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  The House Edge Except for the tie bet, baccarat is one of the best bets in the casino. The following table shows the house edge on all available bets. Usually a tie will pay 8:1 but sometimes will pay 9:1.

Six-Deck Baccarat Real Time Gaming online casinos offer a six-deck baccarat game. This makes the odds on the banker bet better, and the odds on the player and tie bets worse. Following is a probability table for six decks.

Riding Trends Every baccarat table will have plenty of scorecards and pencils for the players to keep track of the outcome of every hand. Most players will do so religiously and carefully analyze their card for trends as the winning hand switches back and forth from the banker to player. This is a big waste of time! The smart player will bet on the banker every time and leave the scorecards alone.

Where to Play Baccarat is becoming a hard game to find. In Las Vegas only the largest casinos generally offer the game. Of the four megacasinos at the intersection of Tropicana and the Strip (MGM Grand, New York New York, the Excalibur, and the Tropicana) only the MGM Grand offers the game. In downtown Las Vegas only the Golden Nugget offers the game and only on weekend evenings. Many places that do offer the game only deal it at night (the Luxor and Hard Rock for example).

The table minimum is usually very high. During my last Vegas trip I inquired about the minimums at the MGM Grand: one table was $500, one was $1000, and another was a private game. A sign at the baccarat room at the Stardust indicates they have a $25 minimum game (nights only) which is the least I have ever seen. I believe the Las Vegas Hilton has a $100 minimum.

Mini-Baccarat Are the baccarat minimums too high for you? Then you may want to try mini-baccarat. The rules and house edge are the same but the minimum is usually only $5 or $10. Unlike regular baccarat with its player participation and unique decorum mini-baccarat is played at a blackjack size table where the dealer controls everything. The pace of mini-baccarat is very fast, it would not surprise me if more were bet per hour at a $10 mini-baccarat table than a $25 regular baccarat table. Without the atmosphere of the big baccarat table it is my opinion that mini-baccarat loses its charm and is reduced to a redundant and boring game. It is not surprising to me that mini-baccarat is one of the least popular table games in any casino.

Commission Free Baccarat The Atlantic City Hilton offers a version of the banker bet in baccarat which pays even money but only wins 1:2 odds on a winning total of 6. The house edge on the banker bet is 1.623%. As usual gimmicks do not pay as well as the regular game, and this game is no exception.

Methodology A combinatorial analysis using eight decks was used for this baccarat analysis. All other sources I have seen use an infinite deck assumption which leads to an incorrect house edge of 1.06%, 1.23%, and 14.18% on the banker, player, tie bet respectively. Some sources indicate the the banker and player house edge to be 1.17% and 1.36% respectively. These higher statistics ignore ties, which is not how I define the house edge. However if ties were ignorred these house edges in an eight deck game should be 1.19% and 1.35% on the banker and player bet respectively.

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