of the strategy that the game allows: bet on the banker, and leave the tie alone. A player who leaves ties out of the count (as some published tables do) finds 1.17 per cent on banker and 1.36 on player, which are the same bets measured on fewer hands.

The commission and the tables without it

The "no-commission" tables pay every banker win at even money, except a win with a total of six, which pays half (1 to 2). A banker six wins 5.39 per cent of all hands (about one in nineteen), and paying half the stake instead of the whole stake on those wins costs 2.69 per cent of every banker bet, against 2.29 per cent for the commission (5 per cent of 45.86).

The difference is 0.40 points, so that the banker bet without commission keeps 1.46 per cent, more than the bet with it! For our player the 1,000 hands on banker cost about $212 when the commission is charged and about $292 when it is not, and we read the word "no-commission" as a description of the payout rather than a saving.

The tie, at 8 to 1 and at 9 to 1

A tie comes about once in 10.5 hands (9.52 per cent of deals), so that the bet would break even only at a payout near 9.5 to 1 (its "true odds"). At 8 to 1, the standard payout, it keeps 14.36 per cent; at 9 to 1, where a table pays it, it keeps 4.84 per cent, better but still more than four times the banker bet.

Our player who puts the same $20 on the tie for 1,000 hands stakes $20,000 and can expect to lose about $2,872 at 8 to 1, against $212 on banker! The tie is the bet that pays most when it wins, and in our view that is precisely what makes it attractive and what makes it expensive.

Roads, score cards and streaks

The screens of live baccarat show the history of the shoe in "roads": the "bead plate" records each result in order, the "big road" stacks consecutive wins of the same side in columns, and three "derived roads" (the "big eye boy", the "small road" and the "cockroach pig") summarise whether the big road repeats its own shapes. They describe the past with great care.

The next hand does not read them. In a game whose hands are independent, a run of banker wins changes nothing in the 45.86 per cent of the next deal, and the belief that a side is "due" after a run is the "gambler's fallacy" (the expectation that chance corrects itself in the short term).

At a computer table that shuffles a fresh shoe for every hand, the independence is exact, because each deal starts from the same 416 cards. At a live table the cards already dealt shift the shoe a little, but the roads record winners, not cards, so they say next to nothing about it.

Runs that look like patterns are the ordinary product of chance: in our calculation, seventy decisions (hands that are not ties) contain at least one run of six or more on the same side 68 per cent of the time, and a run of seven or more 41 per cent of the time. A road with a long column is, in most shoes, simply a road.

The betting systems built on the roads or on the last result fare no better, the positive progressions that raise the stake after a win included: a system alters how much is bet and leaves the edge of each bet where it was, and on banker the commission trims every win of a progression by 5 per cent.

Speed and the cost of an hour

Speed is the other half of the cost. Because the edge is paid on every hand, a table that deals 70 hands an hour (a figure we use for the example) puts $1,400 of our player's money in play and costs about $15 an hour on banker; a computer table played at 200 hands an hour (again our figure, not a measured one) puts $4,000 in play and costs about $42.

The pair bets beside the main boxes add to that cost, since a "player pair" at 11 to 1 (a bet that the player's first two cards form a pair) keeps 10.36 per cent in eight decks, nearly ten times the banker bet. If you play for the length of an evening rather than for a number of hands, it is the pace of the table, as much as the bet, that you are choosing.

Live tables and computer tables

The arithmetic does not change between a studio and a random number generator if the payouts in the help screen are the standard ones: 19 to 20 on banker (or the half payout on a winning six), and 8 or 9 to 1 on the tie. The studios themselves are described in our live casino guide, and punto banco takes its place among the other games in the house edge comparison.

In our view baccarat is one of the cheapest games in the casino for a player who keeps to the banker bet and ignores the roads, and one of the most expensive for a player who chases ties at speed; the cards are the same in both cases, and only your choice of box differs.

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By the Rand Casinos editorial team · Last updated October 2026 · Online since 2007