Baccarat Simulator

This baccarat simulator deals punto banco from a shuffled 8-deck shoe, card by card, with the proper third-card rules. Bet Player, Banker or Tie with play money, run off the rest of the shoe in one click, then let the strategy tester play a thousand shoes for you and show what a system really does. It’s free, and nothing is saved or sent anywhere.

How the baccarat simulator deals

The shoe holds 416 cards. Two go to Player and two to Banker, in that order, and the totals count only the last digit: a 7 and an 8 is 15, so the hand is 5. Tens and picture cards are worth nothing. A total of 8 or 9 on the first two cards is a natural and nobody draws.

Otherwise Player draws a third card on 0 to 5 and stands on 6 or 7. Banker’s rule is the fiddly one, because it depends on Player’s third card:

If Player stood, Banker simply draws on 0 to 5. You never have to decide anything. That’s the whole game, and it’s why baccarat moves so quickly: about 80 hands come out of one shoe before the cut card.

Banker, Player or Tie?

From a full 8-deck shoe, Banker wins 45.86% of hands, Player 44.62% and the rest are ties. Ties push Player and Banker bets, so you get your stake back. Take the ties out and Banker wins 50.7% of the hands that settle. That small lean comes from Banker acting second, and it’s why the casino takes 5% commission on Banker wins.

• Banker: 1.06% house edge with 5% commission. The best bet on the table.
• Player: 1.24%. Slightly worse, but no commission to work out.
• Tie at 8 to 1: 14.36%. One of the dearest bets in any casino. At 9 to 1 it falls to 4.84%, still four times Banker.

Switch the rules to no commission and Banker pays even money, except a winning Banker 6, which pays half. That happens on 5.4% of hands, and it pushes the Banker edge up to 1.46%. No-commission tables feel cheaper. They aren’t. The odds table next to the simulator works all of this out exactly for 8, 6 or 1 deck.

Testing a baccarat strategy

Pick a strategy, a base bet and a number of shoes, and the tester plays every hand. It shows your result next to what the house edge says you should have lost, so you can see how much is luck.

Martingale is the one worth running. Double your Banker bet after every loss, go back to one unit after a win, and start again if the next bet would pass a 100-unit table limit. Over 1,000 shoes about three in four end in profit. That’s the trap: the winning shoes are small and the losing ones, where seven losses arrive in a row, wipe out dozens of them. The total still lands close to 1.06% of everything you staked, and you staked far more than a flat bettor.

Following the shoe, or chopping against it, does nothing either. Each hand is dealt from what’s left in the shoe, and the last result doesn’t tell you what’s next. The bead road is fun to watch, and streaks of six or seven Bankers are normal in a shoe of 80 hands. They’re not a signal.

For the full house edge on every bet, including the side bets that aren’t in the simulator, use the baccarat calculator. The betting systems simulator runs the same kind of test on roulette.

What the simulator leaves out

Real tables burn a few cards at the start of each shoe and some put the cut card earlier. Neither changes the odds. Card counting doesn’t help much in baccarat either: even a perfect count finds a playable edge only a handful of times per shoe, which is why casinos don’t mind you keeping score on a card.

Keeping track at a real table? The baccarat scoreboard draws the bead plate and big road as you tap in results.