TABLE GAMES
Baccarat: three bets, two of them fine and one of them not
Baccarat has no decisions at all, so the whole game is picking one of three bets. Banker costs 1.06%, Player costs 1.24%, and Tie costs about 14% and exists to be avoided.
Assumes eight decks, banker win paying 0.95 to 1 after commission. Change the ruleset and every figure on this page moves.
Every bet, with what it costs
| Bet | Pays | House edge | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Banker | 0.95 to 1 | 1.06% | The 5% commission is already in that figure |
| Player | even money | 1.24% | No commission, slightly worse anyway |
| Tie at 8 to 1 | 8 to 1 | 14.4% | The most expensive bet on a common table |
| Tie at 9 to 1 | 9 to 1 | 4.8% | Rare, and still worse than the two main bets |
| Player Pair or Banker Pair | 11 to 1 | 10.4% | Side bet, priced like one |
| No-commission Banker | even money, 0.5 on a winning 6 | 1.46% | Faster to settle, more expensive to play |
Cheapest and most expensive on the same table are 1.06% and 14.4%. Nothing about the room changes between those two rows; the only difference is which one you tapped.
What an hour costs
Stake, times rounds an hour, times the edge. That is the whole formula and pace is the term people forget: the same game dealt twice as fast costs twice as much. The full table across every game is in what an hour costs.
What actually happens
Two hands are dealt, one called Player and one called Banker, and neither belongs to you. Face cards and tens count zero, aces count one, and totals drop the tens digit, so an eight and a seven make five rather than fifteen.
A third card is drawn or not drawn according to a fixed table that nobody at the table controls. Closest to nine wins. That is it. You are betting on which of two hands a rulebook will favour, and the rulebook favours Banker slightly, which is why Banker wins carry a commission.
The commission is the balancing weight. Without it, Banker would be a positive bet for the player. With it, Banker costs 1.06% and remains the cheapest thing on the table by a clear margin.
The roadmaps
Big Road, Bead Plate, Big Eye Boy, Cockroach Pig. Four displays of what has already happened, offered on the assumption that it predicts what happens next. Each hand is dealt from a shoe that does not know what it did before, and the shoe is shuffled long before depletion changes anything measurable.
They are worth understanding purely so you can recognise what the screen is doing. A display that shows streaks will find streaks, because a random sequence produces streaks constantly and that is what randomness looks like from the inside.
What an hour costs
Ninety hands an hour on a standard live table, more on a speed build. At C$10 a hand on Banker that is C$900 of staking and about nine dollars and fifty cents of expected cost.
The same hour on Tie, if you could keep it up, costs a hundred and thirty. That gap between 1.06% and 14.4% is the biggest single decision available in any table game on a Canadian phone.
On a phone
- The scoreboards down the side of a live baccarat table exist to be read on a big screen. On a phone they compress into an unreadable grid and cost frame rate on an older handset.
- Squeeze tables add fifteen to twenty seconds a hand for the card reveal. Some builds let you skip it. Skipping it roughly doubles your hands per hour, which doubles what the hour costs.
- Bet spots are large and well separated in portrait, which makes baccarat one of the few live products that genuinely works one-handed.
- Turn off the roadmaps if the build allows it. They are pattern displays for a game with no patterns, and they take up the half of the screen that could be showing the cards.
Where the tables are
40 of the operators on our board carry live tables, 5900 between them. More tables mostly means a shorter wait at your stake level rather than a better product.
Baccarat questions people actually type
What is the house edge in baccarat?
1.06% at eight decks, banker win paying 0.95 to 1 after commission. That is C$1.06 for every C$100 staked, and the worst bet on the same felt costs 14.4%.
What should I bet on in online baccarat?
Banker, and nothing else. It costs 1.06% with the five percent commission already counted, Player costs 1.24%, and Tie costs about 14%.
There are no decisions in the game beyond that one, which makes baccarat the fastest table in the lobby to actually learn.
Do the baccarat roadmaps predict anything?
No. Big Road, Bead Plate, Big Eye Boy and the rest are displays of what already happened, attached to a shoe with no memory of it.
They are worth understanding for one reason: so you can see what the screen is doing. Any display built to find streaks will find streaks, because streaks are what randomness looks like from the inside.
Does baccarat work on a phone?
Better than most live products. The bet spots are large and well separated upright, so it is one of the few streamed tables that genuinely works one-handed.
Turn the roadmaps off if the build lets you. They eat the half of the screen that could be showing you the cards, and they are predicting nothing.