Baccarat, a fun and easy game
The game of baccarat has a very low house advantage and is one of the simplest table card games to play in a casino. The objective of both baccarat and mini-baccarat is to correctly guess which of the three possible outcomes will appear on the next round of cards. You can bet on the player, banker or tie. If you bet the player, the house edge is 1.36 percent; if you bet on the banker, the house advantage is only 1.17 percent; and if you bet a tie, the house advantage jumps to whopping 14.4 percent. If the player and dealer hands do end in a tie, and if you had not bet the tie, it’s a push, with no win or loss for the player.
There is one more important thing you should know about baccarat, there is a type of “service” charge when you win the banker hand. A five-percent commission is exacted on the winning banker bet, but not on the losses. For example, if you win $10 on banker, you owe 50¢ in commission; if you should win a $100 banker bet, you will owe the house $5. The reason is the banker bet has an actual player advantage of winning 50.68 percent of the time while the player only will win 49.32 percent of the time. If the setup were allowed to stay that way all players would bet the bank and the casino would not make any money. The commission returns the house edge to minus 1.17 percent for the player. Also, rather than collecting the five-percent banker commission after each round, a record of what is owed by each player is kept on the table in numbered boxes corresponding to each players seat. Players pay this accumulated amount after the finish of each shoe and before leaving the table.
The game itself is dealt from a six or eight-deck shoe, and the overall objective to get a hand closest to 9. The 10’s and all face cards are counted as zero. For example, if you get a hand like king-7, you would have a total of 7. All the other cards including the ace are counted at face value. The game starts as each position, player and banker, are dealt two cards each. What makes the game so simple to learn is the dealing of the cards is entirely done by a set of fixed rules. The dealer will draw or stay on hands depending what the total 2-card hand of the player and banker.
The game is a good one for the player because of the low house edge, and on the mini-baccarat game, the table limits start at a very low minimum. So on your next visit to a casino stop by the mini-baccarat table and pick up a booklet, which has all the drawing and standing rules, and play a few hands.
