Live baccarat is a card game in which you bet on the Player hand, the Banker hand or a tie. It is dealt by a real dealer in a studio, and because the cards are drawn by fixed rules, your only decisions are where to bet and how much.
Rounds are short, and the Banker bet carries a house edge of only around one per cent. Below we cover the basic rules, the house edge on each bet and the most common live variants.
The Player and Banker hands each receive two cards. Card values are added up and only the last digit counts: an ace is 1, cards 2 to 9 are face value, and tens and picture cards count as zero. A 7 and an 8 make 15, so the hand is worth 5. The hand closer to nine wins. If either hand totals 8 or 9 on two cards, it is a natural and no more cards are drawn. Otherwise the Player hand draws on 0 to 5 and stands on 6 or 7, and the Banker's third card depends on its own total and the Player's third card. The dealer applies the rules, so there is nothing to memorise.
In speed baccarat the cards are dealt face up straight away and rounds are shorter. No-commission tables drop the 5% fee but pay only half on a Banker win with six. Squeeze tables reveal cards slowly by bending them, and some tables add random multipliers in exchange for a fee or lower base payouts. As for strategy, it comes down to choosing the bet: Banker is the mathematically cheapest, Tie the most expensive, and scoreboards of past rounds do not predict the next hand.
The Banker bet, with a house edge of about 1.06% even after the 5% commission. The Player bet is about 1.24% and the Tie about 14.4%.
The third-card rules give the Banker hand a small advantage, so it wins slightly more often than the Player hand. The commission offsets that.
No. Scoreboards show past rounds, but they have no effect on the odds of the next hand.