How to play baccarat: the rules, the drawing tables and the payouts

Baccarat (punto banco) simply compares two hands, player and banker. Your job is to pick which one finishes closer to a total of nine, or to back a tie. The moment your stake is down, no human being at the table decides anything further: the dealer draws by tables printed on the felt. This guide hands you those tables exactly as casinos apply them, together with the payouts, the maths behind each bet and how to conduct yourself at a live table. It sits inside our baccarat academy.

What each card is worth

Suits count for nothing here. Add the cards up and keep only the last digit: 9 + 7 = 16 counts as 6; King + 5 = 5; 4 + 6 = 10 counts as 0 (known as baccarat, the worst hand of all). Because of that wrap-around, no hand can ever bust. Nine is the best total available.

Naturals

When either hand reaches 8 or 9 on its first two cards, that is a natural: the round stops there and neither side receives another card. A natural 9 beats a natural 8, and two matching naturals are a tie.

A round of baccarat, step by step

1. 1

   Place your bet

   Drop chips on Player, Banker or Tie, plus any side bets on offer. At a live table your stake must be down before the dealer calls "no more bets"; online you tap the betting area and confirm.

2. 2

   Two cards each

   The dealer sends two cards to the player hand and two to the banker hand, player first, alternating. In "squeeze" games the reveal is drawn out slowly; the order of the reveal never alters the outcome.

3. 3

   Check for naturals

   If either hand shows 8 or 9, the round ends there and then and the higher hand takes it (or the hands tie).

4. 4

   Apply the player's third-card rule

   Player draws on 0–5 and stands on 6–7. This step comes first and depends on nothing but the player's own total.

5. 5

   Apply the banker's third-card rule

   If the player stood, banker draws on 0–5 and stands on 6–7. If the player drew, banker's action turns on its own total and on the value of the player's third card — see the table below.

6. 6

   Compare and settle

   Closer to 9 wins. Player bets pay 1:1, banker bets pay 1:1 less 5% commission, tie pays 8:1 (9:1 at some tables). When the hands tie, player and banker bets push and your stake comes back to you.

The third-card rules (drawing tables)

These tables are the same in every punto banco game on earth — Macau, Las Vegas, London, and every licensed online casino you can reach from Nigeria. You never need to memorise them, since the dealer or the software applies them for you, but reading them explains exactly why banker wins more often.

Player hand rule

Banker hand rule when the player stood

Where the player did not take a third card (a player total of 6 or 7), banker follows the same straightforward rule the player did: draw on 0–5, stand on 6–7.

Banker hand rule once the player has drawn a third card

Put plainly: banker on 0–2 draws every time; on 3 it draws unless the player's third card was an 8; on 4 it draws when that card was 2–7; on 5 when it was 4–7; on 6 only when it was 6 or 7; on 7 it always stands. A banker 8 or 9 is a natural and never draws at all.

The bets, their probabilities and their payouts

The figures below are exact for a standard eight-deck shoe. Ties land in 9.52% of hands; across the other 90.48%, banker comes out ahead of player by a small but steady margin.

Here is the banker edge worked out in naira: expected value per ₦1 staked = 0.4586 × ₦0.95 − 0.4462 × ₦1 = ₦0.4357 − ₦0.4462 = −₦0.0106, so about 1.06 kobo lost per naira, or ₦1,060 on ₦100,000 turned over. Player: 0.4462 − 0.4586 = −0.0124, or 1.24%. Tie at 8:1: 0.0952 × 8 − 0.9048 = −0.1436, or 14.36%. Ties push the player and banker bets, which is why these edges are quoted per bet placed rather than per bet resolved — per resolved hand they come to 1.17% and 1.36%.

Six decks, and the single-deck tables

Deck count hardly registers on the main bets. At six decks the banker edge holds at 1.06% and player at 1.24%, while the tie edge creeps up to 14.44%. At a single deck banker improves to 1.01%, player worsens to 1.29% and tie leaps to 15.75%. The pair side bets react to deck count far more sharply than the main bets ever do.

No-commission baccarat, explained

Plenty of online lobbies, and Asian casinos in particular, push "no-commission" or "super six" baccarat: banker pays a clean 1:1 with no 5% taken off. The catch sits in the small print — a banker win totalling 6 pays only half (1:2) rather than even money. That one exception earns the house more than the commission it replaced: the banker edge climbs from 1.06% to roughly 1.46%. Player and tie stay where they were.

There is a second family, EZ Baccarat, which drops the commission and instead turns a banker win on a three-card total of 7 into a push. That version runs a banker edge of about 1.02%, a shade better than standard — but it nearly always comes bundled with the Dragon 7 (7.61% edge) and Panda 8 (10.19%) side bets, and that is where the operator makes its money. The rule to carry with you: when the banker bet looks cheaper than standard, go and read the footnote.

The squeeze

In high-limit rooms and many live-dealer studios the reveal is stretched out: whoever has the biggest stake down (or the dealer on camera) bends the corner of each card to peek at the pips before flipping it. That is the squeeze. It is theatre and nothing else — the cards were settled the instant they left the shoe — yet it is the part many players enjoy most, and it drags the table down to maybe 30–40 hands an hour instead of 60–80. Fewer hands at a fixed edge means a smaller expected loss per hour, so the squeeze does your wallet no harm at all. Online "speed baccarat" tables pull in the opposite direction, settling a hand roughly every 27 seconds — worth remembering if you are playing on mobile data and watching both your balance and your bundle.

Scoreboards and roads: what they show, and what they cannot

Every baccarat screen carries a grid of red and blue circles: the bead plate (every result in order), the big road (columns of back-to-back player or banker wins, ties marked with a green line), plus three derived charts — the big eye boy, small road and cockroach road — tracking whether the big road is "repeating" or "choppy". Players lean on them to back streaks continuing ("follow the dragon") or snapping.

None of it predicts anything. Each hand comes off the same shoe with whatever cards remain, and the composition shifts so little between hands that the banker probability stays within a few hundredths of a percentage point of 45.86% for the whole shoe. Eight banker wins in a row are followed by a banker win exactly as often as any other hand is. The roads are a record of the past, not a forecast of the next card — treat them the way you would treat a team's last five results before a league fixture. Our baccarat strategies guide shows what becomes of a pattern-chasing bankroll across 10,000 hands.

Etiquette and practical notes at a live table

• Commission on banker wins is usually tracked in a box in front of the dealer and collected when you leave or when the shoe ends, so keep enough chips back to settle it.
• Online live-dealer minimums often work out at roughly ₦1,000–₦5,000 a hand once converted; land-based tables typically start several times higher, and high-limit rooms higher still.
• On "no commission" tables, check the payout every time a banker 6 lands — that is where confusion and disputes start.
• Never touch the cards unless you are the designated squeezer in a squeeze game.
• Settle on your next stake before the previous hand is paid out, so the "no more bets" call never rushes you.

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