A Winning Baccarat Strategy

How can you develop a strategy for a game that you essentially bet on blind and which has a (roughly) 50/50 outcome of success?

That, in essence is the Baccarat quandary and it is one that has puzzled many analysts and casino professionals for many years.

Let’s start with the basic rule for winning Baccarat Strategy:

  • Never Bet On The Tie

While you have three choices of bet in the game, Banker Win, Player Win or Tie, the Tie bet has a less than 2% chance of paying off and as such, should immediately be discarded from your strategy. Yes it can happen, but it is not a profitable bet to make regularly.

This essentially means you have a choice; player or banker, so what do you do?

Many baccarat tables have cards that allow you to keep track of winning hands so you can potentially identify patterns. Indeed some strategists claim identifying these patterns can help you win. However, as a strategy they are flawed as they imply these patterns are somewhat predetermined and in a game of random chance, that is simply not true. Patterns happen because of the result, results do not happen because of patterns.

Instead, the best Baccarat strategy is simple, bet on the banker. Although it may appear the banker and player have equal chance of winning the hand, statistical analysis shows that the banker (representing the house) has a slight edge of just over 1%.

What this means is that on every given hand the banker is the slight favourite to win.

As such, the long term strategy you employ should include that fact as its central tenet. The banker is likely to win each hand more often than the player.

These two rules, never bet on the tie and bet on the banker (at least the majority of the time) for the basis of a simple Baccarat strategy. Whether you win or not depends on the cards, but in statistical terms at least, it gives you the greatest chance of success over the long term.