The baccarat blog

How a baccarat hand is dealt, when the Player and Banker draw a third card, what naturals are, and why you never have to remember any of it.

Banker wins more often but pays less. The exact win rates, the commission, the house edge of each bet, and when Player is the right call.

How no-commission and Super 6 baccarat tables change the Banker payout, the real house edge, and why standard 5% commission tables are cheaper.

How Lightning Baccarat multipliers work, what the mandatory fee does to the return, and the published RTP against standard baccarat.

How speed and turbo baccarat tables change the game, why players fall behind, and how to run more than one table without losing your rules.

The exact frequency of runs of 5, 8, 10 and 12 in baccarat, why a long run does not mean the next hand continues, and what our logged shoes show.

Why doubling after a loss fails in baccarat, with the exact probability of hitting the table limit or your bankroll, and what it does to your expected loss.

Flat betting, positive and negative progressions, and proportional units compared on expectation, variance and risk of ruin.

What to look at on a table display before buying in: shoe position, road shape, table pace, limits, and the mistakes scouting cannot fix.

Every common baccarat side bet with its payout and exact house edge, from the near-fair Dragon 7 count to the worst tie and perfect-pair bets.

Enter a bankroll and a hit rate and see the unit Kelly recommends, the drawdown to expect, and a 2.25x target, all computed in your browser.

Plain definitions of the terms you hear at a baccarat table and see on the display, from bead road and big road to dragon, chop, natural, cut card and commission.

Hands per shoe for eight-deck baccarat, how the cut card and burn cards change it, and the time a shoe takes at standard, speed and turbo pace.

How the three big live-dealer baccarat studios compare on pace, table variety, shoe handling and what our logged data shows about their outcome streams.

How Rack Chasers collects live-dealer baccarat outcomes around the clock, how the data is cleaned, and how every rule is judged against shoes it was never fitted to.

We logged 796,000 live-dealer baccarat hands from Pragmatic Play, Evolution and Ezugi tables and tested every popular strategy against them. Here is what held up and what did not.

A plain guide to the bead road (bead plate) and big road, how columns and dragons form, and what 800,000 logged hands say about reading the future from them.

The three derived roads explained, and their actual predictive power measured on hundreds of thousands of live-dealer hands: none.

How to size baccarat bets from your buy-in, why 5% is aggressive on a thin edge, what Kelly says at 53% versus 60%, and the drawdowns to expect.

Exact house edge for Banker, Player, Tie and the pair bets, the hit rate each needs to break even, and why 51.3% is the number that matters.

Baccarat card counting, computed exactly: what perfect knowledge of the shoe does to Banker, Player, Tie and pair bets, and why the main bets never turn positive.

Why casino-floor baccarat shoes and live-dealer studio shoes behave differently even though the odds are identical, with the randomness tests behind the claim.

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