Card counting in baccarat, with exact numbers
It is possible to count baccarat. It is also nearly worthless. We simulated 10,000 shoes with the exact probabilities at every hand to show how worthless.
The setup
We dealt 10,000 eight-deck shoes to the cut card with the real third-card rules, 731,000 hands, and before every hand computed the exact chance of Banker, Player and Tie from the cards still in the shoe. Not a count approximation: the full enumeration.
What it found
| Statistic | Value |
|---|---|
| Banker EV per hand, average | −1.06% of stake |
| Banker EV, best 5% of hands | −0.82% |
| Hands where Banker is a positive bet | 0.0026% (19 in 731,000) |
| Hands where Player is a positive bet | 0.0046% |
| Profit from betting only positive-EV hands | ±0.0002 units per shoe |
A perfect counter who bets only when the shoe favours them gets a bet every 40 shoes or so, worth a fraction of a percent. The published level-1 count (aces to fours plus, fives to eights minus) tracks the exact edge well, correlation 0.91, and still never gets Banker above zero. Popular "count the fours and fives" systems are signed backwards: they correlate negatively with the real edge.
Side bets
The pair bets at 11 to 1 do become favourable late in a shoe when the remaining cards are concentrated in few ranks, on about 4% of hands in theory. In practice you need every card since the shuffle, the profitable hands sit in the last fifteen before the cut card, and studios cut a full deck off the back. The Dragon 7 bet in EZ Baccarat is the one strong count in the game, worth 8% when it fires, and it is not offered on live-dealer studio tables.
Break-even math · What the live data says about patterns
Questions
Does card counting work in baccarat like blackjack?
No. Card removal effects in baccarat are 50 to 100 times smaller than in blackjack. A level-1 count reduces the Banker house edge from 1.06% to about 1.0%. It never becomes a player edge.
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GET ACCESSFigures on this page are replays and measurements of logged hands under the current rule set as of 2026-09-23. They are not a forecast and do not guarantee future results. Decision support only; every bet is your own decision. 21+ or your local gambling age.