Baccarat, the game with exactly one real decision

Two hands are dealt, called Player and Banker, and the names designate positions, not people: you can back either. Cards 2 to 9 count face value, tens and pictures count zero, aces count one, and only the last digit of a hand's total matters, so 7 plus 8 is 5, not 15. The hand closer to 9 wins.

Whether a hand draws a third card follows a fixed tableau printed in the rules: the Player position draws on totals of 5 or less, and the Banker's draw depends on its own total and on the Player's third card, mechanically. Nobody at the table chooses anything after the bets are placed, which is why baccarat, unlike blackjack, has no such thing as a good or bad player.

Complete analysis of the eight-deck shoe, the same kind of combinatorial work behind the blackjack figures, gives the outcome probabilities: Banker wins about 45.86% of hands, Player wins about 44.62%, and about 9.52% tie. From those three numbers, every bet on the table can be priced with arithmetic you can check.

The player bet pays even money and pushes on a tie: its expectation is 44.62% won minus 45.86% lost, about minus 1.24%. The banker bet pays even money minus a 5% commission on wins: 45.86% times 0.95, minus 44.62%, gives about minus 1.05%, the famous 1.06% after finer rounding. The tie bet at 8 to 1 wins 9.52% of the time: 9.52% times 8, minus the 90.48% of losing hands, is about minus 14.3%.

That last line deserves a pause: the tie sits on the same layout as two of the best-priced bets in the casino and costs more than ten times as much. Its 8-to-1 payout looks generous precisely because the true odds are worse than 9 to 1.

No-commission baccarat advertises the removal of the 5% charge on banker wins, and replaces it with a quieter rule: a banker win with a total of 6 pays half. Run the arithmetic and the banker bet's cost rises to roughly 1.46%, so the variant sold as a saving is a price increase wearing a discount's clothes. It is the baccarat equivalent of blackjack's 6:5 payout.

A tie paid at 9 to 1 instead of 8 to 1 costs about 4.9% rather than 14.4%, still the worst bet on the table but three times less bad, and worth reading the felt for. Side bets, pairs and bonus wagers vary by table and carry edges closer to the tie than to the main bets; the pattern across this whole site holds here: the further a bet sits from the main game, the more it costs.

Baccarat is the most pattern-tracked game in existence: casinos hand out scorecards, and screens display the roads, grids of past results in red and blue. All of it is decoration. Each hand is dealt from the same shoe under the same fixed rules, the sequence of past winners carries no information about the next hand, and the roads exist because they lengthen sessions, not because they help.

Card counting, which genuinely works against a physical blackjack shoe, is close to worthless here: analysis of the game shows the composition of the remaining shoe moves the baccarat edges by amounts too small to exploit at realistic stakes. Online, against a shuffled-per-hand RNG, the question does not even arise.

The honest summary is the one the keyFacts already state: pick banker or player, ignore the tie, and accept that nothing else at the table is a decision.