Baccarat simulator

How to play baccarat

1. Pick a chip and put it on Player, Banker or Tie. The pair bets are optional side bets.
2. Press Deal: Player and Banker get two cards each, face up.
3. The hand closest to 9 wins. Nobody decides anything: the third card rules below say whether each side draws.
4. Player pays 1 to 1, Banker 0.95 to 1 (a 5% commission), Tie 8 to 1. On a tie, Player and Banker bets come back.

Card values

Aces count 1, cards 2 to 9 count their number, and tens and face cards count 0. Only the last digit of the total matters: 7 and 8 make 15, which counts as 5. A two-card 8 or 9 is a natural, and ends the coup at once.

The third card rules

The Player draws on 0 to 5 and stands on 6 or 7. If the Player stood, the Banker draws on 0 to 5 too. If the Player drew, the Banker follows this table, using the Player’s third card:

Payouts and odds

Baccarat strategy: which bet

The only real decision is where to bet. Leaving ties aside, the Banker wins 50.68% of coups and the Player 49.32%, because the Banker draws last and knows the Player’s third card. The 5% commission takes most of that away, but Banker is still the cheapest bet on the table: 1.06% against 1.24% for Player.

Watch the variants. At a no-commission table where a Banker win on 6 pays half, the Banker edge rises to 1.46%, dearer than the classic game. A Tie paid 9 to 1 instead of 8 to 1 drops from 14.36% to 4.84%, and is still worse than either main bet. The pair bets cost 10.36%.

Scoreboards and streaks

The bead plate records every coup in order, six to a column. The big road starts a new column each time the winner changes, marks ties with a green line and lets long streaks run on to the right.

They make streaks easy to see, but they do not predict the next coup. Over 36 million simulated coups, after three or more Banker wins in a row the Banker won the next coup 45.85% of the time: exactly its usual rate. Streaks are simply common: 65% of shoes contain a run of six or more, and the longest run in a shoe averages 6.4.