Baccarat Casinos: Named Tables, the Three Bets and Their Odds

The three bets and what each costs

Baccarat is dealt by a fixed rule. Two hands, Player and Banker, receive two cards each, a third card is drawn by a published table, and the hand nearest nine wins. You bet on which hand wins, or on a tie. You make no playing decisions after the bet, so the entire strategy of the game is the choice among three bets.

The odds are exact for an eight-deck shoe, which is what live baccarat uses.

Calculated exactly by enumerating the eight-deck shoe and the third-card rules, not read from a casino. A tie returns a Player or Banker stake, so it is not a loss to those bets.

Banker is the cheapest bet at the table even after commission, and Tie is the most expensive by an order of magnitude. A player who bets only Banker or only Player gives up about a pound for every hundred staked. Nothing else on the layout is that cheap, and nothing on it is dearer than the tie at 8 to 1.

The side bets and the commission-free tables

Most tables add side bets on either hand: a pair bet that the first two cards match, and in some formats bets on the size of the winning total. They are paid at fixed odds and priced well above the main game. A pair bet that pays 11 to 1 costs 10.36%, which is about ten times the Banker bet.

Commission-free tables take the 5% off Banker wins and pay for it elsewhere. The common version pays only half when Banker wins with a total of six. That bet costs 1.46%, which is higher than the 1.06% of a standard Banker bet. The change looks like a gift because the commission, the visible cost, is gone; the cost is simply moved into a payout rule you are less likely to read.

Lightning, Speed, Squeeze and the other formats

The same baccarat is wrapped in several presentations. Most change the experience, a few change the payout table, and it is worth knowing which.

• Speed Baccarat shortens the betting and dealing clock so that more rounds are dealt per hour. The edge per round is unchanged, so the cost per hour goes up.
• Squeeze and Peek formats reveal the cards slowly or by the player, for drama. They do not change the outcome.
• Lightning Baccarat adds random multipliers on some cards and prices them into the payouts. MrQ lists 98.76% for the game, which is an edge of 1.24%.
• No Commission and similar tables remove the Banker commission in return for a change in the payout of a Banker win on six.
• First Person tables are software games with the same rules as the live game and a computer-generated deal.

Scoreboards, patterns and why they do not predict

Baccarat tables display the results as a grid of coloured dots, called roads, and a whole folklore has grown up around reading them. The shoe has no memory in the sense that matters: the probability of Banker, Player or Tie on the next round is set by the cards remaining, which change so slowly in an eight-deck shoe that the displayed history carries no usable information. Betting with a streak or against it is the same bet at the same price.

Baccarat and bonus wagering

Baccarat is among the games most offers exclude. It has one of the lowest edges at the table, and the terms often count it at a fraction of the stake or not at all. Betting both Player and Banker on the same round is commonly treated as a breach and can void the bonus.

The terms that apply are in the promotion's own small print and are applied after the deposit clears. If baccarat is the game you want, check the weighting before claiming anything, or play without a bonus.

Staying within your limits

Baccarat's stakes are often high and its rounds are quick. The tools that help are set before the first bet: a deposit limit, a reality check and a time-out. Every UK-licensed casino must offer them.

If gambling is causing harm, GAMSTOP excludes you from every UK-licensed online casino at once, and the National Gambling Helpline is free and open every day. Our responsible gambling page lists the services with their numbers and hours.

What the whole catalogue looks like behind this list

A category page shows the casinos that meet one rule. It is worth knowing what the rest of the catalogue looks like on the measures that apply to all of them, because those are the facts a single rule cannot capture.

We hold 59 British-licensed casinos here, every one of them resolving in the Gambling Commission register to a named licensee with an active licence — that is the entry condition for appearing in any list on this site, including this one. Of those, 47 have had their own banking, help, terms and responsible-gambling pages read by us, and the average casino has 47.6 of our hundred rating points assessed. Where that figure falls below 40 we publish no score out of ten — a number built from a fraction of the method describes our reading rather than the casino — and print how many of the checks we could run were passed instead.

The disclosure picture across those 59 operators is the part most worth carrying into any category. 40 name an alternative dispute resolution provider on their own pages — the only stage of a complaint where somebody independent can order an operator to pay. 12 name an independent testing house. 3 publish a return-to-player figure anywhere, which is the number that decides what playing actually costs. 32 publish the verification documents they will ask for, and 14 say when they will ask for them.

On the regulator's side, 38 of the 59 have a Gambling Commission enforcement case published in the last five years against the company behind them, or against their site under an earlier licensee. Across the whole mirrored feed that is 74 cases totalling £149,654,854, and each one appears on the review of every brand that licensee operates — including any that appear in the list above. A penalty against a company is a fact about all of its brands, not only the one named in the headline.

Of the welcome offers we have read in full, 23 carry a recorded date on their terms and 12 attach no wagering requirement at all. That second figure is the one worth remembering when a large headline bonus appears next to a small one: the small offer with no wagering is frequently worth more.

Our verdict on baccarat casinos

Bet Banker, ignore the tie and the side bets, and treat a commission-free table as a different game with a different price rather than a bargain. The tables are largely the same wherever you take them, so the choice between casinos is the bonus terms, the stake limits and how the lobby is run.