Baccarat
A casino card game in which you bet on which of two hands — Player or Banker — will total closest to nine, or that the two hands will Tie.
Definition
Baccarat is a comparing card game in which two hands, labelled Player and Banker, are dealt from a shoe (typically eight decks) and scored by the last digit of their pip total, with tens and face cards counting as zero, aces as one, and the hand nearest nine winning. Bettors wager on Player, Banker or Tie but do not control the cards: in the dominant Punto Banco form, whether a third card is drawn follows fixed drawing rules, so outcomes are entirely determined by chance. The three main bets carry different house edges — the Banker bet is about 1.06% (a 5% commission is deducted from winning Banker bets), the Player bet about 1.24%, and the Tie bet about 14.4% at 8-to-1 — which makes Banker the lowest-edge wager on the main table. The commission rate and Tie payout, however, vary by operator and variant, so the exact edges shift accordingly.
Worked example
A shoe deals the Player hand 7♦ 2♣ (total 9) and the Banker hand K♠ 6♥ (total 6). Because the Player holds a "natural" 9, no third cards are drawn and Player wins. A £10 Player bet returns £10 profit at even money. Had the same £10 instead been placed on Banker and Banker won, the even-money £10 win would be reduced by the 5% commission to £9.50. Across 1,000 such £10 Banker bets (£10,000 wagered), the ~1.06% house edge implies an expected loss of roughly £106.
Why it matters
Baccarat is one of the highest-turnover casino games in the world — it dominates table-game revenue in Macau and is a core product in VIP rooms and live-dealer studios — so its bet-by-bet edges matter to anyone modelling hold, margin or player value. It is also a clean teaching case in game math: because no player skill affects the result, the house edge is fixed entirely by the drawing rules and payout schedule, illustrating how small structural differences (a 5% commission, an 8:1 versus 9:1 Tie) move the operator's expected margin. Understanding these mechanics helps professionals reason about theoretical win and helps learners separate genuine odds from the myth that betting patterns can beat a fixed-edge game.
Related
Note: Core Punto Banco rules and the standard 8-deck edges (~1.06% Banker, ~1.24% Player, ~14.4% Tie at 8:1) are stable and widely cited. Variable by operator/variant: the Banker commission (usually 5%), the Tie payout (8:1 or 9:1, the latter cutting the Tie edge to ~4.8%), and "no-commission" baccarat, which rebalances the edge via a reduced payout when Banker wins with a total of 6. Side-bet availability and payouts (e.g. Player/Banker Pair, typically 11:1 with a ~10% edge) differ widely and should be checked per table.